I recently read an exhaustive review from 2013 by oriongates of the World’s Largest Dungeon (WLD for short, hereforth), a megadungeon released for D&D in 2004, at the height of the d20 OGL publishing era.
The product’s gimmick was that it was bigger (and more expensive) than any other dungeon of the time, and that it included every type of monster in the game. This is good advertising and bad design. Reading oriongates’ exhaustive review, it is clear that much of the size is wasted on repetitive, purposeless rooms, and that many of the monsters are shoehorned in to meet the product’s central conceit, rather than appearing because they present interesting challenges and opportunities to tell the story of the place and give the PCs compelling choices for exploration. Compare this to something like Arden Vul (more modern in publication date, more old-school in approach) where the size, shape, and populace of the dungeon is very deliberately communicating something, rather than trying to hit an external, artificial objective.
The WLD would be a mess in any system, but it is particularly ill-suited to D&D 3.5E, where monsters and magic have particularly detailed and complex abilities and mechanics. At least a B/X game could reduce this kind of enterprise to minimalist keys, in the style of Palace of the Vampire Queen. Anything in the D&D-3.5E world has to deal with huge stat blocks and include contingencies for super-powered characters.
Trying to fix this abomination is a fool’s errand. In their review, oriongates mentions trying to do so, but later giving up, and I think that’s the right call. If neither the map nor the lore nor the factions nor the NPCs are really anything to write home about, why would anyone think it was worthwhile to fix?
I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work for us.
Update (June 2025): I started writing this post (and subsequent posts about the WLD) in early 2025, and it was mostly done by the spring. It turned out to be a topical exercise, as I later learned that a crowdfunded overhaul of the the WLD is in the works, and as of writing this update, has clocked nearly $700,000. The Backerkit page is extensive, and features lavish production design and a mountain of extras. It also features a long list of contributors with extensive RPG credits.
While the product certainly looks nice, I am suspicious of language like "Massive in Every Way That Matters." The marketing still sounds very "woooah, Guinness Book of World Records!!" rather than "here's how and why this would be a compelling roleplaying experience." Sheer page count and taxonomic exhaustiveness cannot make up for what really defines a great megadungeon: a specific, gameable concept for an intriguing adventure scenario underpinned by an evocative milieu.
That said, perhaps the team behind this effort decided that such nuances of dungeon design were simply not right for what is basically get-hype marketing copy, and they will quietly fix the original WLD's many flaws behind the scenes. It will be interesting to monitor the reviews when this beast comes out and see how it does. End of Update.
So, if we were going to try to make our own WLD, we could make life easier by first starting with a smaller monster list. D&D’s bestiary in the 3.5E days was huge, and featured some really weird, niche monsters that could not logically be packed into a megadungeon. Go back to something more fundamental. Start with a classic and basic bestiary, like the OSE monster bestiary. There are 138 monsters here. That is pretty manageable.
Here’s a list of all those monsters. Look at 'em go!
- Acolyte
- Ape, White
- Bandit
- Basilisk
- Bat
- Bear
- Beetle, Giant
- Berserker
- Black Pudding
- Blink Dog
- Boar
- Brigand
- Buccaneer
- Bugbear
- Caecilia
- Camel
- Carcass Crawler
- Cat, Great
- Cave Locust
- Centaur
- Centipede, Giant
- Chimera
- Cockatrice
- Crab, Giant
- Crocodile
- Cyclops
- Dervish
- Djinni (Lesser)
- Doppelgänger
- Dragon
- Dragon Turtle
- Driver Ant
- Dryad
- Dwarf (Monster)|Dwarf
- Efreeti (Lesser)
- Elemental
- Elephant
- Elf (Monster)|Elf
- Ferret, Giant
- Fish, Giant
- Gargoyle
- Gelatinous Cube
- Ghoul
- Giant
- Gnoll
- Gnome
- Goblin
- Golem
- Gorgon
- Grey Ooze
- Green Slime
- Griffon
- Halfling (Monster)|Halfling
- Harpy
- Hawk
- Hellhound
- Herd Animal
- Hippogriff
- Hobgoblin
- Horse
- Hydra
- Insect Swarm
- Invisible Stalker (Monster)|Invisible Stalker
- Killer Bee
- Kobold
- Leech, Giant
- Living Statue
- Lizard, Giant
- Lizard Man
- Lycanthrope
- Manticore
- Mastodon
- Medium
- Medusa
- Merchant
- Merman
- Minotaur
- Mule
- Mummy
- Neanderthal (Caveman)
- Nixie
- Noble
- Nomad
- Normal Human
- Ochre Jelly
- Octopus, Giant
- Ogre
- Orc
- Owl Bear
- Pegasus
- Pirate
- Pixie
- Pterosaur
- Purple Worm
- Rat
- Rhagodessa
- Rhinoceros
- Robber Fly
- Roc
- Rock Baboon
- Rust Monster
- Salamander
- Scorpion, Giant
- Sea Serpent (Lesser)
- Shadow
- Shark
- Shrew, Giant
- Shrieker
- Skeleton
- Snake
- Spectre
- Spider, Giant
- Sprite
- Squid, Giant
- Stegosaurus
- Stirge
- Thoul
- Titanothere
- Toad, Giant
- Trader
- Treant
- Triceratops
- Troglodyte
- Troll
- Tyrannosaurus Rex
- Unicorn
- Vampire
- Veteran
- Warp Beast
- Water Termite
- Weasel, Giant
- Whale
- Wight
- Wolf
- Wraith
- Wyvern
- Yellow Mould
- Zombie
I’m going to randomly pick from this list and put it together as I go. There’s no reason to do this randomly. Randomizing it just makes this exercise more interesting. I mean I certainly don’t want to do this in alphabetical order. No “A is for ape, white as the snow; B is for bandit, after your dough…” No, no, no, absolutely not. Random it is.
#64: Killer bee. Let’s keep as much of the WLD conceit as possible and assume that this place is (or at some point in the past was) a prison. The OSE killer bees “build hives underground” (interesting) so something about this place attracted them when they were seeking a nesting site. We’ll decide what that was later. But we can definitely imagine a structure of beeswax and propolis that has repurposed and displaced parts of the original dungeon structure. This will give us a good opportunity to add some texture to the dungeon, right from the start; from oriongates’ review, it’s clear that too much of the WLD was plain gray stone.
#29: Doppelganger. The doppelgangers might be prisoners. Thracia has a good encounter with doppelgangers who have been imprisoned behind a sealed-up wall for centuries, which I suppose implied that doppelgangers are immortal and can't starve to death. Perhaps doppelgangers go into a hibernation state when no other sapient bipeds are nearby. Their cells have been covered in hive structure, but they may wake up if PCs or other people get close enough.
#82: Noble. “Powerful humans with noble titles (e.g. Count, Duke, Knight, etc.)... Squire and retainers: Accompanied by a 2nd level fighter (a squire) and up to ten 1st level fighters (retainers).” OK, I like the idea that this guy and his followers are all prisoners together. Let’s suppose our noble is a Qin Shi Huang type who has done some pretty terrible stuff. The PCs can talk to him, and he will argue that his methods were necessary to unite a kingdom that will last long after his death.
I like the idea that rather than this being a prison of unambiguously evil creatures like demons and liches, it is more like a real prison, with degrees of culpability, moral gray areas, and judgment calls on the part of the celestial jailers. The PCs will probably not find this noble to be particularly sympathetic… but they might! Or at least they may see him as someone worthy of a temporary alliance or truce.
He’s here with a cadre of true believers who volunteered to go with him into captivity. Since I already established that the doppelgangers were not near other humanoids, I’m going to put this noble and his retinue on the other side of the bees. The noble and his retinue have been stealing honey to supplement whatever sustenance is otherwise available (we’ll decide later how creatures are getting enough food to survive here). The killer bee hive provides a nice risk/reward opportunity for NPCs and players alike, since the honey can heal wounds… but the bees also, uh, kill, so it is a dangerous place as well.
#30: Dragon. We’re not messing around. Let's go right to the big guns. I agree with the WLD’s decision not to include every variety within a category of monster, so when we get these monster entries with multiple sub-types, we'll just choose one. I’ll pick randomly and get a black dragon.
This particularly rapacious dragon has been using its acid breath to slowly burrow out of its cell. The prison was designed to resist this kind of escape attempt, but its structural integrity depended in part on maintenance and monitoring from the jailers, which has since lapsed. The dragon is patient, and it has linked up a number of cells around its primary domain. Like the bees, the dragon provides a reason for the dungeon’s structure to deviate from the sensible, dull, repetitive layout one would expect of a prison. The dragon limits the killer bees’ expansion in this direction, as its scales protect it from their stings, and its acid can easily destroy their hiveworks.
#138: Zombie. There is no real reason to imprison zombies. Another complaint from oriongates' review is that there are too many monsters – particularly the undead – that celestials would just destroy, not imprison.
So we'll say the zombies were created by something else that is imprisoned here; something more dangerous. Some or perhaps all of them are former members of the noble’s nearby entourage who were killed and then zombified. We’ll figure out later who or what caused that to happen. For now, we'll place our zombies just to the east of the killer bees. They’re indifferent to the stinging insects, so they make a good buffer.
#16: Camel. From dragons and zombies to… camels. Not all the entries are going to be easy. The camels are not prisoners, and they’re also unlikely to have migrated here intentionally, like the bees did. Let’s say they were brought here by some group of prisoners – possibly our noble and his retinue. We’ll put them adjacent to the dragon’s territory. The dragon has been herding them to supplement whatever food it is getting elsewhere. Humans find them to be irascible, but they freeze like deer in the headlights when the dragon approaches.
#40: Fish, Giant. One of the oddities of old-school D&D is the extensive “unusual animal” entries. I hadn’t realized the OSE bestiary included five different types of giant fish. We’ll pick randomly again for our sub-type, and land on giant catfish. One of the issues with the WLD is that several areas of the dungeon are transparently excuses to cram in monsters who need a custom biome, and the WLD’s “water level” is one of the most conspicuous. We’ll instead presume a number of separate watery areas, several of which may also be connections between different parts of the dungeon, as good megadungeon design necessitates. Water can also help explain the breakdown of separations between dungeon areas.
We’ll say that this fish was once an ordinary catfish that was sucked into the dungeon as part of a flooding event, and later grew to its abnormal size as a result of the powerful mana suffusing the water within the dungeon. Because it is submerged except when hunting, it is safe from the killer bees, so we’ll put it next to them to form another buffer area. The noble and his entourage probably come here for water; they know to avoid the catfish.
#85: Ochre Jelly. A classic dungeon denizen that can be placed just about anywhere. Since the jelly is acid-themed, we’ll place it near the black dragon’s lair. Perhaps the jellies even originated with the dragon, gradually gaining mobility through latent dungeon magic?
#79: Mummy. We’ll put the mummy near the zombies, and posit that the mummy (whether intentionally or ambiently through its aura of uneath) is what roused them. Obviously this is another prisoner – perhaps the magic that allows it to respawn is particularly pernicious, and the celestials decided to imprison it after failing to find the canopic jar that powered its resurrection cycle. We’ll learn more about the mummy after we place a few more monsters nearby.
#74: Medusa. Gorgons are a favorite of mine. It would be easy enough to just assume this one is a prisoner, but I want to subvert expectations here. Perhaps they were contracted by the builders to help build the dungeon; after all, turning living matter into stone is a good way to supplement whatever stone you’re quarrying. This gorgon was either betrayed by the builders, or trapped here by accident. The gorgon is immortal and at least as willing to negotiate as the noble, if not more so. They can’t turn off their gaze, so they’re a dangerous ally even when attempting to work with diplomatic PCs.
Next time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Dungeon Is Wet, Tortoise Foreshadowing, and Feral Hogs on Trial
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