As I’ve said before, I’m pretty new to “old-school” style play. As I work on my 2024 megadungeon, I’ve been noticing a problem I’ve encountered in the past with my dungeon designs; everything is too damn close together. I find it really hard to create a decent dungeon ecosystem when all the rooms are just like, 30 feet from each other. It seems strange to have any number of intelligent creatures crammed into that small a space, especially ones who aren’t allied. Watching Delicious in Dungeon recently has helped me realize this. The dungeon in that show seems huge – the characters are walking for days at a time through empty halls before they encounter a monster or a trap. There may be other monsters nearby, but it’s at wilderness scale rather than building scale. I think this kind of “dungeon” is what I really want to be building, and I’m having a hard time cramming that into the frankly quite dense map I generated for the Astral Prison of the Nether Vulture.
For at least one of the lower levels, I am going to do smaller chunks. Maybe a half-dozen rooms with randomly generated occupants, ideally 1-2 kinds of monsters and some treasure. Each of these distinct pods can then be mapped and relationships drawn between them. I also think I may go back to the Nether Prison and make a lot more of the occupied rooms into actual locked prison cells – helping explain why there are so many creatures crammed together in a small area without all running into each other at all times.
So here’s our first pod of level 4, which can be accessed through the chute in Room 54 of the Nether Prison of the Astral Vulture:
Room 1: A shaft leading upwards to the Nether Prison of the Astral Vulture.
Room 2: 10 children of the ashen fields, an encampment of explorers scouring the cyclopean ruins for weapons and resources in for their campaign against the gods. They use the centipedes in Room 6 to guard their findings
Room 3: Ancient columns and statuary
Room 4: Empty
Room 5: Empty
Room 6: 17 centipedes seemingly swimming through midair. In reality, they are covering invisible jars which contain 1850 EP. Each jar also contains a poison needle that fires straight upwards when the top is removed. Any wealth left in the room for more than a few hours is encased in a new jar guarded by another pack of centipedes.
Room 7: Empty