How would you go about making a dungeon that could very reasonably take up an entire campaign?
Super-Dungeons
Ayden Cooper
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Ryan Hill
Randomly generate a huge ass dungeon and then go through and furnish and add personality to all the rooms.
Carson Powell
I would mash some script to generate rooms & encounters ala Dungeon Crawl and run it on my phone. There would be no plot hook, just rooms upon rooms upon rooms with increasing difficulty. A social experiment how long it takes players to notice / get bored of it.
Ethan Gray
the term is mega dungeon. there are some already made.
Oliver Johnson
What this user said Check out Stonehell and Barrowmaze., and while you're at it, some old TSR modules like Keep on the Borderlands
Brayden Green
Buy Ptolus
Carson Reed
i'm in the middle of doing it... it takes SO long.
Isaac Thompson
Besides that: Check this out
thealexandrian.net
Mind that you don't need to START with a huge ass dungeon. This was a pretty common playstyle back in the day, and people mostly made as much dungeon as they needed for a session. This can be as little as 5 rooms if you spice up the dungeon properly and make each of them engaging.
A lot of people also argue up to 60% or something along those lines of a dungeon should be "empty" rooms (as in there is nothing immediately interesting there, like puzzles, traps or a keyed encounter, not literally empty) so that the dungeon doesn't start to feel like a theme park.
Counterintuitively, newer editions of D&D (meaning anything published under WotC) don't support the playstyle that well. Check out BFRPG for a game that's made to resemble TSR D&D while updating some bits and pieces to be more palatable to a modern audience, while having 90% or so still be authentic "old-school" stuff.
Also, be mindful to not develop anything "plot-wise" too much right out of the bat. You'd traditionally want players to explore and make their own stories, not stumble upon yours.
Parker Bell
>make their own stories
What does this mean exactly? The DM decides what’s in the dungeon
Josiah Sanders
The DM decides what's in the dungeon, but that does not mean he chooses what the "story" is. To OSR sensibilities, preplanning a "plot" is often a misstep, particularly since classic dungeon crawls tend to be quite high lethality and making the campaign hinge upon one character or another being alive can come back to bite you in the ass when he fails his save vs poison/death ray and is instakilled.
The role of the DM is, then, mostly to do rulings and judgement calls, and handle other aspects of the game like NPCs as organically as possible. In short you want a sandbox.