"Megadungeon" in Golarion - What to Do?

[Garden Tool]

Despite running two games at home, two games on the forums, and having very recently established my own product line on the Paizo webstore, I've apparently decided that I want to run a "megadungeon" campagin badly enough to start up a third game right here on the forums.

I want to set it in Golarion (mainly because I want to continue to explore and familiarize myself with the setting), but I don't want to "shoehorn" it in, or just decide "it's an ancient ruin in the Mwangi Expanse" and call it a day. I'd like it to have some relevance to the setting - to feel like a Golarion dungeon. Along that same train of thought: I'm thinking about running something much more similar to Undermountain than to the other, fairly mindless "megadungeon" crawls out there, and I have enough content prepared from an earlier, real-life attempt at exactly this kind of thing to keep a game going for a long time... if only I had any idea where to set the game. (My original work was for a pleasantly-generic-storybook-fantasy-world homebrew setting).

If any Golarion experts out there could recommend to me a "where" and a "why," I'd like to hear some ideas as to how such a campaign could be implemented on Golarion. I want to stick to the Inner Sea region (no extraplanar, extraplanatary, or off-continent dungeons), but I also want to be able to host a wide variety of environments within the same dungeon (in other words, I don't want to run a big demon-slaying hack-and-slash dungeon out of Mendev, or a generic, orc-filled Darklands dungeon out of Belzken. Nothing so limiting as that.

I need a place to set a huge, sprawling, campaign-worthy dungeon where a wide varity of creatures and "dungeon environments" could reasonably exist and thrive. Another angle I'd like to be able to accommodate is the idea of a somewhat "private" or "undiscovered" dungeon. Maybe the PCs could receive invites from someone who owns the land that te dungeon resides on/under, or from someone who discovered (or rediscovered) the dungeon and wishes to hire out adventurers in exchange for exclusive sale rights to whatever treasures the PCs find. Something of that nature - something that would allow me to avoid the question of "if this dungeon is so huge and populated and full of treasure, why isn't it crawling with adventurers?"

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and help!

[Digitalelf]

There's "Dungeons of Golarion, which describes several large dungeons throughout Golarion. It does not however have detailed maps...

Then there's "City of Strangers" which details the city of Kaer Maga and the many levels below it. But again, no detailed maps...

[Garden Tool]

Oh, I'm not looking for maps or modules. Just setting ideas that match the criteria.

[Matthew Morris]

The Irespan in Magnamar is apparently hollow, and has various rooms in stasis.

I mention this not as a 'place to put your adventure' but for an idea. Suppose one of those peaks is a Thassalonian prison complex, and when it's opened, the stasis fields have shut down?

Likewise, the old BECMI adventure "The Lost City" might serve as an idea. an isolated tribe of degenerate humans worship 'the cave god' IT's actually a guardian of a deeper lair.

Story idea that's been kicking in my head.*

Spoiler:

A distant copper mine is behind on reports. The party goes to find out what's going on. They find the survivors lock themselves in at night, as the miners unleashed a *something* and it killed them and made them zombies/ghouls/ghasts that come out at night to kill/make more. So you have mines, then they open up into Azlanti ruins/darklands/something else.

[Orthos]

So... basically Undermountain?

[proftobe]

I'd go Well of Lies in Nex. Nex the wizard was an expert in planar gates and summoning so the dungeon he built to house the well that supposedly tells your fortune could have anything in it. Plus its got ghoalan ghan(sp) written all over for it for old god worshipping cyclops ghosts, mythos creatures, and what not.

or

Depending on how close you want to keep it to undermountain. If you're comfortable with technology(I use psionics for these areas) there's starmount in Numeria

or

just say f it and run the starstone in Absolum. Nobody said you become a deity. A lot of adventurers get a lot of treasure out of it and as a capstone having a group either come close to or ascend to divinity can be fun.

there's also all those old thassilonian ruins in varisia, the sunken city of atlantis(I mean azlanti), the gholan ghan ruins in the shackles, all that whispering way stuff in Ustlav.

This is all off the top of my head and a lot of these places are either patrolled, controlled, or cursed to answer your crawling adventurer questions.

[hogarth]

Another vote for Cathedral of the Starstone. It can easily accommodate the automatically resetting dangers, mysterious traps and riddles, etc. of Undermountain.

[Freedom16]

I'll suggest the Red Redoubt of Karamoss, its the remains of Karamoss, the Machine Mages siege castle. It sprung up over night and recently the Pathfnder Society has thought of sending a group into the ruins to see what is salvageable in the ruins. The Technic League also worries that someone will go into Red Redoubt and discover their strange alien technoogy and will use it against them. I've ran this dungeon before for several groups, its a good basic mega dungeon since there is no way up only down. You eventually find a escape hatch but its a choice of do you leave or go deeper. Most of my parties go deeper.You meet robots and technology, its fun and its outside Absalom.Since you want it to be a full campaign worth you could have it go deeper and branch out like roots. Its mostly labs, test sites, and the details are vague enough you can make critters be in stasis for further study but awaken when the power surges so you could have a Bullette thats burrowing through metal or a group of half constructs attempting to escape on their last mission. I've played 2 parties against each other once and it was fun, pathfinder society vs. technic league adepts in training.

The Shory ruins of Kho could be good as well, its the ruins of a Shry city and its engines fire off once and a while causing some chaos so your players might be hired to see why so many elementals or warps are happening, it is said the Shory may have found a way to tap into the primal chaos that is Azathoths court. They discover the runs of Kho and find old magic, new monsters, and strange old cult mutants.

On topic of the idea of a mega dungeon try Numeria, its littered with space wreckage and you could possibly work something with that. If you do try to find a copy of City of the Fallen Sky, it has a good bit on the technic league and Silvermount. If not you could run it how ever you want, have fun with it. Nothing says nostalgia like a Expedition to Barrier Peaks or city of the Gods style game.

[yellowdingo]

I still say The Cleaves would have worked as a Dungeon accessible anywhere from the setting.

[Kthulhu]

hogarth wrote:

Another vote for Cathedral of the Starstone. It can easily accommodate the automatically resetting dangers, mysterious traps and riddles, etc. of Undermountain.

I don't really get a mega-dungeon vibe from the Cathedral of the Starstone. I think it's more along the lines of the Tomb of Horrors, a small-to-medium sized dungeon that's more defined by difficulty than by size.

[PFWiki Scribe]

I think any of THESE would make a good mega-dungeon, plus you could then connect them to the Darklands.

[W E Ray]

The Starstone Cathedral is a good 2nd Choice because of its importance to the world & history of Pathfinder -- but The Spire of Nex is the only real option.

This is the Flagship Mega-Dungeon of the campaign world, like Undermountain to FR, Castle Greyhawk to GH or the Mega-Dungeon underneath Ptolus.

[Digitalelf]

Garden Tool wrote:

Oh, I'm not looking for maps or modules. Just setting ideas that match the criteria.

And I was simply pointing out those two sourcebooks as they are filled with setting ideas that could fit the criteria...

No worries...

[Robb Smith]

You could set it underneath the City of Iz in the Worldwound. The first few levels could be the sewers and catacombs underneath the city, then you could break into a great barrow of the region, and then descend even further into layers of the Abyss starting to grow and fester there.

That'd give you a mix of Monsterous creatures/humanoids/some devils in the first, moving to undead in the next, and then whatever the hell you feel like when you get down to the abyssal parts.

[Cthulhudrew]

Offhand, how about one of the original dwarven Sky Citadels that has been lost? That would have both levels above and below grounds, and probably connect to extensive cavern systems from the dwarves migration.

[Kthulhu]

Put Rappan Athuk on Golarion, and make the necessary changes. To Golarion.

[Mark Sweetman]

Currently running a PbP here delving into the mines of Zolurket, so have given the topic some thought.

There are many many places that one can put a megadungeon without it seeming forced, and there are many many reasons for said dungeon to exist. Dungeons of Golarion is a good resource - as is Lost Cities of Golarion. And the most recent Lost Kingdoms is also a good resource as it deals with the forgotten and buried kingdoms of ancient times.

However to fit in with your criteria in the first post, I would have to put a vote in for Tumen.

Blurb from Lost Cities:

Amid the drifting sands of Osirion’s great deserts hides a city of wonders. Constructed by the legendary Four Pharaohs toward the end of their reign, the cliffside redoubt known as Tumen is four cities in one, each built to the specif ications of its patron pharaoh. Yet with the fall of those godlike rulers, Tumen too has fallen into disuse and disrepair, with any roads to its gates hidden completely by the wildly shifting sands. Though the era of pharaonic greatness has passed into the history books, the lost city of Tumen still maintains many of the wonders that made it famous... and even more of the dangers.