The PCs will soon be entering their first “Megadungeon”. And I want to emphasize how dangerous this environment is - not by throwing them into meatgrinder fights, but by having them come across the remains of earlier adventurers who died horribly. And I could use some suggestions from others!
Here are the rules:
First, describe the scene - whatever the PCs are seeing.
Second, describe what actually happened in case the PCs investigate and make some successful skill rolls, use divinatory magic, and so forth. Here is an example:
1. The PCs come across a chain mail which has seen some battle damage but is largely intact, as well as the blade of a handaxe. Both are covered by a thin green-white residue. Searching further, they come across a belt buckle and a small number of coins, all of which are likewise covered in residue.
(A gelatinous cube came across the body of an adventurer, digested everything organic, and left the metal parts behind.)
I like imagining whatever traps are waiting have gotten a few people. Have a massive spider lair? Leaved a husk of an adventurer outside with an antivenom potion in their bag.
Adapted from one of the best dungeons I’ve ever come up with and run:
The entrance is marked “You will never find what you are looking for”. Ideally, the players believe some macguffin is deep inside.
Inside the entrance, the walls are unadorned, solid, black. There are no lights. It is pitch black inside, and whatever lights the players bring don’t seem to illuminate as much as they should. It’s also freezing cold. It quickly becomes a maze of hallways, rooms, stairways, and intersections of all the same cold, black. They may find the frozen remains of previous adventurers that entered. They don’t look like they died from violence. Just exposure to the cold, and maybe starvation.
Have the players map it themselves, and slowly make the layout make less sense. Have hallways loop back into what should be another room. Turn around to go back to the big room, and they find a small round room instead. And always the freezing cold gnaws at them.
The mechanic is
spoiler
You will, literally, never find what you are looking for. If you are looking for the treasure, you’ll find endless rooms and halls instead.
This rule has more fun side effects. If the players decide to turn around and go back to the exit, they won’t find it.
If the players split up, and then decide to regroup? They can’t find each other
Leave tokens behind to mark your path? They’ll disappear.
In my game when I ran this, they found a very large spiral staircase that went down farther than they could see. They spent some time walking down, looking for the bottom, and of course they didn’t find it. They decided to turn around and go back up, but per the rules of this place they didn’t find it. One of the players said “Fuck it. I have feather fall. Let’s jump.” They fell for so long, and it wasn’t until their goal changed of “let’s see if we can grab a landing??” that the bottom appeared.
The other clue my players got was they found a survivor from the antagonist’s party that had gone ahead of them, and he said that the antagonist had just spent the whole time asking them a lot of personal questions. Where did you grow up? Where did you learn to read? What was your favorite toy? The trick there was to distract them from the actual dungeon, so they would walk without seeking anything.
If the characters walk without looking for anything in particular, it will cycle through a bunch of rooms and eventually take them to the heart.
(Yes, this was heavily inspired by House of Leaves)
The players had a blast with it. I was so proud of them that they figured it out.
Behind a shattered door, the adventurers find a tent, bags of gear, smouldering fireplace, and smell roasting mutton. It seems abandoned only seconds ago, but on closer inspection the tent is mouldering, the gear mostly rusted through, and the fireplace only ancient charcoal.
(A party of adventurers passed through 20 years before, and were ambushed and dragged off to be eaten in the dead of night. Their ghosts remain, giving a semblance of life to the camp as they relive their final moments)
For anyone wondering about the photo, I believe this is the Catacombes underneath Paris. I visited it 2 weeks ago, it really looks like this. I am fairly sure this is a really photo.
A classic is extremely lifelike statues but they’re a bit mangled and have horrified expressions on their faces. Upon further investigation it’s not statues, it’s people that fought something like a basilisk that has the ability to petrify. Drop in wherever feels right for the target creature.
A large room with several exits. Bright torches illuminate several doors and the players see a large corridor with several pillars leading out of the room. In the middle of the room, the players find the inscription carved into a stone: “I am trapped in this room and cannot find an exit”
Adventurers come across a couple skeletons covered in what looks like a small, brown blanket.
Upon investigation, the blanket is a solid object that does not easily move, and doesn’t bend. It is made of rusted metal.
Previous adventurers succumbed to a nasty Heat-Metal spell trap or cast from an enemy, which melted their metal armor over top of them.
