D-3: Introductions and planning
Hello to any readers! This blog is going to serve as my way of organizing my thoughts and leaving behind a record as I work on the Dungeon23 communal homebrew challenge, however much I achieve. Since I'm planning on primarily mapping on paper, I'm not necessarily going to be sharing detailed images of every room, let alone a complete dungeon jpg. This is more where I'll put in some description, thoughts, musings and brainstorms as I work my way through this.
I hope I'll have an entry covering every day, but I know I won't post every day; at least frequently I'll have bigger posts covering multiple days. Also, I will try to maintain the goal of designing 1 room a day, but life happens, so I may miss a day and then do two rooms the next day, etc. And I won't stop myself from designing an extra room on a day if I'm in a groove or if it makes sense to work on a pair together. But I'm not going to work too far ahead, both in the spirit of the thing and because I always want to stop when I have new ideas I'm excited about, so it's easier to keep momentum going.
Inspiration and sources
- theangrygm.com - particularly the "Megadungeon Monday" series. Although I wish he'd continue on that series, because it was pure gold (especially for this project), there's frankly so much there that it's basically complete for our purposes. The dungeon he was building isn't 'finished,' that's mostly because he did such a thorough job showing his design process he didn't need to continue building out the dungeon for examples.
- thealexandrian.net - particularly the "jaquaying the dungeon" series (behind the hyperlink). Although I want to follow the letter of the design, where we work on a subsequently lower level each month, I don't want the dungeon to "play" linearly, where the PCs clear a floor, then go down to the next one in a predictable way. This is going to make design a little more complex, since the PCs are going to be returning to floors at a few different levels. Oh well. It's not like I can't fix mistakes later, or even just make mistakes - I doubt this is ever going to be published, after all.
- r/Dungeon23 - I'll probably mostly be a lurker here, but this seems like it will be a good community to keep a finger in and see how other people are doing, both for inspiration and motivation. I expect you found this blog through there, welcome!
About me
I'm the kind of person who both is totally drawn to do something like this and really shouldn't. I'm a long time roleplayer. My first rule system was 3.0, back in 2000, but before that my brother and I would play RPGs that we'd just make up as we go (also shoutout to the kids on the bus and the afterschool programs who introduced me to TTRPGs). I've played and/or run games (mostly the latter; forever-GM type) in D&D 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder 1, Savage Worlds, Cypher, Fate, D&D 5E, PbtA, Pathfinder 2e, and probably a few others I've forgotten.
I'm currently a PhD candidate who needs to focus primarily on getting his thesis proposal accepted and then planning and conducting his fieldwork by the end of 2023. And I've also got a wonderful little girl who will turn 2 shortly before the end of this project. Plus about a dozen other hobbies I can never find enough time to work on, and I do need to make more time to take care of my own physical health and my family. So this seems like an excellent project to take on!
I'm also currently running two games: a weekly(ish) PF2e 1-20 adventure for five players (about 1.5 yrs in, currently lvl9), and a fortnightly(ish) PbtA (Root RPG) adventure for three players, about four months in. Next month I'm also starting a PF2e campaign as a player for my first time, which I'm very excited about. Should I play a gnoll fighter or a Taralu dwarven druid?
By the way, if you know me personally, I'd love if you read this and follow along... but also I'd recommend not following along, if you're at all interested in playing this dungeon some day, since I'm certainly going to be spoiling things (after all, the fact that it's a whole big dungeon is a spoiler on its own!). Kind of stinks I suppose, but that's the GM's curse-unable to talk about the cool things they're designing with the people who are most interested to hear about them.
Planning things: system and structure
I know I'm going to be designing 365 rooms and 12 levels (we'll talk about what that really means when the designing starts). But what kind of adventure is it going to be? Obviously a site-based exploration heavy game, but how will it fit into the rules set?
Incidentally, I'm going to be designing for PF2. It's the rules set that makes sense in a dungeon-delving game that I'm currently most excited about. Obviously a lot of this is system agnostic, but a lot is going to depend on the rules I've chosen. For example, in theory you could adapt this to D&D 5E or whatever follows it, but you'd probably have to tweak encounter balance, frequency, and things like distribution of magic items in treasure: PF2e assumes a much higher-magic fantasy, with magic items an important part of your character's advancement compared to 5E. Which is all to say, I'm unapologetically building for the system I'd like to run this in, but feel free to take and adapt as you'd like, with appropriate caveats!
How many levels?
This is something I'd like to know right off the bat: what level range is this going to be appropriate for? PF2e makes this a little simple for us: it always takes 1,000 xp to reach the next level, which you can get by defeating 25 enemies which are at your party's level. So how many enemies will be in this dungeon?
Per the core book, a "moderate" encounter is worth 80 xp (2 at-level enemies or one at level + 2), an extreme encounter is double that, a trivial is half that. So I assume the average encounter will be moderate for the party when I expect them to find it. If there's an encounter in all 365 rooms, the party would earn (365 * 80 =) 29,200 xp over the whole dungeon, i.e. they'd finish it at level 29. That's both not what we want and not possible under the rules as published.
Of course, one encounter in every room is also super dense, which is both going to make it hard to believe in this dungeon as a real place, and quite a slog to get through. Playing around with the numbers, I find that if 1/2 of rooms have an encounter, worth an average of 80 XP, the party will get to level 14 by the end. This works out really nicely for what I have in mind: among other things, it means that certain potential final bosses I have in mind (ancient dragons, demiliches) will still remain very challenging but technically beatable.
It also means that there's plenty of space to give them extra xp without messing up the challenge level too much: after all, if the final boss is a L18 ancient dragon, if they face it at L14 they might win, but if they find every possible thing they can which gives them xp and end up at L16, they'll be better prepared to face the dragon but still challenged. Note that it isn't only combat which gives xp; discoveries or achieving goals should be rewarded with xp as well. So we don't need a combat in every other room to meet our goal.
But also, only half the rooms being empty of encounters is too few, I think: the dungeon will feel two dense. Note that I tried only having an encounter in 1/3 of the rooms, but that only gets the party to L9, which is lower than I want to build to. So this means our 365 rooms doesn't count featureless corridors and other 'connective tissue' which I don't expect or want an encounter in. So those are going to have to be designed as part of the rooms they connect to, meaning I can't use them as filler when I'm having a non-creative day. Good to know.
Gating
Because I don't want to just use the very early D&D style of having 1 level of advancement on each floor, after which the party finds the stairs down, levels up, and faces the next level one floor down, the players are going to have to be walking right past areas that are too high-leveled for them. To a degree that's ok, but I don't want them feeling like billiards, trying to find how they can safely proceed through trial-and-error as they constantly run from too-high encounters (or worse, try to face encounters that are just a little too high too often, burn through resources and then get killed by a trivial encounter).
So we need to have ways to show the players higher-level areas without them being able to get to them yet. Some of this can happen via *vaguely handwaves at in-world story* like finding keys or otherwise changing things in the dungeon to change their access. But there are also plenty of physical obstacles which can divert them in other directions. But the nice thing about magic is it gives plenty of ways to get past physical obstacles! So I need to know at what point a party can reasonably magic their own way around different types of obstacles, so they serve as good gates up until those levels. This means I need to do an inventory of PF2e magic to see when the party gets access to certain powers.
Here's what I found:
- Invisible objects: 3 (See invisibility)
- Someone needs a swim speed: 3 (Animal form)
- Vertical heights for someone: 3 (Spider climb; also a handful of ancestries get climb speeds from level 1)
- Water breathing: 3 (Water breathing)
- Crossing water surface: 3 (Water walk)
- Anyone needs a swim speed: 5 (Feet to fins)
- Vertical heights for anyone: 5 (Levitate)
- Someone needs to fly: 6 (Angelic wings)
- Someone needs LOS teleport: 7 (Dimension door)
- Non-airtight closures: 7 (Gaseous form)
- Anyone/everyone needs to fly: 7 (Air walk, Fly, Aerial form)
- Stone obstacles: 7 (Stone shape)
- Someone needs teleport to a known location out of LOS: 9 (Dimension door, heightened)
- Language barrier: 9 (Tongues)
- Water which needs to be removed, not just passed through: 9 (Control water)
- Walls less than 10 ft thick: 9 (Passwall)
- Anyone/everyone needs to teleport without LOS: 11 (Teleport)
- Changing planes of existence: 13 (Plane shift)
- Any walls: 13 (Ethereal jaunt)
This doesn't mean that will be able to get past those obstacles at those levels, just that some parties can. Obviously a top-level spell slot or scroll may be a big use of resources, so the obstacles aren't nothing at those levels. Also note that I'll need to give parties a way to get past these gates at the appropriate level, or maybe a little later (to reward prepared parties).
Finally, skill-based 'keys' are reasonably easy in Pathfinder 2e, specifically locks and dispel magic. You need a certain proficiency level to bypass certain types of locks, so certain types of locks at best become pickable at:
- Expert: 3
- Master: 7
- Legendary:15
For dispel magic, you can never dispel an effect more than 3 (spell) levels higher, and without a critical success, you can't dispel an effect more than 1 (spell) level higher. So most magical gates should probably be dispellable with a crit success a little early as a bonus, but with a regular success 'on time,' or a little before they'd find the 'key' anyway.
Final thoughts
Ok, this was a lot more writing and time than I will usually do for this. I've got lots more ideas for this planning stage, but I'll try to write about them tomorrow. Have a great day, and let's get building!
-R
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