Fashionably Late to the Megadungeon Party

I've given it some thought, and today I finally feel inspired enough to participate in the room-a-day megadungeon challenge. Yes, it means I am two months and a week behind schedule, but I'd rather be inspired and have a late start than uninspired and on time.

I prefer to have a strategy with any undertaking, and my strategy will be this:

• I'll start with a concept: the dungeon of Castle Greyauk.
• It will be a funhouse dungeon, a fungeon.
• At first, I will map it with early published random dungeon generators e.g., 1e AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (Appendix A, pp. 169-173).
• I'll stock it partly randomly, partly not-randomly.
• Gradually, I'll replace the use of the published random dungeon generators with one of my own for comparison.
• Throughout, I will plant the seeds of the main theme and underlying Secret Themes.
• It will be system neutral, but I might include stats for several different RPGs (Thieves' World-style).
• Later, I just might publish it.

A plan so crazy, it just might work...

The Scope of the Megadungeon

Sean McCoy of Mothership fame has proposed a daily exercise called #Dungeon23. As he originally tweeted (in part) on 5 December 2022, "Megadungeon for 2023. 12 levels. 365 rooms. One room a day. Keep it all in a journal." One of his tips is, "Don’t overthink it. Don’t make a grand plan, just sit down each day and focus on writing a good dungeon room." That's my first stumbling block: Don't overthink it. I don't think I'm capable of not overthinking it. I need to know who made it, what function it serves (and perhaps what function it was originally intended to serve), where it is located, when it was built, how it was built, how adventurers will learn of its existence, and what is supposed to be there that will motivate adventurers to explore it. All of this information is essential to my design, but the advice is "Don't overthink it. Don't make a grand plan..." Without a grand plan, however, it will likely end up being a nonsensical funhouse dungeon, which is fine if that's your objective, but if that's the extent of your ambition, why bother to chart it in advance? Why not stock the dungeon as play progresses rather than wasting time on scores of rooms the player characters may never visit? You could devise the floorplan the same way, just barely ahead of their light source. You could even do it randomly via the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide (Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation, pp. 169-173).

Of course someone like me will create a grand plan. That's where I find my motivation to create an environment for adventure. For exploration to be worthwhile, there must be reasons for things. There must be patterns that can be discerned by those who are observant. There must be facts that can be deduced by those with intelligence. Everything flows from purpose. Without a grand plan to guide my design, I might as well generate the entire dungeon with a click of the mouse.

This is not to discourage anyone who enjoys funhouse dungeons from creating their own fungeon one room at a time. This just speaks of my own inability to participate. Even if I can accept the funhouse aspect of it, I still need to rationalize why it exists the way it does, which leads me to the classic answer: mad archmages. Nearly anything that defies logic can be attributed to the whims of insane spellcasters. This might be a good excuse to revisit my old satirical setting, The World of Greyauk. Perhaps it is time to think about finally designing that megadungeon beneath Castle Greyauk...

Setting Nomenclature II, or, More Dumb Names for Campaign Worlds

Previously, I mentioned the name change of one of my more recent settings (wherein The Sundered Land became Some Dread Land). Now I would like to describe the folly of my earliest campaign worlds.

Murdundia (q.v.) was, I believe, my first original setting for Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike most role-playing fantasy settings, it reflected a monotheistic culture to make better use of paladins, clerics, demons, and devils. I think the name itself might have been inspired by "Mundania," the nonmagical land in the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony, but there the similiarity ended. "It's the world of... uh... Murdundia."

Cyclica was a setting dominated by a vast, circular megalopolis reminiscent of Constantinople and Lankhmar, but far more orderly. It was the only significant city in the known world, and the rest of civilization was feudal. I created the world of Cyclica as a setting for the adventures of a player character who was a saint, which was a class that appeared in DRAGON Magazine and was strictly intended for non-player characters. (Ludicrous, I know. We were junior high school students at the time, so that's our excuse.) "Cyclica" was meant to evoke the idea of a circular structure expanding gradually, but it always sounded contrived.

The World of Greyauk was my most detailed setting, a parody of a certain popular campaign world complete with sophomoric puns. I even ran an adventure at Gen Con set in Greyauk when I was a high school student. And I still have the world map and the adventure and the pregens! Greyauk is just, well, silly.

[Edit: Greyauk was originally called something else, and something else again.]