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.