There was a post on Facebook (cess pit that it is) that I found really inspirational. Here's a screenshot so you don't ritually defile yourself by going there.
It's a node-based megadungeon. It looks sprawling!
They clarified that each node was 4-5 rooms large. If you have 54 nodes and 5 rooms a node, that's 270 rooms. That feels solidly megadungeon level--past the point of "Is Pluto a planet?" and "Oh yeah, that's Mars."
KJ Davies of the In My Campaign blog has been working on similar projects since 2014. A storied career, with many blog posts, ideas, and dungeon design to support their work! Check out their last nodal megadungeon! (Each level doesn't seem quite complete to me, but they're what His Majesty the Worm would call a dungeon seed - a jumping off point to be fully mapped, Meatgrindered, and filled with monsters and treasures.)
Gus exchanged some of his own nodal megadungeon ideas with KJ Davies, and even did this cool picture of their dungeon:
[SIDEBAR] As has been said, blogs create ruins. I'm so glad that these ruins from 2014 are still around for me to crawl through! It also just goes to show you how many people want the thing you're making but can't find you. Marketing isn't efficient, but it's an attempt to connect the author with the audience. I wish I had found them sooner! [/SIDEBAR]
I said when I was writing Worm that writing a megadungeon isn't hard (I still hold by that statement): it was just making a series of atomic choices.
Some things are atoms. (And everybody thought atoms were the smallest thing imaginable, until scientists hit them with a hammer in 1932 and a lot of like, quarks and neutrons and shit fell out.) But the more I work on megadungeon design, the more I understand that we don't want atoms. We want elements. That's what we make things out of.
In the Worm Discord, we've had this concept dungeon quilts. Not a dungeon in toto, but a patch that could be sewn into it--drag and drop it in wherever. Nodal megadungeon design is parallel development to this concept.
A dungeon node / dungeon patch of 4-5 themed rooms is an element that is usable.
It resonates with Sean McCoy's advice to write rooms in pairs:
You can think of these rooms as sequels and prequels to the rooms you’ve already come up with. Setups and punch lines.
Writing in pairs builds connectivity and halves the amount of work you have to do.
This gets you in the mindset inherently of connecting your spaces rather than thinking of a dungeon as like thirty different themed rooms. Once you start doing this it’s hard to stop.
It resonates with what Gus talked about in his Jaquaysing article:
By breaking down even a small dungeon into these kinds of nodes, and limiting their connections, players can better understand the space, and the designer can better imagine it, creating rational connections between the keyed locations that allow for more complex play rather than a sort of directionless ramble. With larger dungeons shortcuts and alternate entrances become more important, either as ways to quickly get to unexplored areas or to change the direction that the party approaches certain obstacles from. Faction territories can be logically delineated by choke points or defensible areas, disrupted by secret passages.
By way of example, let me break down one of the levels from The Castle Automatic:
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| Art by Guy Pradel |
This is the Sanctum of Swords, one of five levels of the Castle Automatic. It's not a huge level: only 18 rooms. But you can think of it as a series of discrete nodes.
- Purple: The Black Oil Heart (which powers the mechanisms in the level) and surrounding trapped rooms. An entrance to the level. Underground.
- Teal: The lair of Pimple the Vampiric Torturer and surrounding rooms. A guarded exit from the underground section of the level to the above ground section.
- Honestly, the distinction between purple and teal is a little arbitrary on my part. This could also be an 8 room patch--an underground section.
- Red: Four rooms connected by a theme of a moat flowing into an underground river.
- Yellow: The Court of Swords, including all the noble NPCs (and the boss of the level, the King of Swords).
- Purple: A mirror portal connects room 201 (current level) to room 101 (entrance level).
- Teal: There's a trap door in the ceiling of room 209 that connects to room 310.
- Red: The moat leads to room 311 if you solve the riddles of the Moat Twins.
- Yellow: This node has multiple exits--doors to the Threshold Tower, doors to the Palace of Pentacles, and unlockable mirror portal in another level that teleports adventurers into room 215.
The level is cohesive, but is also chunked into discrete clusters of themed rooms. The map could be rearranged in any pattern the excellent Guy Pradel wished as long as those nodes were kept together. The Meatgrinder (overloaded encounter table) ties the level together thematically, even though many of the patches have different environmental details and dungeon construction.
Having conceptualized this more fully, I issue this challenge: Write your dungeons in 4-5 room elemental building blocks.
- Start with a kernel of a good idea. One of the things your dungeon needs: a reason to explore, a reason to talk, a reason to run away, etc.
- Build out 2-3 rooms around this core idea.
- Connect an intentionally blank room to it. This blank will be filled by the dungeon assembler. They can either repurpose it into a lore room or make a connection to another patch using it--a lever that opens a door in another area, an idol with empty eye sockets that activates when gems from level 5 are placed into it, etc.
- Put a gate that intentionally connects to another level (not just a door to another patch).
- Give your patch an evocative name: The Pit of Pain, the Tomb of the Clown Prince, Lift of the Condemned, Wyrm-Hole.
