What Fools These Adventurers Be!
A Look at a Failed Megadungeon Campaign
Most of what I discuss in this newsletter will either be focused on or be inspired by my current Twilight Age megadungeon campaign. This endeavor, though, is not my first attempt at running a D&D campaign centered around a tentpole megadungeon. My initial effort began as a experimental side campaign with a roster of about half-dozen players. As I ran it over the course of three years, it grew into being the focus of my DMing energies and developed a player pool of a little above a dozen participants. I hadn’t run a game like it before. I hadn’t played in a game like it, either. Entitled What Fools These Adventurers Be, to make it work I had to be open to being a fool myself sometimes as I blindly experimented to figure out how to make a megadungeon game work.
What Fools (as it was often shortened to) built off of Miranda’s first few “Cuccagna” posts over at In Places Deep. The proposed Shakespeare-inspired setting featured the idyllic isle of Cuccagna. That island was home to six powerful wizards bearing the name “Prospero” who engaged in petty squabbles and dangerous rivalries. It drew upon other things I grew up loving (and still love) besides just with Shakespeare’s works like the classics, mythology, and Terry Gilliam films. In addition, it played off interests I have developed in adulthood like the writings of Jack Vance or Ray Harryhausen movies.
As enticing to me as this Cuccagna setting was, reading about it isn’t what made me decided to run a game there. It was watching an adaption of Much Ado About Nothing one evening at my folks. As I watched one ill-conceived plan after another be hatched, I was struck by how the comedic scheming of Shakespeare’s romances didn’t feel that different from the half-baked plans players commonly dreamed up in D&D. With that, I knew my next game had to be a game inspired these “Cuccagna” posts that endeared themselves upon me so strongly. One of the elements established by Miranda is that one of the Prosperos is missing which left his magical experiment and treasure filled manse abandoned. As I began developing the setting for play, I quickly realized these “Lapis Vaults” of Prospero the Blue were the perfect frame for me to experiment with a campaign form I always wanted to try: the megadungeon.
My approach to constructing the world of What Fool, started with pulling from the about half-dozen posts Miranda had written describing the setting of Cuccagna but I didn’t keep myself bound to the ideas in them. These blog entries provided such a light sketch of what “idyllic” isle was like. As loose as that presentation was, I felt no obligation to keep anything from it. Instead, I felt it was more important to follow where my imagination lead while trying to stay true to the spirit of the writings that had inspired me. As an example, one of the first things I did was move Prospero the Blue’s manor from a lake to a mountain and set it next to the Abbey of St. Gambrinus which served as the player’s base of operations. I then set about building my own “Lapis Vaults” which I renamed “The Seclusium of Prospero the Blue” starting with Level 1 of the dungeon.
To create the map of this first level, I began by numbering the horizontal and vertical axes. This was mainly done so that it was easy to figure out the distance between egresses connecting levels. For the map itself, I drew upon the maps of a few adventures I really liked. I had read about reusing and reworking maps and keys form different adventures as a means for constructing a megadungeon. I found the idea of the constrained and playful method to have a puzzle-like charm. So, I decided to build an approach for constructing my own megadungeon off of this technique. Rather than taking a map and key whole cloth from a published adventure, I riffed off of the physical design of rooms I liked from some printed works until I made a space I found satisfying. For the key, I sometimes I used descriptions tied to the corresponding rooms. Other times, I took from other sources. In others still, I just created something all together new.
This initial map focused on the manor home of Prospero the Blue situated at the feet of the ruins of an old Trojan fortress. Armed with the simple key developed with the technique above which I filled with his vat creations, former apprentices, demons, and goatmen; I started running sessions on this first level. Quickly, I found that the dungeon need another entrance beyond the front door found at keyed location “1”.
To create this second map, still part of Level 1 of the megadungeon, I used a similar process. I pulled from, smashed together, and modified existing dungeons that I liked into something different than its parts. The main inspiration for this section was a map from a module made to work with later editions of D&D. This required me to radically rekey the rooms I wanted to reuse using the guidance found in the original D&D pamphlet Vol. 3 Underworld and Wilderness Adventure. These rooms were located underneath the ruins of the previously mentioned old Trojan fort. A new entrance into the underworld was established the cavern stream coded in light blue in the map. In addition, a connection between the rest of Level 1 was created in the brown labeled “2-1”.
These maps, along with a rougher one for Level 2, sustained play for a few months. Over this time, the campaign began to feel less like an experiment for me. The players were really connecting to the mysteries of the dungeon. The practices I adapted to run a open-ish table game in a living dungeon seemed to be working. I decided a true ongoing concern needed a more refined map.
This new map isn’t that different form the first drafts outside of use of ink and color on the whole thing. I attempted to draw the two halves of Level 1 along with a Trojan fortress sublevel (which is seen in the first map) all together. I deployed different colors to attempt to differentiate the different parts of this dungeon level. Not pictured is a garden path that connected “2” to “36” (previously known as “2-1”). This map lasted for the rest of the year of play.
About a year into running the megadungeon, I decided to followed the advice found on p. 8 of Vol. 3 Underworld and Wilderness Adventures on “Maintaining Freshness.” The general idea of the guidence is that as the players clear rooms and map the dungeon, play could grow boring. So, a DM should change and expand the map along with rekeying some of the rooms.
The biggest changes I made to the included redesigning a lot of the western section of the map and creating another entrance to the dungeon in an expanded cave system in the eastern proportion. In the northwestern proportion of the map, I had the architectural changes occur at the hands of a group of goblins created by the former apprentice of Prospero the Blue. The southwestern changes were forced by the arcane rituals of the agents of Prospera the Indigo.
In this map, I feel like I finally hit one form design and presentation ideas that I continued to carry forward in future maps. Absent from this map is the Trojan fortress sublevel while the overlapping garden path connecting the eastern and western portions of the map as added in. I found the multicolor overlay of the previous representation of overlapping elements too difficult to parse through at the table. Overall, I found the updated map a success. To this day, I generally keep to annual map revitalization when I can.
Spurred on by the passage of another year of play and the defeat of the agents of Prospera the Indigo, a new Level 1 was drawn up. A big part of changes in the map was caused by the interruption and failure of the rituals of these occult operatives. This lead to the most drastic alternations occurring in the southwestern section of the map.
This final Level 1 map is not as finished as the last few. One reason was I wanted to start creating a blue sketchbook dedicated solely to the “Seclusium of Prospero the Blue” and the environs there around. All my previous maps and keys were in the catch-all sketchbooks I carried with me all the time. The fact that not long after this map’s creation that I started thinking about a change in campaigns that lead to the Twilight Age also played into the lack of polish present in the map.
Sailing On From Fair Cuccagna
Why did I feel this need to move on from Cuccagna? As much I as touted the megadungeon campaign as a “good enough” form in my last newsletter, this idea is not a rigid dogma for continuing something at all costs. What Fools These Adventurers Be had developed some flaws in execution that were beginning to cause a breakdown in the enterprise that made it unfulfilling as a DM.
One of those flaws was that I had a hard time maintaining the feel of the campaign. I greatly enjoy the works of Shakespeare, appreciated classics like the Inferno or telling of the tales of Charlemagne’s Paladins, and grew up on myth. That said, my improvisational instincts cut to towards more modern milieus and anchor points. On top of that, certain reoccurring thematic elements I have trouble avoiding felt like they were overrunning ones more grounded in the inspirational aesthetics of the campaign.
Are these issues inherently campaign-ending issues? To some, probably not. For me, I strongly believed in the spirit of Miranda’s initial posts. They provided a fantasy setting distinctly different than popular ones in gaming drawn from Tolkien and Sword & Sorcery yet functioned off of concepts even more deeply ingrained in American culture that the setting and its tone were easy for players to fall into. Even if I was unsatisfied with my execution now, I felt like it was a setting I would want to spend time in at some point. I didn’t want to wear Cuccagna’s concepts out while I wandered off into a campaign with a widely divergent tone and aesthetic.
The other key issue was one of dungeon design. The player characters spend almost all of the three years they explored “The Seclusium of Prospero the Blue” in Level 1 of the dungeon. They became so engaged with the dynamics on that level that they rarely wanted to travel deeper. At the same time, they would talk about frustrations around the incredibly slow growth of their player characters in levels and in wealth.
It could be easy to write such issues of as something at fault with the player base’s choices but I don’t believe that to be the case. I feel like I didn’t do much to make exploration of lower levels compelling to them. There were few obviously enticing egresses down further into the megadungeon. NPCs and factions didn’t often entice deeper exploration and in fact generally drove the players interest in the opposite direction.
My focus on dungeon design followed along these lines. The Level 1 maps, as shown above, were revisited four times. Level 2’s map was revisited once. Level 3 was only drawn once with a key written right on to the map. I never develop deeper levels beyond simple notes insight have general ideas for the first five levels before they bottle necked at a gate into Hell.
Sure, I could have embraced attempting to reframe the players’ interests or running with my natural instincts rather than the explicit tone of the setting. Instead, it felt like time to take a second go at constructing a megadungeon. This time in a setting that was a sandbox filled with the core concepts that my gaming imagination liked to dwell upon. That is how I left the paradise of Cuccagna and traveled into the Twilight Age.
I went…Into the Megadungeon
Since you all last heard from me, I was on a podcast. In fact, I would guess a large portion of you reading this now discovered the newsletter through the conversation I had with Ben. For those that didn’t find me there and haven’t listened, I highly recommend doing so. We discuss dungeon factions, why megadungeon games are the only kind of games I want to run, why I think large player bases are important to the form, and more. You can listen in these places:
This newsletter owes its existence to that interview. It is true that I had been thinking about making something about how to run megadungeons for some time. The serendipitous experiences of doing that episode with Ben, working on #dungeon23, and reading those e-zines from Kevin Huizenga’s patreon I mentioned last time all worked together to create a vision of how I could start working on the long simmering project that you are now reading the second installment of.
Until Next Time
Before we leave Cuccagna for good, I will share a few things from that campaign I scanned for this post that didn’t made the cut. In addition, I want to talk about a zine Ben wrote that is a part of his September Sale that has been a key tool in the Twilight Age game. Lastly, want to talk about a megadungeon-focused reading recommendation I got from Skullboy. See you all soon!
Great story! Megadungeon campaigns are their own fascinating creatures. This makes me think more about the importance of tone in helping to hold a megadungeon campaign together.
I have a failed megadungeon campaign story as well -
We started playing in June of 2019, I was hoping to show some 5e players what an AD&D megadungeon campaign was like. We stuck to Castle Hochheim and the sprawling dungeon beneath it for about 4 month before the campaign turned toward exploring the world (and politics) outside the dungeon. The PCs still head back on occasion, but they're far busier dealing with the machinations of factions that have sunk the kingdom wherein the game is set into a civil war. Maybe someday, I should write the tale.
I'd still like to run/play a pure megadungeon game, but for now, I have Hochheim and it's players to keep my occupied.