Sick-bed ruminations: Troglodytes, Grimlocks and the Deep Sea.

Hey all, I'm back from the land of the groaning, hacking, bed-bound and incapacitated, only to find new readers, and kindly accolades from Tim over at Gothridge Manor! Thanks everyone, for all the kind thoughts!

Prior to starting this blog, another heartfelt project of mine was to develop a detailed megadungeon based on the wonderful How to Host a Dungeon by Tony Dowler. Having tried out the game (which blew my mind, oh yes it did), I started work on a new dungeon from scratch, writing a very detailed history of each phase, and adding to my section map as I went:

This is turn 6 of the Age of Monsters- as you can see, my dungeon looks, well, rather COMPLEX. It is also, in my view, bloody awesome- utterly full of potential- but this is just one dungeon, and not by any measure the best that might be formulated. Take it from me- if megadungeons are your thing, pay the small fee for Tony's wonderful game- I cannot recommend it highly enough, really...

Well, with one thing and another, Greyhawk sucked me in again, and I decided to learn from the masters before working up my own megadungeon, and thus settled upon this scheme instead of one of the others I'd had in mind. I've been, however, pondering the lowest depths of the Lonesome Hill Dungeon, where my errant PC's might soon go exploring, and the underground sea there that awaits further fleshing-out by a determined DM (still no guesses as to LHD's real identity, anyone? What if I said it has ELEVEN LEVELS?), and I began to consider a contested shoreline, where the local troglodytes plot against the more plentiful Grimlocks of this DEEP SEA, and the various travails of the subterrene races in my How to Host a Dungeon game came back to me. The deep, progressive history which that system unveils is SO evocative to me- the dungeon, too, can be like ancient Troy- layer upon layer upon forgotten layer. Perhaps the Mesa Verde style cliff-dwellings that the Grimlocks call home on those darkened shores are the ruined fragments of another, forgotten and mind-bogglingly ancient subterranean city? What priceless treasures might the half-bestial Grimlocks unwittingly possess? And so on, and on ad infinitum...

As you can see, my own megadungeons are haunting me still- but an unexpected bonus has been the rigging-together of a bunch of other wonderful megadungeons. Where does one stop and the next begin? Are there links in the underdark between Castle Greyhawk and all of these other locales? How do I stave off gamer A.D.D, in the end, and stick to my guns? I guess I'll have to just plug away at sublevels, tacking on pieces of the grand tapestry here and there as I go. It seems that the Lake Geneva campaign , for instance, was well equipped for dealing with wandering DM attentions- any new idea was apparently jury-rigged into the campaign as it went a long. So the GAME is the thing- in this case, my Monday night game. I have my group, and need only throw all my energies into rolling out a great campaign for them, week by week. Very, very exciting.   :)