How the fuck do I make a megadungeon...

How the fuck do I make a megadungeon? I've tried three separate times but it just feels hollow and disjointed and I end up hating everything about it and just scrapping the whole thing and starting over.

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creightonbroadhurst.com/dungeon-design-megadungeon-design/
tonydowler.com/projects/how-to-host-a-dungeon/
howtohostadungeon.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_Host_a_Dungeon_Wiki
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/53006207/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioleaching
muvluv.wikia.com/wiki/BETA#BETA_Hives
muvluv.wikia.com/wiki/G-Elements
cnc.wikia.com/wiki/Tiberium
youtube.com/watch?v=XWgc20zbRXk
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

>but it just feels hollow and disjointed
that's clear indication you're doing it right

> make dungeon
RAILROADING

Gotta have a reason for the Megadungeon and for there to be people running it.

>Google
>angrygm
>megadungeon
fwiw

>How the fuck do I make a megadungeon?
It's called a city. Just make it underground.

Start with what your mega-dungeon is.

Is it an abandoned city?
Who lived there? What did their culture feature? What was the city famous for? Why was it abandoned? What creatures can live here now? What dangers other than creatures are there?

Is it a city of monster race?
Again, what's their culture? What's there in their city, what's their economy based on? What places affected by past historical events are there?

Is it just a huge dungeon?
Who built it? For what purpose? Does it still serve it? What's happened to it in these years?

Try first thinking of a purpose and then go crazy with the implications.
Like say you are making a megadungeon prison. You of course need cells and guards, who need to be fed, so you need a kitchen district, which means you need to get food, which means you have a inner farm and livestock, and now that you have food, vermin come in, so you get animals to hunt them, you need something to control their population, so you get a bigger animal to control them,etc, etc.

Don't make a megadungeon.

Make the upper levels and run them for your players for two or three sessions. Drop random scenery elements (wall carvings, paintings, architectural features), items (books, famous artifacts, weapons with a cultural element) and creatures in there.

Listen to your players speculate and see how they deal with various creatures and situations. In between sessions, have a think about how the creatures behave when the PCs aren't there. If the players killed off all but three of the goblins, will they stick around? Run away? Get eaten by the minotaur who will wear their heads as trophies?

Use the players' thoughts and the remaining monsters as inspiration to design the next couple of levels. Think about how things change as they get deeper underground.

Keep rolling from there.

I don't know how you would make a megadungeon. Apparently you have very specific tastes. Maybe you should reflect on what you are looking for in the dungeon.

Write your own program to draw it.

This. I ran a campaign based on Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup once. Thousands of adventurers had entered the dungeon, given up hope of finding their way back out, and started several cities down there. It was the most mega megadungeon

Are you starting with a history?

Read this: creightonbroadhurst.com/dungeon-design-megadungeon-design/

There is a solo mini game pdf and I can't remember the ducking name. But basically you roll events every year throughout history of your suburb to build the back story. It was really cool.

ohhh boy, you need a lot of money for that.

What is your dungeon tax policy?

How to Host a Dungeon:
tonydowler.com/projects/how-to-host-a-dungeon/

howtohostadungeon.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_Host_a_Dungeon_Wiki

The less serious approach you take, the better the results. Average megadungeon, to be successful, should contain pulp elements to the brim of it. Entry levels containing animals, then low level monsters, then serious shit, then dinosaurs, then remains of Atlantis, then a military bunker, then dinosaurs, then shit straight from Verne, then monsters again... and let's not forget about all sorts of weird civilisation, usually in the middle of going through their own post-apo. And all of it peppered by strange locations and phenomenas that most often serve no purpose at all, but are just a filler.

tl;dr - megadungeon can be either pulp as fuck, or fucking boring.

Bless you user

Look out for the food in the mid-level commissary.

Make a dwarven fortress. Mark off what every room does. Now, ruin it. Add monsters. Add tunelling monsters that dig new passages. Try to define territories for these monsters. Add entire new rooms if goblins or other semi-intelligent creatures are present.

Alternatively, just assume someone built the dungeon on purpose, a la tomb of horrors, but bigger.

I've never made one, and I've only ever considered making two.

The first was an underdark dwarven city built in a natural cavern. It had a big, well-defended gate, and a smaller secondary gate behind that one, with an area in between where travelers could stay without entering the main city. It had a big open plaza which was a communal meeting area and hosted a bazaar. On the roof of the cavern above the bazaar was a tunnel that went alllll the way straight up to the surface and exited on a high frozen mountainside. There were various neighborhoods, isolated pocket cavern sectors in the walls, tower complexes built from the floor to the roof and connected with walkways, a sewer, running water from a dammed lake at the top of the cavern (it was kinda bean shaped, with one end being higher up than the other; lake was just past the higher end) that had a stream going through every home at least some of the time and thus providing running water. The higher up the city you went form the gate, the higher up the social ladder you went, with the palace being up near the lake (which had fish, btw, and was regularly cleansed by priest magic before being let down to the city). There was a prison that was kinda below the palace, with it's own quarry that the prisoners dug and cut for use in the city. At the end of the sewers under the lower part of the city, the water drained into a waterfall into some vast vertical cave to who knows where. There were mines, foundries (with smoke tunnels that all eventually led to the surface somewhere), guard/military strongholds here and there throughout the city, a museum (with dinosaur and other monstrous skeletons on display that miners had found), a mages guild/college, etc etc etc

Of course it had all fallen and was occupied by various creatures and races who fought and scavenged over the various sections of the city, with a bigass dragon owning the palace and all the delicious dwarf gold.

the second was many dungeons all secretly connected by hidden portals that some bbeg strung together for some reason I never got around to figuring out, but I wanted the pc's to do a bunch of dungeons

How about making it self-replicating?
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/53006207/
>A conclave of evil wizards gives birth to a self-replicating dungeon deep within the earth
>The dungeon grows day by day as rooms beget rooms
>In time, the whole planet may become one giant dungeon

Every day, many adventurers go inside to cut off and burn parts of it, trying to stave off its growth. They are actually encouraged to go full murderhobo inside. Entire catacombs worth of prisioners were forced to go inside and simply wreck havock

It leeches off raw materials from the earth itself, even gold and silver for treasures. There are entire cities dedicated to supporting the adventurers and exploiting what they bring from it. This loot includes unique alchemic compounds, useful body parts and magic crystals. It has to be carefully cleansed, which is a service charged by clerics.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioleaching
muvluv.wikia.com/wiki/BETA#BETA_Hives
muvluv.wikia.com/wiki/G-Elements
cnc.wikia.com/wiki/Tiberium

No one knows how far it has spread, but there are openings in lands across the eastern sea.

There are cults worshipping the dungeon as a god or a means of selecting the worthy for some sort of paradise. Some also think it is a challenge to thin out the ones able to survive some sort of Ragnarok.

Honestly, some of the most fun I've had in rpgs was in dungeons. I think it's just become a meme among more recent roleplayers that dungeon crawling is bad, old and tired because they play systems which do not support it and it's cool to be as "non-grog" as possible

youtube.com/watch?v=XWgc20zbRXk
Not strictly Veeky Forums, but the EC Baldur's Gate vids could actually be pretty helpful for you.

>Extra Credits
>Meme Helium Man's first point can literally be shortened to "not every place is Mordor"
>the dungeon should have a merchant right next to it for convenient selling no matter how relevant logistics might be to your approach to the dungeon; he just stands next to a dungeon that could have dangerous creatures moving in and out of it (if they're sentient and need sustenance, then they will) and has just enough money on his person to peddle the crap you find inside
>place overpowered guards at the start
>EC doesn't know Invisibility, 15 ft. exists, that an insistent player will simply bypass the shitty gatekeep unless you railroad him into it
>OP wants a megadungeon where characters will literally live in for a while, parcelling it layer by layer
>better slap a massive gatekeep right at the start for no reason rather than giving the players the ability to inch in at their own leisure and comfort
>in next video he sets up this entire point about traps as if Durlag's Tower fucking invented them and they didn't happen before
>when Cloakwood, that you already had to probably go through to stand a chance in Durlag's, is even more of a trap fiesta, so he contradicts his point about it being a "veteran" venture

I listened to that guy's retarded voice for two videos just to get mad. I knew I would get mad because he's an expert in regurgigating obvious info and inventing dumb shit.

Durlag's great, but not for any of the reasons that cretin is talking about. As usual with EC. And many of the issues he talks about are *too* entrenched in the video game realm, like the merchant.

Thank me later

Those