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.