Castle Pendalton: D1.1, The Deep Cellars (Part 1/2)

So our first section is the Deep Cellars. This is going to be the main entrance of the dungeon. It's basically an abandoned set of storerooms deep beneath the castle. Wide corridors, loading bays, warehouses, some small office rooms, stacks of big crates. That kind of thing. Mostly, it's been plundered into oblivion, but there are a few treasures still there - mostly on the corpses of dead adventurers. As such, there are mostly scavenger sort of monsters here. I'm thinking giant rats on the easy end, giant web spiders on the difficult end, and giant centipedes in the middle.

There are a few different kinds of rooms here:

• Hallways - these are wide, empty zones designed to help the players get from one area to the other fairly easily. The further the other rooms are from the hallway, the more likely they are to have good treasure.
• Undercrofts - this is a sub-type of the hallways that basically adds some extra support to the ceiling at major intersections. There are sometimes maps on the wall with a little you are here, but they are ancient. The lobby is basically an undercroft with a busted wall where the players first gain access to the dungeon. It'll have multiple hallways leading off in different directions, to provide the players an immediate choice of where to go.
• Stairwells - these are simple functional stairs to the first floor of the castle (these are mostly blocked) and down to the various sublevels of B2 (which are not).
• Warehouses - these are bigger rooms just off the main halls, which are more likely than most to house monsters and interesting treasure.
• Offices - these are smaller areas off the halls and the warehouses that are more likely to house useful clues and information. They also make good monster dens.
• Storage Closets - these are really tiny sections off the main halls that most likely contain interesting trash and mundane equipment like ladders and carts.
• Latrines - these are located off the main hall and are exactly as labeled on the tin. There is access to the dungeon's drainage systems here.
• Tunnels - these are burrowed into the walls by rats and beetles and such to creature monster dens. The dens usually have a larder which may contain corpses and treasure.

Next, we have a few specific needs for rooms in this area. First and foremost: we need a dungeon lobby. It's critical to the structure of this dungeon. Next, we'll need some kind of landmark on the way to the next area where the plants start to overtake the dungeon. From the moment I came up with the idea this area, a core image in my mind has been a warehouse full of crates, some which the party searches only to find that they have stuck their arm into a horrible giant centipede nest. I also want to have a secret area tunneled into the wall that provides a sneaky shortcut between several areas, but all the tunnels go straight through a giant rat den. There also needs to be a sealed stairway up to the above-ground levels of the castle.

That said, we'd be crazy not to use a little random generation to speed things up. I use the following table for stocking my dungeons, and we'll be rolling 1d8 among the bullet points above for the room types. I'll be tweaking the results a bit to swap in the rooms we know we need for results that were closest to them. The reason we're doing that is to preserve the overall ratio of room types. We'll fill in the actual details of the rooms in the next post.

General Dungeon Stocking Table (d100)

1-6        Treasure

7-33      Empty

34-40    Trap and Treasure

41-50    Trap

51-67    Special (usually no treasure)

68-83    Monster

84-100  Monster and Treasure

Here's the results of the rolls.

Dungeon rooms:
Storage Closet: Treasure
Storage Closet: Empty
Undercroft: Empty
Stairwell: Empty (Sealed, to F1)
Storage Closet: Empty
Undercroft: Empty
Latrine: Empty
Undercroft: Empty
Hallway: Empty
Warehouse: Empty
Office: Monster
Storage Closet: Monster
Stairwell: Monster (Open, to B2)
Tunnel: Monster (Rat Lair)
Warehouse: Monster (Giant Centipede)
Office: Monster
Storage Closet: Monster
Undercroft: Monster and Treasure
Office: Monster and Treasure
Tunnel: Monster and Treasure
Latrine: Monster and Treasure
Office: Special
Hallway: Special (Main Lobby)
Hallway: Special
Undercroft: Special
Undercroft: Trap and Treasure
Warehouse: Trap and Treasure
Stairwell: Trap (Open, to B2)
Tunnel: Trap
Warehouse: Trap

Next step is to put actual stuff in the rooms, and after that we'll sketch out a map and distribute the locations onto it.

Castle Pendalton: D1 (The Ruined Cellars) - Prep Work.

So we have our first level named - the Ruined Cellars. It's going to be a fairly generic area - some of these players are little kids. They are going to be very new, not just to D&D, not just to RPGs, but to tabletop games in general. Bland stereotypical entry-level dungeon stuff isn't just acceptable, to a certain degree it's actually desireable. They new players have to learn how to handle the standard elements somewhere and this is where. But we also don't want a totally undifferentiated mess of dull cliches, or the DM or any older players get bored. So we'll also be dividing this level into themed regions. Each region will contain a mixture of its own shenanigans and the overall level theme.

So this level is going to be for a small cast of rank beginners: 2-3 characters, tops. Probably too broke to really have any hirelings or pets. So the characters are alone and delicate, the players are novices, and we need to be pretty careful what monsters we use. We also want to mostly try and restrict ourselves to a somewhat limited palette of monsters. That makes it easier to learn how to handle one monster at a time. I'll put a few monsters - say three - that are common to the whole level, and three more for each subregion. One easy, one medium, and one hard.

I'm using 5th edition, so the CR system makes the balance fairly easy to work out. The medium critters should be just about nasty enough to fight a PC on a one-on-one level. The easy critters should be more of a minion/horde deal. One of the big critters alone should be in the hard/deadly range for the whole party. I'm thinking for this section I mostly want relatively mundane dungeon vermin.

Hard monster: I'm thinking like a giant armored beetle. CR 1/2 or so. Maybe 1. None of the monsters in the Monster Manual are really adequate for this, so I'll probably have to homebrew it. Still mulling over what I want it's role to be: a monster that the party has to fight together, or a monster not worth fighting that the party will want to flee from.

Medium monster: Vampire bats. I'll probably call them Blood Bats, because saying vampire is just asking for trouble in a game that already has actual vampires in it. I will probably just use palette-swapped stirges for stats, which means CR 1/8 (this is good because then two of them qualify as a Medium encounter). I never understood why you'd invent that monster instead of using a vampire bat. It's like someone at TSR never went to archetype school. These will be my standard-issue filler monster.

Weak monster: Probably some kind of jumping spider. CR 0, obviously. This is basically just a giant freaky venomous spider about two feet across. Their main mode of attack will be to make huge fuck-off leaps across the room from a standing start. They spin webs, but not strong enough to stop people, just enough to make squares into gross difficult terrain if they have a few days to work on it. I'll use them for quick jump scare ambushes, minor non-threatening encounters, and weak swarm attacks.

We are gonna need to figure out how big the level needs to be, also. I'm going to rejigger the 5e XP charts a little. I'd like to see the time to reach second level be something like three adventuring days instead of one. That gives the party a bit more time to get used to their characters and powers. By the DMG that's 900 XP per character, or eighteen Medium encounters. Since I won't be giving XP for wandering monsters (for reasons I will get into later), that's not an issue. And on my dungeon stocking table, 2/3rds of the rooms do not have encounters. This is a necessary thing in megadungeons, because if you cluster the encounters too much, not only is it hard to move around, but every simple alarm trap risks bringing down the entire dungeon on the party's heads. But the upshot is this: the first level should have at least 18 placed encounters and 54 rooms. Lets instead do twice that, since we also want to leave enough XP there for future characters in case of PC death, alt-itis, or new players, and we don't actually want to force the players to go to every single part of the dungeon to gain a level.

We also need to figure out roughly how much treasure to include. By the XP calculations, the 108 rooms of D1 should contain (in total) roughly 1800 gp worth of treasure. My table puts treasure in roughly 30% of rooms. That makes roughly 30-35 treasure finds across the level, so we can settle on an average value of about 50-60 gp per treasure. We'll have some variance - harder areas should have more and easier areas less, but that's the approximate expectation.


I have a few ideas for subsections:

• D1.1: The Deep Cellars - This is going to be a fairly plain area full of storerooms and warehouses that serves as high-traffic travel avenues. I figure this area will consist of about 30 rooms, most of which are optional.
• D1.2: Overgrown Passages - This is another plainish high-traffic area, but overgrown with plants and fungus. This area will be about 30 rooms also. Again, mostly side rooms.
• D1.3: Clifftop Dojo - I'm going to put a small little outdoor section in a pagoda inhabited by a small clan of rat-people ninjas. These are going to serve the general "humanoid" role of this level. This area should have about 20 rooms, and since the whole area is a side area, it's a more linear progression.
• D1.4: Forgotten Tower - This is going to be a side area where there is a wizard tower with an evil wizard. The dark wizard manufactures a bunch of phantasmal warriors and plant minions, and gets up to all kinds of evil wizard stuff. This area is basically a small lair - only about 10 rooms, set up defensibly.
• D1.5: Deepwell - This is the single biggest travel avenue in the dungeon because it's where the huge pit between levels is. Only levels 1-3 can be accessed from here at the start (which is up to like 200 feet down). About 20 rooms here, mostly on side paths.

Next time, we'll zero in on D1.1 and the dungeon entrance.

The Megadungeon: Castle Pendalton

So Castle Pendalton is a megadungeon. The upper levels are large but finite, having been a project by a cursed time-traveller with incredibly massive amounts of design time but no ability to stick around long enough to ever finish a build or troubleshoot his work. The lower levels are more sprawling and basically infinite in scope, since they are a spiraling descent into a nigh-bottomless pit of escalating chaos and insanity. The main entrance to the castle is going to be on the first dungeon level and exploring it will be the first adventure.

Obviously I can't detail an infinite number of levels all at once, but I figure for starters I'll do the levels from the first to the third dungeon level, then make more stuff as I go. For a starting point, I'll need a brief introductory level (suitable for very small groups of new 1st-level characters - possibly even solo adventures), and a couple of different choices of which area to explore from there. As such, B1 is going to provide immediate access to three different level 2s: (the main level, B2 and sub-levels B2a and B2b), an entrance to B3, and a few entrances going aboveground to 1F, which will be all sealed off for now with magic light barriers placed there by the cursed wizard to keep away outsiders. These will fall before the party fairly soon.

One concept that I'm trying to strongly emphasize is that there are safe corridors that lead deep into the dungeon. Usually when I do big dungeons, I don't do enough of that, so we'll be trying to improve. Safe "highway" corridors leave relatively unobstructed paths between level transitions, allowing the party to skip over the easy sections and jump straight into the difficult ones if they feel daring enough. Most of the really interesting content needs to be placed in side branches, away from the critical paths between transitions. Likewise, I'm sticking a ridiculously huge bottomless pit a little ways in that leads to most of the dungeon levels. There will be a path leading down into it granting access to all the completed levels, but I'll put some kind of blockage in to bar passage beyond there. Don't fall in. You'll probably hit a platform and die long before hitting the bottom, but worse things will happen to you if you make it all the way.

I've developed a few basic concepts for the levels I plan to detail up front. This was done partly from the requirements of the scenario (teaching very young first timers how to dungeon), with a few rolls on a random table of dungeon zones to fill in the gaps.

B1 is the Ruined Cellars. This section will basically be the Platonic essence of ruined dungeon, mostly intended to teach new players the basics of dungeon crawling. B2, the "main" part of level 2 are the Zoological Gardens, basically a fancy menagerie where all the animals have escaped and gone feral. Most of the enemies there are wild beasts, some of which are rare and exotic. Also on dungeon level 2 is B2a, the Dark Barrows (because sometimes people play clerics and therefore an undead section in the tutorial is mandatory), and B2b, the Cobwebbed Courts (because my wife hates spiders and I am a cruel man). Back in the main sequence, B3 is the Escape Tunnels, which are a series of holdout points and retreat tunnels infested by some kind of gobliny/koboldy things - still deciding precisely what kind. The layout of major transitions between the first areas will look something like this:

  /---B2a
 /
 |    B2----B3----*open*
 |    /     /
B1----------------*blocked*
 \
  \---B2b

There will probably be several smaller and more secret shortcuts between different sublevels, but that's the primary gameplan. It's basically a tweaked Five-Room Dungeon layout. While it's never good to hew too closely to formula, 5RDs make very handy basic rhythms for framing and pacing a narrative arc, and they nest neatly to form sub-arcs if you use them fractally. I'll get more into exactly how that works in a later post.

I'll start next post with a rough top-down sketch of what the Ruined Cellars will be like, since that'll be the most important zone to get done.

The Campaign

So the campaign I have in mind for the kids is like this:
 
The party will consist of my kids and my wife, plus whatever companions they choose to bring. The pool of possible henchmen will largely be ripped from whatever my kids are into at the time. Current TV habits suggest Tarzan, Po from Kung Fu Panda, and Gecko from the PJ Masks, all of whom would be pretty solid companions. I'll also add family pets and favorite toys to the list, like Hamlet the Hedgehog Knight, and Eldest Daughter's stuffed owlbear Lord Reginald Ursinius von Owlington.

The exterior is going to be a weird sandbox world, taking a little bit after Adventure Time - split into weird themed kingdoms, nearly everyone being bizarre and not human, running largely off bizarre video game logic, etc. The home base will be a little kingdom called Glenvale that I'm not going to detail until they make characters. I figure that way I can tailor it to the PCs in case Daughter wants to be a princess or something. There are two castles in town. Castle Glenvale is where the king and queen live (probably the party too). Castle Pendalton is on the outskirts of the village.

Castle Pendalton (named after one of my old AD&D characters) is going to be a megadungeon that serves as the central pillar of the campaign. Anytime there isn't a specific mission to the outer world going on, the party will mostly be exploring it. The castle is located at a dimensional nexus. The main entrance opens onto level B1F, and from there you can go either up or down. The lower reaches of the dungeon descend into a ridiculously deep well of chaos magic. The deeper down you go, the weirder the dungeon gets. The upper reaches were constructed millennia ago as a magical capstone on the madness. They were built by a decent perfectly sane wizard (my old PC) who managed to get himself unstuck in time via a magical wishing accident. He keeps bouncing between different eras uncontrollably and as a result none of his workings ever get finished properly. Either his castle keeps getting infested by chaos monsters in his absence, his spells get warped by chaos magic leaking up from the deeps, or the enchantments go wild because one of his random time-skips happen midway through the spell and he disappears without finishing it. A lot of this blog is going to cover the design process for this dungeon.

Next up: The dungeon overview.

Declaration of Intent!

Welp, trying the blogger thing again, mostly as a way to preserve information about a DnD sandbox and megadungeon I'm designing for my kids and my wife.

Watch this space for more things in the nearish future.