Baby First Dungeon!

hey, I'm about to run my first ever dungeon in my campaign, whats some stuff i should have? regardless of level, system, or mechanics.

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I've never been a big fan of big dungeons. Things always take longer than you expect, and dungeons with more than a couple dozen rooms can grind on forever. Personally, I like to pick a theme and build around it. What was the dungeon in the first place and what is it being used for now? Just off the top of my head...

Maybe it was originally a shrine / base of operations for a militaristic cult that was abandoned after new construction hit an underground river and flooded significant portions of the dungeon. Now, a whole host of nasty critters have laired there, but the main force at play is a tribe of troglodytes who have grown increasingly bold in raiding the surrounding countryside for plunder and food. In addition to livestock, they have a handful of peasants housed in cages, awaiting the slaughter.

The main threat to the troglodytes is a giant slug, which they carefully avoid. It blocks access to the deeper, more sacred parts of the shrine, where, past armored double doors, undead and magical traps protect the relics of the cult. This is where the true treasure lies.

As for the cult, it was locked in a secret war with a holy order, which sought to eradicate it. The flooding came at an inopportune time for the cult, when it was beset and could not leave itself exposed. Thus, it abandoned the flooding shrine, intending to return with greater forces to reclaim their base. But before that could happen, the holy order decimated their ranks, leaving the survivors to scatter and hide themselves among the populace. But a handful of cultists still reside in a nearby town and keep an eye on the area. They will likely try to ambush the weary PCs, when they depart from the dungeon with their riches.

So at this point, the dungeon pretty much populates itself.

The fact that you're even using dungeons leads me to believe you'd be interested in OSR.
In that case, you need Wander Monster tables (to penalize poor time management) and traps that act like puzzles.

Normally I'd refer you to /osrg/, but some blowback from /pfg/ stirred everyone up and we spent half the thread bickering over a chariot axle, so...
maybe wait 'til the current /osrg/ dies to go check it out?

Print it out and use paper to hide the rooms. Don't expect cartographer players.

>I've never been a big fan of big dungeons. Things always take longer than you expect, and dungeons with more than a couple dozen rooms can grind on forever.

Ya know, the point of a bighugemcmegadungeon isn't to spend a million hours clearing all those rooms, the point is that it's TOO BIG to clear and explore. So finding treasure is actually a challenge, something you have to think creatively to do, not something you automatically are expected to get by grinding through rooms 1-100 and inspecting every stone.

I'm not saying you HAVE to like big dungeons, but I am saying that there is a wrong way to do big dungeons, and it sounds like you have experienced big dungeons done wrong.

This, basically. I used to like small dungeons that a party could clear up in a single session, but nowadays I prefer throwing really big ones at them to get lost in.

If different sections/levels of a larger dungeon are suitably different, that's fine. Running smaller dungeons lets folks feel like they've completed/conquered a dungeon more frequently, so it never feels like they're treading water, but that's a relatively minor concern compared to making things interestingly different over time.

This is also true. Whenever my party steps into an entirely different ecosystem in a megadungeon, their first instinct is usually freak out that they're totally lost.

That sort of an effect can't be maintained if all the dungeons are the same.

Where's the map from, by the way?

This. Imagine how boring the Metroid games would have been if they were all Upper Crateria.