Megadungeons

Got an Arcane Library newsletter in my inbox this morning. It was a Q&A of sorts. Found this small gem buried within it.

1. I've always wanted to make a megadungeon based on the layout of a mega mall. Could you write some thoughts on dos and don'ts with copying existing architecture for dungeon maps?

Definitely! Existing architecture is a great place to get ideas for room shapes and how areas flow together. It's also handy to note how buildings are structured around major rooms, like temples or grand halls.

However, one thing to be cautious of is having your layout be too symmetrical or utilitarian. Dungeons are supposed to be mythical places that don't always make sense. In fact, it's that surprising and unpredictable factor of a dungeon's layout that makes it fun to explore!

If a dungeon is too symmetrical, it will be too predictable as far as a game board goes. You want to make your mega mall a bit surreal, a bit nonsensical -- something that would never receive an actual building permit. You could keep some realism by making your mega mall look like it was added to several times throughout the decades, placing things in a decidedly "non-ideal" layout.

Wow. I actually didn't even emphasize the "as far as a game board goes" line; she did that herself. At the risk of sounding like a snowflake Millennial, I "can't even" with the OSR playstyle anymore. If D&D (or ShadowDark) is a board game, then yeah, we're not even talking about the same hobby that I recognize. While I admit to seeing a fair number of smug trad folks writing articles, columns, reviews and more in the 80s with their dismissal of the dungeon as a passe, childish fad who's time had come, that overzealousness faded quickly. While I often talk about one of the two mottos of 3e, "tools, not rules" the other motto was "back to the dungeon" and people have been playing that way for a long time now. In fact, if anything, truly trad play is somewhat on the outs; we have a lot of hybrid trad dungeon play, at least in the D&D and D&D-like games sphere. The official WotC campaigns, and Paizo adventure paths all strike this pose. The only truly trad stuff that I regularly see is in other games, like WFRP or Call of Cthulhu. (Although I'm sure there's plenty more out there in other games that I'm not as familiar with.)

Maybe I'm making a false distinction between trad and "hybrid trad." What I really should say, probably, is that my rejection of dungeoneering in favor of more natural types of game play that resemble 1) almost every other non-D&D or D&D-like game, and 2) almost every story in the source material that D&D is supposedly based on (and every other type of story too, for that matter) is, curiously, a somewhat radical stance, apparently. Or at least it seems to be true that few people play that way, and maybe ever have. Maybe my time outside of D&D for pretty much all of the 90s has given me a skewed view of what the RPG hobby is and how most people engage with it. One so skewed that the 25 years since hasn't completely purged me of RPG.net think. Maybe.

Before I finished typing up this post, I found this newly posted video by Professor Dungeon Master that seems to talk, albeit in somewhat different language, about the great playstyle divide, and it's longevity. It's an interesting addition to what I said, I think, and should be watched as a different take (with similar conclusions, however) on the same concept.