Alright. So now
we have an idea of what our setting might be like.Through this process, we drew a sideview of our dungeon complex (as it stands now anyway - we might modify that sideview later if the elements we come up with don't "lock" into each other neatly of if there's a piece we didn't think about that's glaringly missing with hindsight):
And we have a key that describes the elements we have on this sideview:
(0a) The Hive
(0b) The Aarakocra Aviaries
(1a) The Mines of the Ash-Kadaï
(2a) The Ashen Court
(2b) Tombs of the Builders
(3) The Smoldering Theatre
(1b) The Trogodyte settlement ruins
(4) Ponds of the Fish Men
(4a) Sunken Ziggurat of Ankhepoth
(5) Temple of the Hand
(6) The Market Place
(6a) The Fortress Gate of the Duergar
(1c) The Brigands' Hideout
As I mentioned earlier, I mostly came up with these names out of thin air, because they sounded cool at the moment, or I just thought "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we had the duergar there?" That's the extent of my brainstorm on this, along with the consideration of the types of different entrances to the dungeon that informed what these levels might be like (the ruined tower with the brigand's hideout, the troglodyte habitations and the mines above).
Names suggest a lot of things. Nothing beats a cool name as a jumping off point. As a matter of fact, I'm willing to bet that each and every single one of us reading that list instantly started to imagine what the levels and setting might be like, and what they might contain, just by reflex. That's our imagination and logic taking over and instinctively filling in the blanks : "Oh, the Smoldering Theatre, what's that? Is that a level filled with smoke and stuff? Why a "theatre"? That sounds interesting!"
As the guy coming up with this megadungeon, I use this exact same reflex to structure the ideas afterwards and from there, shaping these instinctive ideas like I beat the crap out of bars of raw iron to reveal the blade that's been hiding there all along. I let the whole thing simmer for a while, dip it into water and let it sit in the back of my mind for a while, so that both my imagination and my logic fit the pieces into each other and break them down for the next few days.
Maybe I'll write a bit of an idea on a sheet of paper once in a while. Maybe I'll just think "hey, that might be a cool look for the fortress of the Duergar" and move on. At some point, I will sit down in front of my notebook or computer just as I'm doing right now, gather any notes I scribbled down, along with the map and key and all that stuff, and I'll just look at the whole before writing down what I think links all this stuff, as if I had "clues" to a mystery lying in front of me that I would have to solve right then and there.
Now, I usually have two ways of going about it. I either start drawing one or several dungeon levels right away and basically make sense of it as I go, writing down what I come up with for reference in later levels in case of foreshadowing elements, or ideas that might affect further developments of the environment, OR I think of a more coherent concept right away and go on to design the dungeon levels afterwards, retroactively modifying whatever I came up with on the paper as I go into the detail of what the place looks and feels like.
The point is, that’s an organic process starting from the moment you put the pencil to the page and start to draw where ideas feed into each other and everything gets smoothed out in a way as the whole takes shape. But there’s an important warning here I have to give you: don’t over design. Don’t describe absolutely everything in your dungeon environment. It should be described and populated in a comprehensive way so you can take your notes and run the damn thing (that’s the whole point here after all), but you don’t want it to become so detailed it stifles your imagination as you run the game. There’s a point after which less is more. It can vary from DM to DM, but the point still holds true generally, I think.
For the sake of this example, I’m not going to go straight to level mapping. I’m going to flesh out my ideas a little bit first.
So I look at that key and map we got. We know we have some “builders” somewhere in the history of that place. We also have people who built the troglodyte habitations on the side of the volcano, and people who dug the mines on its side as well. Are those the “Ash-Kadaï” mentioned earlier ? Perhaps these are the same people, but then, perhaps not.
I think it’d be weird to have these habitations here and the mines just next door, and also strange that these complex habitations would have been build after the existence of the mine, so I decide that the mines were dug after the habitations had long been abandoned. Maybe they are haunted by some presence, in which case it would explain the miners, whoever they are, avoided these ruins like the plague. But then maybe they came to this place because these habitations existed, and dug inside the volcano to get to a place of power while at the same time avoiding the dangers of the haunted ruins?
The brigands would have come to inhabit the tower at the foot of the volcano much later, fairly recently, since they would still be there. The tower itself could have been built by the same people who built the troglodyte forts/habitations.
I think the Builders were a race of pre-human beings that disappeared at some point during the world’s history. They built the main levels of this dungeon which were repurposed by their new inhabitants afterwards: I’m thinking of the ashen court, the tombs, the temple and the market place at the very least. Maybe something happened to them that made them degenerate over time. Maybe that’s what the Hive and/or the ashen court are: a sort of hive of mindless husks including some original builders, but also all manners of humanoids which have been repurposed by a “Queen bee” of some kind? The Aarakocras of the levels beside it might use it as a source of sustenance. Maybe the inhabitants of the mine too (inhabitants which, I am guessing, are some sort of clan of humanoids. The Ash-Kadaï could be some sort of goblinoid clan or war party; though I’m not sure what types of creatures their numbers would count quite yet).
The Smoldering Theatre could be some sort of hemicycle, or dungeon structure that surrounds and incorporates the volcano’s main conduit. If the temple was a place of study and communication with the higher beings living within the fiery depths of the volcano that would later have been understood as a religious place of some kind by more primitive creatures, then the theatre might have been some type of testing area. Some sort of jumping off point for the experiments born within the ancient laboratories of the temple. The name would come from faces, or alcoves –cameras maybe– surrounding the conduit. It would look to a primitive creature as a “theatre” indeed, with silent figures looking at the fumes choking the whole place, a place for great sacrifices the ancients, the Builders, performed for their gods perhaps? They would have thus repurposed the place and turned it into some kind of cult to their Elders, a cult where they mimic what they understand of the Builders, that is… not all that much.
This is evolving; time to pause for a little while. I’ll go on with this later on. Let me know what you think.