2015-02-06 New Campaign

Harald is leaving and his two Mystara campaigns are closing down. I’ll be taking up referee duties and I’ll be running the Castle of the Mad Archmage. I want to run a real megadungeon! All my campaigns go through the classic Basic/Expert phases: The first few levels my players explore the nearby dungeons but soon enough they start exploring the wilderness, meddle in local government, find portals and powerful planejumping magic and end up doing Planescape stuff. This time I announced that I’d be interested in running a megadungeon (one player to another player: “like Diablo!”) and so I started looking at my collection:

Castle of the Mad Archmage

Stonehell was deemed too simple
Rappan Athuk had beautiful illustrations and was well liked
Darkness Beneath got people interested because multiple authors means a lot of variation; I think it lost out in the end because I said I liked the upper levels very much but couldn’t say much about the lower levels
Castle Whiterock was looking good except I said I would have to “convert” stuff from D&D 3.5 to classic D&D; people didn’t want to add to my workload, I think
Castle of the Mad Archmage was picked because I said it was going to be a funhouse dungeon

Stonehell

Rappan Athuk

Darkness Beneath

Castle Whiterock

Castle of the Mad Archmage

I recommend the author’s blog, Greyhawk Grognard, and his megadungeon posts in particular.

Greyhawk Grognard

his megadungeon posts

☯

So, the megadungeon as a campaign tent-pole is what I’ll be using. And, as Joseph says, players are “just as free to poke around in the local town or city, hie off into the wilderness, or explore smaller dungeons”.

megadungeon as a campaign tent-pole

I quickly whipped up a random wilderness using my Text Mapper using the Gnomeyland Map Icons by Gregory B. MacKenzie. This is what it looks like:

Text Mapper

Gnomeyland Map Icons by Gregory B. MacKenzie

https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/16271169809_9b96084a24_z.jpg

*My Regional Map.*

https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/16271169809_9b96084a24_z.jpg

Regional Map

I posted it on a new campaign wiki called Greyheim.

Greyheim

I spent a bit more time detailing the city:

https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/16269720738_3ddf1b8507_z.jpg

*The surroundings of Greyheim.*

https://alexschroeder.ch/pics/16269720738_3ddf1b8507_z.jpg

Greyheim

I used An Echo Resounding to add some extra ruins, lairs, towns and resources in the map. Who knows, maybe these will come in handy—here I’m hoping that this kind of preparation will allow me to improvise. Elves acting like jerks? They must be in league with *Aredhel*. That kind of thing.

An Echo Resounding

I printed the map out and used little color stickers to mark the locations in questions. I don’t need to add it all to the map just yet.

☯

I also printed twenty random level 1 characters using my Halberds n’ Helmets Character Generator. My plan is to run this a bit like a funnel: These are the twenty characters available, pick some, go. Your replacement characters and henchmen will all come from the same pile.

Halberds n’ Helmets Character Generator

#RPG #Old School #Megadungeons

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

⁂

If it’s of interest Barrowmaze Complete will be available shortly.

– greg 2015-02-06 20:04 UTC