As I may have mentioned in the past, I am always toying with the idea of finally putting together the megadungeon promised by Dungeons and Dragons in my youth. Recently, I found this amazing series of articles on the topic and while my goals are slightly different than those of the author, I felt like I was finally prepared to actually put pencil to paper and start working on my megadungeon project. But, reading another set of articles, a few stray comments caught my eye.
The first mentioned that megadungeons don’t have to actually be dungeons, and I started to consider the megaforest a megadungeon like a forest full of maze-like deer paths, forgotten glades, ruins, dungeons etc… that act much like the classic megadungeon.
The second discussed that you cannot make a megadungeon in a vacuum, that players will eventually grow bored of the megadungeon, wander off to pursue other adventures, then return later so the world and adventures around your megadungeon must be detailed to some extent, which was something I absolutely did NOT want to do.
Turns out that while talking with my primary players a few days later, the topic of classic White Wolf came up, and we went with that instead of either a megadungeon or a megaforest–so this whole line of thinking has been tabled, but I wanted to toss out a conundrum for all our readers to tackle and give feedback.
My first worry was that the commenter who mentioned the necessity of world building was correct. For me world building is one of those great black holes that seems unconquerable and makes me give up on campaigns in disgust. I like it in theory, and the World Builder’s Guidebook is one of my favorite 2e DnD books, but in practice it ends up being a ridiculous amount of unused work that I have very little interest in pursuing. As a consequence, I considered how I could have a campaign centered around exploring a megaforest (or megadungeon) in which I didn’t have to do any world building. True, I could just request out of game that the players focus on exploring the forest, but that seems like an inelegant solution.
My solution was to start the characters in the middle of the megaforest, searching for the way out. Here’s the rough synopsis: characters are in a small village on the edge of a haunted forest no one enters (because few ever return). A large force of savage berserkers starts looting and pillaging the region, putting people to the sword and villages to the torch. When they get to this village, the people flee into the forest–taking near certain death over certain death. The flight is exhausting and terrifying with marauders and forest beasts on their trail the whole time, but otherwise it’s surprisingly easy until the refugees come to a ruined keep at the heart of the forest. However, once in the forest it’s much harder to leave. If you’re trying to leave the terrain is difficult, paths are confusing and monsters are deadly. There’s a lot more “backstory” but the immediate campaign goals are clearing and upgrading the ruins so the refugees have somewhere relatively safe to stay, then finding a way back OUT. You could do something similar with a dungeon:Â a pit trap drops the characters into an underground river, they wake up later washed up on the shore of an underground sea and have to find their way home.
So here’s the conundrum: I had two conflicting design goals. First, I wanted to be able to map the forest in a fairly small scale (1 mile hexes) so that the characters could explore a reasonable amount of it between having to find a safe-ish place to hole up for the night (about 18 hexes a day), almost like exploring a dungeon made of forest. Second, I wanted the forest to be large enough that a determined set of characters couldn’t just pick a direction and hike until they got out easily (about 3 weeks in any direction from center). This meant that I was faced with detailing a huge area at a small scale which is a daunting task. Here were the options I was kicking around to deal with this issue when my group decided to toss the whole idea and do something else instead:
- Detail a smaller area at high detail (a few pages of 1 mile hex map) and just make the forest difficult to escape via other means. Walls of briars, dangerous beasts that drive you back when you get too far from the center, distorting distance, direction and time making getting lost more likely the further from the center you get, etc…
- Detail a larger area at a larger scale (several pages of 6 mile hexes) This means characters can only explore a small area in a game day (3 hexes a day) and eliminates the “should we camp for the night or press on” as well as the “navigating around or through difficult or impassible terrain” in play concerns so it results in shallower day-to day gameplay
- Detail a large area at a large scale (few pages of 6 mile hexes) and switch to small areas at small scale at certain points of interest (partial page of 1 mile hexes) in the same way as we traditionally do when we switch from overland scale to dungeon scale in a typical game, but this is a switch from a 3 hex a day scale to an 18 hex a day scale in the valley, swamp, etc…
So, I’m interested in feedback on a few things (though you’re welcome to comment on anything you want I suppose):
- Forest as megadungeon: pretty cool right?
- Is “cheating” and trapping your PCs in a campaign setting and not letting them wander off kosher? Or is it railroading of the worst form?
- Is “Hey, I’ve only prepared this. I know you can wander off that way. Please don’t” poor design or completely reasonable?
- What do you think of those 3 options above (small scale, large scale or large with zoom in points of interest)? Which, if any, appeals to you and why, or do they all suck? Is there a better option than any of them that I’m missing?
In my current campaign I am developing similar concept, but based on exploring unknown land. Players come there unwilling as a cheap work force taken from the prison (not most creative, but works 😉 ). But with one difference, that the world is build as they are exploring it. I’m saying it’s similar idea because:
1. they can’t leave (at the moment)
2. the areas they explore contain random (or at least slightly random) features and it’s unwelcoming land that’s hard to survive
3. They want to leave
4. The mase element is achieved with deadly areas that they should not wander to. So there are paths laid down as well.
And they like it.
Has walling off the area made it megadungeon or is it simply world building? I wonder 🙂
And about the world itself, the world outside is promising enough, I’ve prepared events that should unfold when they leave and make them want to come back.
You might want to check out Dungeon Fantastic – The whole premise has been a megadungeon. the majority of the sessions (86 at the moment) have all been in the megadungeon.. He has some articles about how he does what he does and why.
-> http://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/
The biggest thing I would say is that if you have player buy-in on the premise it can work with ‘town’ being mostly an abstraction.
So I went there to read some of their stuff and it turns out they’ve written an entire article on why MY article is a bad idea. It’s a great read too:
https://dungeonfantastic.blogspot.com/2017/03/why-i-dislike-escape-dungeon-as.html?showComment=1488726188204#c237117952888688272
I often think I over think this stuff and no one else must put that much thought into it. Then I find people who have obviously thought as much or more than I have but in entirely different (perhaps more useful) directions and it’s always super useful. 🙂
First, megaforest is totally awesome.
Worldbuilding is only a huge problem if you let it be. You don’t have to detail the entire world before the first session. Just create a few broad brushstrokes. So in your setting above, you need to answer a few questions:
1) What is the political/cultural environment of the original village? Is it the minor holding of a major noble? Why the heck would anyone live in a village on the edge of a haunted forest? Are they able to grow rare herbs (e.g., spell components) in the shadow of the magical trees that are crazy lucrative? And, importantly, does the village contain a wide variety of races and people from other cultures, or is it pretty homogenous with the PCs as obvious exceptions?
2) Where did the berserkers come from? What do they look like? Why is the village’s lord not protecting the people? Are they likely to follow the villagers into the forest?
3) Where did the forest come from? The villagers will have tales. Are those tales remotely accurate?
Nail those questions down, and the rest of the world is totally irrelevant. Encourage the players to invent whatever details they want in their character backgrounds.
As to the issue with the players becoming bored, you have already created your alternate adventure type. The boredom comes from the routine of “kick down the door, kill the monster, take the treasure”. You get to shake that up by having a group of villagers following the PCs around. This creates resource management issues, political arguments, the potential for different adventure types (e.g. murder mystery), and just general socialization. Look at shows like Lost and The Walking Dead for ideas on how the side NPCs can be a constant source of B plots. This bears especial fruit if you encourage the players to build relationships into their backstories (e.g., a crush on the mayor’s daughter, an older parent who is infirm or sick, a desire to look after the children orphaned by the berserkers). Take the NPCs identified by the players, add in another half dozen names, and create a list of key NPCs. The number of villagers in the group should be 2-3 times that many, with most of them generic “red shirts” who can get conveniently killed off by the threats of the forest (yet somehow the total number of villagers doesn’t ever seem to get smaller).
The mapping issue should be similar to the worldbuilding issue: don’t do more work than you have to. You should do maps on three scales:
1) Do a rough sketch of the entire forest. Note any really significant features, like the original village, the ruins, rivers, and the secret heart of the forest where the magic comes from. You should understand the real story behind the forest in order to make this map. This might be at the 18-mile hex level.
2) Do your 6-mile hex level for the path from the village to the ruins and up to a week’s travel (i.e., 7-10 hexes) to either side. Assuming that someone from the village knows the direction to the ruins, that covers everything your PCs might run into during a single session (unless one of them throws you off by learning to fly). If they start deviating significantly from the expected path, you should have a week between sessions to map out the area they are heading towards.
3) Do your 1-mile hex level for the area you expect the PCs to explore in the next session, plus 7-10 hexes margin around that. This is the minimum you need to have ready to run a session. Do more as you have time and inclination. The more you do ahead of time, the less you need to stress about getting stuff ready for the next session, but the less flexibility you have to tailor the next session as well.
In my experience, it’s generally best to be totally up front with the players as to what kind of campaign you are running, and get their buy-in. This is super important for two reasons. One, the players become more likely to follow the breadcrumbs you are laying down and not wander way off track. Two, the players are far less likely to create characters that end up being totally unsuited to the mission (e.g., a dedicated cat burglar in the woods). Remember that you are supposed to be creating a story together, and the the players are not merely an audience for the story you want to tell.
Yeah, I wouldn’t sweat the smaller scale maps. I think the more important question is, how much can the PCs know about any one area on the map? How much do the PCs know about the map as a whole? If this is their first time through and they don’t have a map or a guide, maybe it’s okay the leave the entire map blank and fill it in as you go, then add bits of flavor around the area that they’re in.
The party can set out in any direction they want, but what does it matter? The awesome zombie village that you spent hours planning out doesn’t have to be North of them if they set out South. It’s your world, you can move cave mouths and entire villages on a whim as long as it’s consistent, should they try to retrace their steps. Or maybe it doesn’t have to be that consistent. Magic forests have a knack for shifting and mutating or forcing you down paths you don’t want to, simply because the going gets too tough in one direction. Vary up your approaches, give meaningful choices but don’t throw out things you’ve prepared that could reasonably be encountered in other locations, just because they didn’t pick the right side of the fork in the road.
Take some advice from Dungeon World: Draw maps but leave blanks.
Hmm, to start off by stating the obvious: If what you’re worried about is “players will eventually grow bored of the megadungeon, wander off to pursue other adventures”, then forcing them to stay in the megadungeon (forest) eliminates the easiest way to relieve their boredom. That seems like a Bad Thing. (If you’re giving them meaningful choices within that framework, it’s not really railroading, though.)
The second question is, can you even “realistically” force them to stay? The setup you describe involves an entire village fleeing into the forest under pursuit. If the geography of the forest is at all consistent, a dedicated party of adventurers should be able to make it out in at most the of same amount of time just by going in the opposite direction. That’s not even factoring in the many tricks creative players might come up with to cut the time short. (Flying? Navigable water? Teleportation? Dimension hopping?)
On the other hand, if the geography of the forest is not consistent, then congratulations! You’ve just solved your mapping problem. Or perhaps made it impossibly difficult.
Of course, you can make it nigh impossible for the PCs to escape. For instance, instead of fleeing into the forest, the village went through a hastily opened gate to a random dimension, and the wizard that made it died getting everyone through. Maybe if you can level up the PC wizard enough times she’ll be able to get everyone out of there. Until then there’s a lot of exploring/adventuring to do. But then, at this level, all you’ve done is … umm …. built a world. What you didn’t want to do in the first place.
For what it’s worth, I think GMing something like Amber or TimeWatch is a good lesson about this sort of thing. Because in the default setting for either of those, there’s no real way to limit the PCs’ mobility. I think at first most of us try to fight that. “Well, this shadow is limited access and Trumps don’t work.” But if you do that very often it tends to feel really cheesy very quickly. IMO once you give in and start going with the flow, the games become a lot more interesting. As a GM you just have to be willing to improvise.
I follow. While maybe not strictly “railroading” still a bad idea and harder than I give it credit for as levels start rolling upwards.
I think the megadungeon/megaforest boredom issue can be resolved with the pitch. If you tell me the game is going to be about exploring the Haunted Woods or cleansing Mirkwood, then I know the adventure will be locked into that. I know we’re be far from home, with few ways back to town. Of course, discovering new ways to back track is also important and one of the things Angry has built in, if I remember correctly.
The other part of the megaforest that relieves bordeom is that there are puzzles to solve. In the dungeon you need a special key, in the forest you may need to find the wood of a specific type of tree that can burn through the ancient spider webs, unlocking a new area. The spirits of a druid’s glade may need to be calmed through a ritual that makes the land more passable. It isn’t all about kicking in the door. It’s about uncovering the history of the druids and the spiders. How they were once allies and what happened to turn them against each other.
If it were me, I wouldn’t bother with hex maps at all. I might have a sketch of the whole thing, or I might not. The important thing is to give players choices. When the forest looks the same in all directions, they really don’t have much choice. A twisted bronze tower jutting over the tree line in that direction. A river full of violet plants and slime to follow in this other direction. An unearthly howling at night from yet another.
This lets you see what your players want to engage with. Just keep going. Come up with some possible encounters and plot hooks, and let them focus on what they want.
And what if you let the players get back to their village or another place they know about, and find the forest has grown to surround that as well? Maybe as a half way point in the campaign they find they have to find the heart of the forest and defeat it before the forest will let go of their lands?
Again, this is me. I prefer emergent story to hex crawls, but you can combine the two.
I created a setting just for this type of stuff. It’s a bit of a spin off of Ravenloft with a little teeny bit of planescape inspiration.
(If I may) Link here: http://www.failsquadgames.com/lands-of-lunacy/
Essentially what it is – is pocket dimensions drifting amidst the “Chaos Void” so you can contain things that you want to try out. Like Megaforests, Releasing the Terrasque etc without turning your own world upside down.
If it works, you make it permanent, if it doesn’t… well… That domain (Pocket dimension) might just collapse.
So far it has worked out well, and a mega-dungeon could be contained within a Lands of Lunacy domain.
This sounds awesome. Bookmarking for future idea plunder!!
Very cool! Purchased!
What you are describing is a “hexcrawl,” rather than the “dungeoncrawl” that megadungeons are based on. I would recommend researching the “West Marches” campaign and the works of Justin Alexander at his site (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl) for inspiration and guidance.
So, I’ve read up on hexcrawls too. Love Westmarches but whenever I think of doing one my head spins with work.
This is, I think one of the things you lose by going up scale. It’s much easier to justify “It’s going to be really hard to move directly from hex A to hex B because of terrain, nasty underbrush, forest guardians or whatever, so go the long way around. It’ll save you trouble.” with smaller hexes. This in my mind puts it in this weird in between zone where you ARE exploring “rooms” created by easy and difficult terrain unless you want to make your life difficult and push through “walls”
In large scale, those things are much more difficult to imagine. There is NO path east to west for 20 miles? Sure if you’re trying to cross a mountain range maybe. But even then you just mark the mountains as some level of difficult terrain and say “entering this hex takes 2 days instead of 1/2”.
In small scale a near vertical ridge is a challenge to circumvent. In large scale it becomes difficult terrain.
First of all, before designing anything take a read through the Mirkwood section of The Hobbit and notice how the presentation is done. If possible get yourself a couple of trips to a real wood too and make a note that “forest” isn’t just a big wood, it is a dense wood too. You’ll have a better feel for how to run the off-the-path bits. Don’t forget the third dimension either. Slogging uphill is hard work in a damp, hot forest (or a freezing, snow-covered one too).
Next, I’d handle this in much the same way it is done in the LotFP supplement “Carcosa” – in which a larger scale hex map has a main feature listed, but the immense area covered by that large scale hex is entirely up to the GM. I’d have a couple of dozen cool ideas written on index cards and shuffled ready to go to give me an idea of what is going to be a “main feature” of the small scale hex the party just fought their way into (twenty-foot cliff has small waterfall dropping into hidden cave, overgrown cave-mouth, rock outcropping has signs of old campfire, etc), and another deck or table giving terrain super-detailing a-la FATE attributes (foot-tangling grass underfoot, unbroken canopy overhead, smell as of dead animal, boggy ground etc).
Third, I’d have the terrain generate itself the same way it does in the board game “Search for the Nile”, where a pseudo random process generates terrain based on what the surrounding terrain looks like but with a decent random change built in.
Naturally, the GMs friend The Five Room Dungeon would be in evidence wherever I could getaway with it and in numerous disguises. There would also be planned vignettes with more pre-built structure to them.
Man, Source of the Nile is one of those classic games that I have never gotten my hands on but sounds super cool. I recently bought the video game Renowned Explorers http://store.steampowered.com/app/296970/ because it promised to have a similar feel. I was NOT disappointed by that game, but it doesn’t stop me from wishing I had a copy of Source of the Nile.
I see Source of the Nile (not Search for the Nile of course) all the time in the bins of vendors at cons. Prices are usually not outrageous.
My wife bought me a copy one Valentine’s day after I wistfully spoke about having the original (pre AH) version.