Getting close to lunch time and my stomach is rumbling.
Yesterday I was trying to explain my anxieties regarding Arden Vul to my wife. This is about the megadungeon with a PDF of more than 1122 pages. It’s long. The levels are long. The rooms are long. The intro is long. The explanations are long.
That means extra prep work, highlighters, and the like. This isn’t the sort of thing that runs easily at the table, because of that. And yet, there’s nothing like this on the market at all. – The Halls of Arden Vul
Compare this to Stonehell. That’s a dungeon I can run from the book without reading too much ahead. Sure, it’s less interconnected: Each level quadrant stands on its own on a page spread: map and key, all there. The room descriptions are very short.
So there’s that.
Here’s how I’d evaluate a megadungeon to run.
See how much you like reading the first 20 rooms for a first session. Does it feel like a chore? Did it take too long? Perhaps find a terser megadungeon.
See how much trouble you have, as you read it, with page flipping: You read the room. What about the neighbouring rooms? Flip to the map, find their numbers, flip back to the key, find the text, read it, check out where the monster stats are, flip there (or check some other book), and come back. Did it take too long? Perhaps find a megadungeon with better layout.
Check out the map and see how many connections to other levels and exits there are. If there are many, I like it.
Check out how much material there is for the world outside the dungeon. Did you read it? Did you read it and decide not to use it? Did you read it, decide to use some of it and created a table mapping your town names and their town names, your languages and their languages, your cultures and their cultures? Was it too much work? Perhaps find a megadungeon that doesn’t come with too much surrounding wilderness.
Also, if the wilderness is too interesting, players are constantly distracted and wonder whether they should be investigating the wilderness instead.
And finally, how do you get started? Set aside a number of hours and days you feel is fair to prep for the first session. Then spend just that time and no more, and schedule the first session. Just do it! You’ll never be 100% prepared.
In my case, I scheduled a first session and ran a 2h travel from the city through the land to the dungeon. Perhaps I should have skipped it? I didn’t feel prepared enough and wanted to seed some rumours, non-player characters, factions. I think more could have happened on the way, but it was OK. And now that we stopped just outside the dungeon, I know which entrance they are going to take (Arden Vul has so many of them…) and the exact goal they have (rescue a prisoner of the Set cultists). The goal just manifested two days ago as one of the player characters got cursed elsewhere and needed that curse removed. We chatted and I asked the player whether they felt a quest was good, maybe an Arden Vul related quest? They said yes and here we are.
Alright, I have about 1100+ pages of dungeon stuff to read. See you on the other side! 😀
#RPG #Megadungeon