Three levels down
So far the D&D mega-dungeon campaign has been running pretty smoothly. For those who missed the earlier posts, this campaign is a fairly straightforward one featuring a dangerous, multi-level dungeon buried deep between the ruins of a destroyed manse. The local community has suffered the deprivations of the dungeon's inhabitants for years, and now the heroes are there to clean house.
There's seven players, but I've decided to limit the table to four each gaming session. With two sessions a month, everybody gets a chance (with one person getting two chances, a privilege I rotate around the group).
We are on the third level of the dungeon, with the group just having hit level three. The engineer in me (I won't use the hackneyed and callous "OCD" joke) has each level having enough XP in encounters in it to advance the group a single level. The downside is that sometimes the group has skipped encounters, etc. so the bookkeeping still has to be done.
The other thing I'm doing is creating certain "themes" to each level, using along two characteristics, factions, etc. In the first level, a small tribe of goblins had been infected by the zombie virus (yes, I know that there is no zombie virus in D&D--they are just juicy magically animated corpses, but this is my universe and I wanted Night of the Living Dead zombies). So the party was navigating two groups--goblins and zombie goblins (zomblins, as they were called by the group. They were led by a zombogre) which were actually fighting each other. Level two didn't have this dynamic, partially because the XP gap between 2 and 3 is so small. The third level has gnolls and demons, this time working together as a result of weird romance between a succubus and a divinely-gifted gnoll leader.
The two-theme paradigm allows for some diversity and character to each level without it getting overly complicated for the players. I may have to mix it up to keep it fresh, but for now it is a nice way to structure things, and the game is, as I said before, moving very smoothly.
And yes, I'm already thinking about the next campaign...
There's seven players, but I've decided to limit the table to four each gaming session. With two sessions a month, everybody gets a chance (with one person getting two chances, a privilege I rotate around the group).
We are on the third level of the dungeon, with the group just having hit level three. The engineer in me (I won't use the hackneyed and callous "OCD" joke) has each level having enough XP in encounters in it to advance the group a single level. The downside is that sometimes the group has skipped encounters, etc. so the bookkeeping still has to be done.
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| Which way to go? |
The other thing I'm doing is creating certain "themes" to each level, using along two characteristics, factions, etc. In the first level, a small tribe of goblins had been infected by the zombie virus (yes, I know that there is no zombie virus in D&D--they are just juicy magically animated corpses, but this is my universe and I wanted Night of the Living Dead zombies). So the party was navigating two groups--goblins and zombie goblins (zomblins, as they were called by the group. They were led by a zombogre) which were actually fighting each other. Level two didn't have this dynamic, partially because the XP gap between 2 and 3 is so small. The third level has gnolls and demons, this time working together as a result of weird romance between a succubus and a divinely-gifted gnoll leader.
The two-theme paradigm allows for some diversity and character to each level without it getting overly complicated for the players. I may have to mix it up to keep it fresh, but for now it is a nice way to structure things, and the game is, as I said before, moving very smoothly.
And yes, I'm already thinking about the next campaign...
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