Hello everyone!
After a long break, I'm back to the drawing board for my next campaign.
I'm looking for ideas on which kinds of settings could work for a dungeon crawling campaign.
So far we have tried the following settings:
- Classic dungeon: one main entrance, filled with traps and monsters, and a large treasure hidden deep inside.
- Large cave network: no exits, natural dangers and monsters, mapping it was their motive to explore, and allowed for some social encounters with other races who had built tribes and encampments in that same cave network.
- [Starfinder] Damaged space station: they spawned outside of it, found a breach and got inside to find themselves in what was an orbiting prison. Automated defences and escaped prisoners were the main enemy, and finding a way to get out of there alive (by restoring the escape pods and landing on the nearby planet) was their main objective.
All of those worked just fine, and they had a blast playing it (even tho they all died in the cave one due to some poor choices).
They thrive in confined environment, where exploration is a big part of the game and resources are somewhat limited (can't just go back to town and buy more).
So here I am, looking for ideas on which other settings could work for this kind of campaign.
At first I thought at some kind of maze, but that would be frustrating after a while. Another thing I considered is the inside of a humongous creature, most likely a dead one; it would be fun to adapt monsters and dangers based on which part of the body they are in...
What do you think? Any cool ideas?
Your ship was sucked into a whirlpool, now you're trying to find your way out of the inside of the hollow world/a labyrinth of partially submerged caverns/the inside of a humongous creature. Workable in PF or in SF if you prefer, or for that matter in other systems.
I'm not sure I follow. These sound like adventure sites, rather than campaign settings. Is that what you're going for?
How about an abandoned/haunted castle on the back of a giant turtle, or that's somehow walking around in it's own right? Maybe the local lord needs some foolhardy types to look into it since it wandered onto his land.
I think the idea is the game will end when the 'dungeon' is finished/escaped. Think of it as Star Trek Voyager with actual walls instead of narrative walls.
avr wrote: Your ship was sucked into a whirlpool, now you're trying to find your way out of the inside of the hollow world/a labyrinth of partially submerged caverns/the inside of a humongous creature. I like that, the submerged parts could make for a nice twist the usual cave exploration, and it would also allow me to use some aquatic creatures we usually ignore...
Quixote wrote: I'm not sure I follow. These sound like adventure sites, rather than campaign settings. Is that what you're going for?
How about an abandoned/haunted castle on the back of a giant turtle, or that's somehow walking around in it's own right? Maybe the local lord needs some foolhardy types to look into it since it wandered onto his land.
Yes, adventure sites probably describes it better, my mistake. I considered an abandoned manor or castle, but it still gave them a chance of simply going elsewhere to buy supplies or find something else to do. By placing it on a giant turtle, or on some other limited space, it solves that problem nicely!
avr wrote: I think the idea is the game will end when the 'dungeon' is finished/escaped. Exactly! Dungeon crawlers usually work like that, and both me and my party seem to enjoy it. That's why I'm looking for a way to add a twist to it, making it less monotonous.
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Possible fun sites for a "dungeon"
1. PCs are shrunk down and placed in a fairly standard environment like a manor house but to them, everything is huge and impassable; fight to survive
2. A series of demi-planes based on popular video games
3. Labyrinthine garden maze that no matter how hard you try you can't get on top of; PCs were secretly stolen away to the First World and had their memory of the transport wiped - they are entertainment for Mad Queen Mab
4. Not just a ruined castle; a ruined city with wards or districts full of ruins, interconnected by sewers, which further descend into deeper dungeons that hold the real secret of why the city fell into ruin
5. A prison for your mind - PCs have all been trapped in a shared hallucination which takes a basic form, like an asylum, but is impossibly large and might contain random sections of sites from the PCs' own memories, like a childhood farm or their dorm at college
6. PCs are electrical elementals fighting their way through a circuit board towards "The Mother Signal"
7. An office tower, filled with terrorists holding hostages, and the PCs begin outnumbered and outgunned - for added fun, take away their shoes
8. Pick a map of a modern day city's grid of subway tunnels and make the PCs play teenage runaways navigating these through one, long night trying to make it to dawn
9. A series of races, perhaps footraces, filled with obstacles, loop de loops, monsters and bosses; include rings that ding when collected as treasure to complete the simile
10. An elemental prison built to hold one extremely powerful entity; lots of environmental effects and physical obstacles along the theme of the element(s) chosen but are the PCs there for their own punishment and meant to escape, or are they there to free the one
11. The abyss - PCs are lesser demons (perhaps start them as dretches or whatever) but each "boss" they topple they evolve into more powerful forms
12. The digestive system of one of Rovagug's children
13. A massive, continent-spanning forest with smaller biomes within, the goal being to find their way out of The Green
14. A sprawling shopping mall (go find maps of the Mall of America in Minnesota, USA)
15. Thousands of tunnels constructed by a Purple Worm, with the point being to capture the thing alive and ride it back to a waiting wizard for profit
16. A vast coral reef - all PCs choose underwater races or, better still, they can be anything BUT underwater races
17. Jumping from book to book in a planar library - like the video game one above but using popular literature
18. A necropolis with accompanying catacombs; for an added twist try your hardest to avoid ANY undead anywhere
19. An imaginative series of interconnected ambushes and deathtraps set in a modern day city, all constructed by a lunatic assassin with a flare for the dramatic who calls himself Arcade
20. The veins of some ancient god, the PCs functioning as some kind of "adrenaline shot" so they must navigate the dying entity's system in order to reach the heart while it's own failing powers try to expel the PCs like a virus
I highly recommend the Kostakep mega-dungeon from Threshold, the Mystara fanzine. First chapter here, link to other issues here.
It's a layered city ruin, successive waves of cultures building on the ruins of the city they conquered, with remnants hiding in lower levels. It contains maps, factions, relations, powerful magic at the bottom to justify going in there and a complex, intwerweaved timeline.
The only 'problem' I can think of (and this is squarely in the 'feature not bug' category) is that it is very closely tied to local history of a particular area of a particular campaign setting, and might require a lot of effort/be impossibl to adapt to another setting.
At the very least, though, it should give some ideas how to do something similar.
Seems like the Undermountain would be a heaven for your players.
A dungeon that constantly shifts and changes its layout so that the path behind you doesn't even lead to where you came from, and the path in front of you could go anywhere.You can only escape if you are lucky... or just as mad as the mad wizard who built it.
Mark Hoover 330 wrote: Possible fun sites for a "dungeon"[...] Holy moly those are A LOT of ideas! I'm definitely going to use some of these in the future!
Bjørn Røyrvik wrote: I highly recommend the Kostakep mega-dungeon from Threshold, the Mystara fanzine. I'll have to read it through, but at a first glance it seems interesting. Thanks!
Lady Asharah wrote: Seems like the Undermountain would be a heaven for your players.
A dungeon that constantly shifts and changes its layout so that the path behind you doesn't even lead to where you came from, and the path in front of you could go anywhere.You can only escape if you are lucky... or just as mad as the mad wizard who built it.
Undermountain is great, and would work fine but one of my player is actually preparing to master it for another group, so he has an extensive knowledge of it that might lead to it being less fun for him. But I guess I could take some things from it and make my own!
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Dungeon Magazine #122 has a D&D 3.5 adventure called Root of Evil that is a dungeon in a sentient demonic tree that is taking over a city.
I would read The Angry GM's articles "Why Mazes Suck" and "Why Traps Suck". Valuable stuff.
My setting has a demi-plane that is essentially the world in Orcs Must Die, where the boss creature (whoever wears the helm major artifact) can reshape the plane, turn it into a deadly maze and add various traps to it. This demiplane has rifts/portals that can lead to various destinations that are otherwise hard or impossible to get to.
I second The Mystara Mega dungeon. There is also a few 100 yard a hex maps with a lot of different terrain that would be perfect for a Fortnite type game on the The Piazza. Go to Vaults of Pandius.
Look for the 1 mile hex mapping thread on the Piazza under Mystara.
There's also The Lost City of Barakus and Rappan Athuk from Frog God Games. You can probably still get the PF 1e edition of both and they have huge, old-school mega dungeons.
Also I love adding planar exits and demi planes to mega dungeons. I started doing that in 3e after I read an article in a Dungeon magazine about healing in the dungeon. One solution they had was that the PCs open a door and find themselves in some kind of Norse-themed feasting hall. Here they dine with other heroes, make merry and drink themselves into a stupor; when they awake they're back in the dungeon, the door just opens to an empty room, but they're fully healed and feel as if they've just eaten a full meal and rested for 8 hours.
RedRobe wrote: Dungeon Magazine #122 has a D&D 3.5 adventure called Root of Evil that is a dungeon in a sentient demonic tree that is taking over a city. That sounds pretty cool! I'll check it out, thanks!
Quixote wrote: I would read The Angry GM's articles "Why Mazes Suck" and "Why Traps Suck". Valuable stuff. I'll give it a read, but I think I know where it's going with it. To be honest, I don't like mazes either (where the objective is just to find the exit), but dungeon crawling works differently.
As for traps, I mostly use custom ones, since I don't like the "save or die" thing. So they either trigger a combat encounter, or are VERY visible but VERY deadly, and can usually be disabled through role-play or avoided entirely.
Goblin_Priest wrote: My setting has a demi-plane that is essentially the world in Orcs Must Die, where the boss creature (whoever wears the helm major artifact) can reshape the plane, turn it into a deadly maze and add various traps to it. This demiplane has rifts/portals that can lead to various destinations that are otherwise hard or impossible to get to. It sounds... complicated. How are players supposed to push on if the enemy can reshape the dungeon at will?
doc chaos wrote: I second The Mystara Mega dungeon. There is also a few 100 yard a hex maps with a lot of different terrain that would be perfect for a Fortnite type game on the The Piazza. Go to Vaults of Pandius.
Look for the 1 mile hex mapping thread on the Piazza under Mystara.
Fortnite pathfinder mix? I'll pass...
Mark Hoover 330 wrote: There's also The Lost City of Barakus and Rappan Athuk from Frog God Games. You can probably still get the PF 1e edition of both and they have huge, old-school mega dungeons.
Also I love adding planar exits and demi planes to mega dungeons. I started doing that in 3e after I read an article in a Dungeon magazine about healing in the dungeon. One solution they had was that the PCs open a door and find themselves in some kind of Norse-themed feasting hall. Here they dine with other heroes, make merry and drink themselves into a stupor; when they awake they're back in the dungeon, the door just opens to an empty room, but they're fully healed and feel as if they've just eaten a full meal and rested for 8 hours.
I'll look it up! And I love the Valhalla feast idea!
Lady Platypus wrote: I'll give it a read, but I think I know where it's going with it. To be honest, I don't like mazes either (where the objective is just to find the exit), but dungeon crawling works differently.
As for traps, I mostly use custom ones, since I don't like the "save or die" thing. So they either trigger a combat encounter, or are VERY visible but VERY deadly, and can usually be disabled through role-play or avoided entirely.
The Angry GM is hands down the most useful, informative, eye-opening and direct source of how to increase one's game-running and storytelling abilities that I've ever found. I really can't recommend it enough.
I just ran an encounter where the primary opponent was also a dungeon of sorts in the form of a 100ft-golem/animated hillside/ancient ruins.
The City of Ghouls from Gamian's "The Graveyard Book" seems like a dungeon waiting to happen.
Every cemetery and graveyard in the world has a gate that leads to the city, which is a towering, mishapen, haphazard tangle of mausoleum doors, tomb stones, moss-eaten statues and old bones, all cobbled together into a massive and winding city of the dead.
I'll second the suggestions for Rappan Athuk. It's the biggest dungeon produced for Pathfinder rules so far, especially when taking into account the Expansions vol.1,Cyclopean Deeps 1 & 2, and Adventures in Zelkor's Ferry.
City of Barrakus is largely out of print at this point.
Lady Platypus wrote: Goblin_Priest wrote: My setting has a demi-plane that is essentially the world in Orcs Must Die, where the boss creature (whoever wears the helm major artifact) can reshape the plane, turn it into a deadly maze and add various traps to it. This demiplane has rifts/portals that can lead to various destinations that are otherwise hard or impossible to get to. It sounds... complicated. How are players supposed to push on if the enemy can reshape the dungeon at will?
Just winged it. It's a location they only spent a single session in, didn't bother with the mechanics. If greater details would have been needed, such as for a return, well... basically, assume the video game logic. Using the helm requires resources (credits/mana/power points/etc.). Some powers would have been X times per day, others would have drained a regenerating pool. Spawning traps was on the cheap end of the scale, changing the layout on the more draining end. And he did create obstacles for them, but he also wasn't aware of their presence for the full time, and they had a native spirit guide them for part of it (because I don't really find maze solving to be a very fun tabletop RPG challenge).
Honestly, I'm not a fan of the statted artifacts. It's like the statted gods, they suck. Artifacts merit to be in the realm of GM fiat. The boss did not abuse his control over the maze because it was beyond his power to do so, it really doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
Goblin_Priest wrote: ...because I don't really find maze solving to be a very fun tabletop RPG challenge... Can't think of anyone who does. When I've got a physical maze in front of me on the back of a cereal box or whatever, it's just barely entertainment. Taking out the visual element doesn't exactly help.
And the fact that solving a maze is just a guaranteed success through trial and error makes it even worse for table top.
Without some kind of additional element, they're just awful.
Quixote wrote: Goblin_Priest wrote: ...because I don't really find maze solving to be a very fun tabletop RPG challenge... Can't think of anyone who does. When I've got a physical maze in front of me on the back of a cereal box or whatever, it's just barely entertainment. Taking out the visual element doesn't exactly help.
And the fact that solving a maze is just a guaranteed success through trial and error makes it even worse for table top.
Without some kind of additional element, they're just awful. Some time ago I proposed "We keep to our right". It kinda stuck since. You are basically garanteed to make it through this way, though it will probably be very long IG. It sure saved a whole lot of table time and made it much easier to manage however.
Y'know what lots of people forget when maze-running? Mapping. While there's the obvious quill, ink and scroll solution to mapping, here's a magical way to make your tabletop RPG into a video game: Prestidigitation.
With that cantrip you can make crude items that can't affect the game world. You can also project colors. Back in 1e and 2e there were Prestidigitation-like cantrips that each took on one aspect of the spell we know it as today, and one of these aspects was a 2-d illusion. SO...
Why not have someone with Prestidigitation summon up a crude scroll onto which they project a 2-d illusion (figment) of the maze, a mini-map, that the PC can have floating above the characters' heads, say to the right of the screen... I mean their vision? Then as the PC continues forward the mini-map fills out.
Said mini-map illusion could also be crude so it doesn't violate any more sophisticated spell of a higher level. The PCs could reference it from time to time to gain either a Circumstance bonus to getting to a specific spot on the map or simply just use the illusion to justify handwaving their way through.
Unless the maze spontaneously changes itself somehow... that's a horse of a different color.
Finally at the OP: what if the dungeon is a Colossal mimic that disguised itself as a dungeon and fell asleep, and as the adventure progresses all the PCs' magic, alchemy and general shenanigans are waking the creature up slowly? You could invent a mechanic to track its level of wakefulness and awareness and, if it ever fully wakens it means the PCs are swallowed whole and have to immediately escape or risk death.
Quixote wrote: Goblin_Priest wrote: ...because I don't really find maze solving to be a very fun tabletop RPG challenge... Can't think of anyone who does. When I've got a physical maze in front of me on the back of a cereal box or whatever, it's just barely entertainment. Taking out the visual element doesn't exactly help.
And the fact that solving a maze is just a guaranteed success through trial and error makes it even worse for table top.
Without some kind of additional element, they're just awful. I've tried various ways to make mazes more interesting, but it's a basic truism. The best way I've found to handle mazes is abstraction - don't even bother with the maze itself, just the features and exit, and make skill or Int. rolls to figure out pathing.
Yea. Mapping the maze doesn't make it fun, it's just tedious.
It should either be handwavable (we always keep to our right) or solved with a few rolls (int checks, knw checks, whatever).
A few forks are fine but mazes are an inherently non cooperative challenge.
My last maze was a semi-semtient labyrinth that tried to trap the characters while a 15ft minotaur tried to heave his bulk down the 10ft corridors and turn the would-be heroes to paste.
So there was still the exploration and the pathfinding and puzzles, but suddenly they didn't have all the time in the world to do it in. They had a finite amount of time to spend before they had to start spending blood, too.
The maze added complexity and healthy frustration. The beast added fear and tension.
That doesn't seem very fun to me. :P
A maze is basically a series of consequential uninformed decisions. Every time a fork is reached, the party must agree on a direction, with no information on which path to choose. Lacking any information to work with, they can basically just decide at random, though, or just pre-set a pattern to follow. With a simple maze, there's no option to solve it quicker. You can't "think harder", or "choose more riskily". All forks offer equally unknown paths.
Mazes/labyrinths are inherently tedious. Dungeons can have forks that force informed decisions, such as between "risky" and "safe", "fast" and "slow", "direct" and "bountiful", and so on, but those are not maze features, and the more of them you add, the less maze-y is your maze. If you offer a risky shortcut in the maze, you are de-mazifying it.
Which is fine, because the less maze-y it is, the better it is. IMHO.
Arcane Marks or ripping up an unused journal (mark the ripped pieces numerically) are the best ways to solve a maze.
That strategy only helps avoid getting lost or going in loops. It's not a particularily good strategy either.
But the problem with mazes is not whether or not they can be solved. It's actually pretty certain it will be
Mazes are so incredibly lame, it is boring just talking about them...
Always turn left. Maze solved.
Only if you have a boring maze with normal geometry and dimensions.
No, always turn "right", because that's the "right" way to go. Get it?
Get it???
A maze without normal geometry and dimensions is what you give your players when you really hate them and want everyone to ragequit the table.
Is this the "Maze settings, ideas?" thread, or is this the "Dungeon crawling settings, ideas?" thread? Also, mazes can be cool if you're waiting for your "...Slam" breakfast meal at midnight.
I like having sections of dungeons where there's an environmental hazard, like the whole section is affected by a gas or cloaked in mist, but there might be a single magic item to help one of the PCs deal with it. Like, sure there's this radioactive mist everywhere that will inflict Sickened on anyone not constantly making Fort saves, and somewhere in the green fog, through hordes of undead is the Sword of Deathslicing that we need, but there's only one magical hazmat suit hanging on a peg at the entrance.
Now the players are forced to examine their characters, see who needs the suit the most, and have a conversation about general strengths and weaknesses of their PCs. There's also the possibility that this breaks down into conflict between the players, but handled well this could be fun too.
Finally, there's a section of the GMG that lays out interesting dungeon sites and interesting dungeon entrances. Rolling on those charts I once got that my dungeon was a series of lava tunnels but that the entrance was through the head of a giant statue. I changed "lava tunnels" to passages scored out by vermin and seawater and set the entire dungeon inside a toppled "colossus" style statue.
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