Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[sablemage]

Due to the preferences of my player group and the fact I never know which ones will turn up at any given session, I'm thinking of running a Savage Worlds megadungeon - 6 or more levels, dozens of rooms per level - as my next campaign.

Any advice or pointers from people who've done that please?

[robert4818]

[chillburn]

I would recommend that you DON'T map the whole thing out.
Instead do something like a series of branching possibilities that occur as the group moves around. It's kind of cheating (the dungeon gets built as the group moves through it), but it prevents a lot of dead time (if group turns left, when all the really interesting stuff was mapped out to the right).

Of course it's critical that you never tell the group this information as it will completely wreck their motivation to explore. Even consider having some fake/extra dungeon maps around for any prying eyes that happen to glance over the GM screen.

Oh, and this is an awesome resource:
http://davesmapper.com/
http://www.1km1kt.net/geomorph/
http://www.velvet-edge.com/RisusMonkeyMap.html
Just google "rpg geomorph" to find others.[/u]

[Timon]

I have not done this, but I have seen some good advice from those that have converted classic D&D megadungeons like the Temple of Elemental Evil for SW. Blusponge is very knowledgeable on D&D to SW conversions, so a polite PM would probably net you some useful advice and materials.

1. Get the Fantasy Companion. It is not in my opinion the best companion, but it has a lot of the heavy lifting for magic items, traps etc. already done.

2. Pacing of encounters in a module is very different for SW. D&D needs to feed treasure and encounters to players in order to level them up sufficiently. SW does not. Many classic dungeon crawls therefore have "padding" encounters that do not add much to the experience, but provide the needed XP and magic items.
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[Zadmar]

On the subject of traps, there was some pretty good discussion here and here.

[Snate56]

Just a thought, you might get some of these;
http://paizo.com/gameMastery/itemPacks
Lots of beautiful art, these are very inspirational. You must still come up with stats however, they only depict the item and perhaps it's materials.



SteveN
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"We've got a blind date with destiny... and it looks like she's ordered the lobster." <The Shoveller>

[sablemage]

Thanks everyone, some good food for thought there!

[VonDan]

In the middle of the dungeon have them find a casino with a theater. The show is "lets make a dungeon deal" and behind curtain 3 is a red dragon
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[chugosh]

My biggest piece of advice would be to make it something other than fantasy.

Science fiction lends itself well to the idea, but so would post apocalyptic survival.

A giant star liner or battleship, derelict in space. Survivors of the original crew and the boarding forces are still wandering around fighting each other and any interlopers like the characters.

A supermegamall teeming with rival gangs of mutants, zombies, rats and the occasional cleaning robot.

Either works well with a flow chart sort of map layout. Broken walkways, sections exposed to space (or acid rain for the mall) and other obstacles make a direct route impossible.

[Jordan Peacock]

I've done variations on this sort of setup with varying degrees of success. A few random thoughts on a fantasy dungeon in Savage Worlds, for the sake of brainstorming:

1) I recommend actually working out the map ahead of time. If you are making it up as you go, there are too many "tells" that can give away your game. I've been on the player side of a "make-it-up dungeon" and once the players clued in (largely due to the GM's over-use of "irony" and "gotcha"-isms) it lost a bit of the magic, and any illusion of self-determination.

Even if you don't do it to intricate detail, at least work out the map and some super-rough ideas for what might be in each room. There's always a certain amount of "winging it" that's inherent to the business of running an RPG, but I would find it better to have a list of ideas and names and descriptors ahead of time -- that in a worst-case scenario I could simply CHANGE on the fly -- than to have a blank sheet in front of me when it's time to play.


2) Have locations relate to each other. You can tell a "story" of sorts by details that link locations and encounters together, even if ultimately all the heroes are doing is exploring a maze, fighting monsters, and getting loot. How detailed or sloppy it is depends upon your time, inclination, and inspiration, but even little touches can make it more "real" for the players.

The old convention of having a "dungeon" be a random assortment of rooms with odd monsters who DO NOTHING BUT SIT IN THEIR ROOM AND WAIT FOR ADVENTURERS TO VISIT struck me as a bit silly. You could give some thought to the "ecology" of the dungeon -- what preys on what -- and in the case of unliving enemies (golems, animated statues, zombies, etc.), why they ended up there in the first place (e.g., created to guard something, or perhaps dead adventurers in a room with a cursed relic that causes anyone who dies nearby to rise as a flesh-craving zombie in 24 hours).

If it's a cavern, perhaps there's a stream that disappears into a crack in one wall, but if the heroes visit another chamber, they'll find out where the stream comes back out again (and if they killed some monster "upstream," maybe its blood or ichor or whatever is coloring the water coming through).

If there's something in a room that makes NOISE, the heroes might be able to hear it in a connecting chamber. Or perhaps there are tracks that could give a hint of the roaming patterns of wandering monsters, or the occasional dead body of a monster (perhaps the creatures here don't "play nice" with each other), hinting at something bigger and tougher than it nearby.


3) Since you don't have Combat Ratings or Challenge Levels or such to carefully scale all encounters to the heroes, make sure the heroes have a chance to run away, or to see what they're getting into before they commit themselves. As with the above, it could be by giving them "foreshadowing" of what encounters might be nearby.

Someone with Tracking or Survival might be able to guess what sort of critter lives nearby, and that character could even get a rough idea of the creature's stats (to abstractly represent his knowledge of the dangers of such things). Someone with Knowledge (Occult/Arcana) on the other hand would be the go-to person for knowledge about magical entities and undead. If the heroes have more to go by, and can make educated choices about what challenges to take on, the lack of "fair" and "balanced" encounters isn't such a big deal; the heroes can take the burden on themselves (and might just wisely decide to AVOID some of the encounters -- especially if there's no decent treasure to be had for their trouble).


4) Figure out a few other uses for dead monsters, other than "XP" (because heroes don't get XP for killing monsters). Not all monsters necessarily have treasure, but in D&D and such, at least you'd get the *experience* for defeating them. If the point of the game is fighting monsters, and not all the monsters make sense to be hoarding shiny gold things, there can be other rewards. For example:

a) Maybe their eggs, hides, meat, etc., can be harvested and sold. The remains of the monster ARE the "treasure." Someone with Survival skill might be the go-to person to know how to properly skin a creature for the best value on its hide, etc.

b) Or, the above have in-game properties of use to the heroes. Perhaps the leather hide of a particular creature could be used (with the relevant skill or a bit of money to hire a professional) to make some superior leather armor that weighs less than usual. Or, rare magical creatures might yield "material components" that can be used up in lieu of Power Points to cast spells.

c) Or, hey, maybe you could capture and tame a monster and eventually train a pet.


5) If it's all about fabulous treasure and such, make sure there's something interesting the heroes can spend it on, back in town. Maybe it's possible to buy "superior" types of weapons or armor (weighs less, slight bonus, etc.). Or, maybe it's possible that the heroes could have other goals to amass money for. Quizzing the players to see what sorts of "personal goals" their heroes might have would be a good idea, too. E.g.:

a) Buy a land and title! For a couple cart-loads of gold and silver, you could buy the barony, and now instead of being Grimdark the Terrible, you are known as LORD Grimdark the Terrible! ;D You even get your own coat of arms!

b) For wizards, perhaps build your own "wizard's tower," and your own personal library, and get a +1 bonus to Kn (Arcana) rolls made back in town, and the right to use the "Investigate" skill to try to look up information on that monster you had to bypass or run away from on your last trip to the dungeon.

c) Lackeys for hire! Henchmen might be available for hire back in town (and prices go up if you LOSE any henchmen during your adventures). As Extras, they probably can't help much in battle, but it can be awfully handy to have a henchman who helps you carry your loot (avoiding encumbrance penalties) and who can spend an action to hand you a potion or pass you your spear so you don't have to waste time in combat fumbling around for it yourself. And at the very least, he's got an extra set of eyes to spot ambushes.


6) Come up with descriptions for things, so it's not just a bunch of plain stone rooms. If you can't describe them, find some pictures to print off of some neat stuff, so you can say, "THIS is what it looks like!" Even features with no functional effect on the area can help to flesh things out and make it worth "exploring."

Maybe these ruined "dungeons" are but a small remnant of an ancient subterranean lizard-man kingdom destroyed by a cataclysmic spell and accompanying earthquake. Some areas could be natural caves, only partly excavated to serve as chambers, so you could have ice-cold cavern streams, mineral-colored pools, bubbling hot-springs, majestic stalagmite and stalactite structures, patches of luminescent moss or glowing crystals, the giant skeleton of some ancient prehistoric behemoth that was fossilized and partially exposed by the erosion of the caves, etc. In the "ruined lizard city" area, there might be enchanted fountains that still work, broken dinosaur-like statuary, incomplete mosaics (someone stole the shiniest stones) that hint at the history of the doomed kingdom, post-cataclysm mass-burial chambers with elaborate death-masks that have outlasted the bones once interred here, a carved bridge over a howling chasm, a "gallery" of musical glowing crystals, a lava room that was once used as a furnace or weapon forge, a magic mirror that lets one survey various odd parts of the kingdom (but only if you can speak "lizard-man" and know the names of the regions it can show you), etc.

And, of course, since you don't want to have to map an ENTIRE UNDERGROUND CITY, passages end in impassable rubble where necessary.


7) If you're using miniatures, and the layout gets too big to represent on a single table, make a "mini-map." That is, I've often made a smaller-scale representation of the area the heroes are exploring, with markers to show their relative location, and then I'd break out a "battle map" for the immediate room being explored and/or fought in. This I found to be a lot more practical than trying to cover the entire table in dungeon tiles.


8 ) I prefer "expendable" magic items, or those with very incidental features, as an alternative to overly focusing on yet another "magic sword" or piece of "magic armor." Potions (magical power effect stored in a bottle), scrolls (allows a spellcaster to cast the indicated spell using his own skill, even if he doesn't know the power, with Power Points already stored), one-use amulets of protection (grants you a free Soak roll!), magic sharpening stones (grants you a temporary damage bonus to a weapon), etc. One reason I like "expendables" so much is that if they're too "generous" ... eventually they'll be used up and gone anyway.
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[Snate56]

Thanks a lot, Jordan, now I want to run a @#$$&# dungeon!


SteveN
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"We've got a blind date with destiny... and it looks like she's ordered the lobster." <The Shoveller>

[sablemage]

Thanks Jordan - good stuff...