Monday, September 27, 2010

Just How Big is a Campaign Dungeon?

-- Potential Players better stay the hell away from this post --

I've started work stocking Nightwick Abbey and I'm a bit worried that the maps are two small.  I've cribbed them entirely from Paratime design because my graduate school life style affords me little time to draw bigass maps.  I'm going to distort all of them in various places, opening levels up more, adding a few more stairs, that sort of thing.

Here are the maps that serve as the basis first three levels.

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Do ya'll think it's too small?  I'm a bit worried that anything bigger might take too much time to stock.

Thoughts?

Edit: Here is the source for the maps http://paratime.ca/  The owner has them up for free so I hope it is ok for me to post them.

EDIT: I removed the maps because even though I increased their size and heavily edited them, the layouts here could have provided potential players with information.

8 comments:

  1. Wow, great maps! Definitely not too small! Most groups I've played in average about 30-45 minutes per room. Some rooms take much longer, some much shorter, but this is a good average for a well paced game in my experience.

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  2. I should note that I didn't make them. They're from the excellent Paratime Design website. I tried to make that clear in the post. They just happen to be the ones that best fit with my concept of the campaign dungeon. I'll be changing quite a bit in actual play.

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  3. "Big enough" = "one room bigger than your PCs will ever explore." :)

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  4. The campaign I'm playing in has spent 8 3-4 hour sessions in parts of upper levels of Stonehell (maybe to L3? not really clear the way the thing is designed). That's a megadungeon, obviously, but from what I understand Curtis took as his scope for each level 4 8.5" x 11" pages of graph paper. From what I mapped, it seems to be of similar density to your plans above. I can tell you that after 8 sessions, the first few of which was exploring mostly empty rooms, and the second half was just running battles and finding entries to deeper levels we were afraid to pursue, we ended up mapping half a page of "Level 1" and 2 pages of "Level 2 (or 3)". So after, say, 28 hours of gaming we covered maybe the equivalent of what you're showing above or less. My guess is that you have a good start, and if the party moves faster, you'll have time to ramp things up, either with more rooms, encounters, traps, fear, tension, and so on.

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  5. It depends on what's in those rooms. I would say go with what you have and wing it. If you don't have a lot of time to figure things out, calculate xp and so on, you can always add-on an extension if advancement is taking too long, conveniently attached by an unnoticed super-secret door they just happened to find the map to in the last normal dungeon room they explored... Or there are always the side quests, town adventures, nearby smaller lairs and so forth to provide a good diversion.

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  6. Those are nice maps. The main reason to go bigger is if you're going to have a significant proportion of empty rooms. Empty rooms are a big deal in some schools of megadungeon design; they cause the focus to be a bit more on exploration, they build suspense, and they give space to maneuver when things go wrong.

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  7. I've decided to increase the size by combining several maps. Each one is about twice as big now, if not more.

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  8. Sounds perfect.

    I've been reading Mike Curtis' Archive of the Rotted Moon blog, as well as Beedo's session reports in the Dragonsfoot campaign journals forum; both are kicking around Stonehell, and it's neat seeing them navigate around that big ol' place.

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