This thread is a thought experiment (though my instincts already tell me something like it has been done many times before.)

What if you played a campaign that was entirely inside one dungeon. You are born there, and start adventuring at level 1, and the campaign continues until you're level 20+, and retire there. In addition to monsters to kill and loot to steal, there were places to rest, shops to trade from, sages to get advice from, patrons to give you new missions, areas that spawn new monsters, ancient masters to teach techniques, areas that are closed off until you power up enough, ways for types of monsters to get stronger, intelligent factions making moves against your resting areas, clues to follow, status to jockey for in the safe areas, factions setting traps, ways to carve out new rooms and stock them, etc. In other words, everything that would normally be associated with a campaign exists in the dungeon. Everything in this dungeon changes.

As you can guess this is really about making a hex crawling game with lots of interactivity between locations, but if you're interested, let's jot down things that could go into an "infinite dungeon" and how they might interact with each other.

Two things:


The Japanese RPG Meikyuu Kingdom has a setting that suffered from a "Dungeon Catastrophe" which turned the whole world into one dungeon, with cities and kingdoms and all.


I don't know where I found this image but I feel that is has something to do with the topic at hand...

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;935670Two things:


The Japanese RPG Meikyuu Kingdom has a setting that suffered from a "Dungeon Catastrophe" which turned the whole world into one dungeon, with cities and kingdoms and all.


I don't know where I found this image but I feel that is has something to do with the topic at hand...

I wanted Meikyuu, did they ever come out with a translated version?

I think this could be terrific. All megadungeons live or die based on the creativity of the DM and the energy and pro-active play style of the players. But, the reason why dungeons 'work' as a rpg setting is that they provide a setting that can be explored as a series of concrete choices as to where you go and what you do. This makes them well tuned to the dynamic of a table-top game. Of course people roleplay in lots of other settings, but there are more ambiguities as to what you can or can't do or where you can or can't go at any given moment. Some groups can role with that and play effectively in a more free-form non-dungeon setting. But may bog down and effectively have to be told what to do. And 598,854,834 published adventure path modules later, players are basically passive consumers of table top games rather than pro-active decision makers. It is ironic, but true, that the supposedly monotonous dungeon crawl - well handled - is probably a better vehicle for player-led games of exploration and adventure. So, removing the window dressing and making the game exclusively about that makes perfect sense.

Just don't burden the world with a new rules set - we already have 50 frillion of those already, and they are all basically the same. This sort of project should be pursued as a campaign setting for some existing game that people already like to play.

Quote from: Larsdangly;935709I think this could be terrific. All megadungeons live or die based on the creativity of the DM and the energy and pro-active play style of the players. But, the reason why dungeons 'work' as a rpg setting is that they provide a setting that can be explored as a series of concrete choices as to where you go and what you do. This makes them well tuned to the dynamic of a table-top game. Of course people roleplay in lots of other settings, but there are more ambiguities as to what you can or can't do or where you can or can't go at any given moment. Some groups can role with that and play effectively in a more free-form non-dungeon setting. But may bog down and effectively have to be told what to do. And 598,854,834 published adventure path modules later, players are basically passive consumers of table top games rather than pro-active decision makers. It is ironic, but true, that the supposedly monotonous dungeon crawl - well handled - is probably a better vehicle for player-led games of exploration and adventure. So, removing the window dressing and making the game exclusively about that makes perfect sense.

Just don't burden the world with a new rules set - we already have 50 frillion of those already, and they are all basically the same. This sort of project should be pursued as a campaign setting for some existing game that people already like to play.

Actually, I'm making a hex crawl / sandbox game thinking "how can I make these rules as clear as a dungeon crawl?" (Once the rules are in place, people can creatively deviate from from.) But I'm doing this thought experiment coming from the opposite angle, "how can I make a dungeon crawl as expansive as a sandbox campaign?" My point of departure is the players and GM are on opposite sides of a hex map, but instead of plopping down a monster a la dungeon crawl, he plops down a faction - which remains invisible to the PC's until the ripple effects of its actions spark an investigation. The biggest different to me between a sandbox campaign and a dungeon crawl, from this perspective, is that you can see the monsters in the dungeon crawl. In a sandbox campaign, the players can't see the factions, which are making moves off camera, so the designer needs a find a way to emulate those moves with as little book keeping as possible.

Those are actually the biggest issues, "seeing" and book keeping. So, the big advantage of coming at this problem from the other side (infinite dungeon) is I only have to worry about the book keeping issue. And it's a serious issue, because its insane to have each monster, faction, village making individual moves WITH NO BOARD TO TRACK THEM - since most of it happens where the PC's can't see it. You need just enough to give a sense of things happening beyond PC instigation that can be quickly jotted in a notebook. The apparent solution is fewer but bigger changes, and certain things which are always assumed to be happening: travelers moving between areas, news spreading, etc.

Sorry, I am making a new rules set. But I suppose if the structure I'm creating works then its can be translated to an OSR setting. But I want my spells and skills to be tailored to the kind of structure I'm making, and I don't feel like squeezing them into a system not designed for it.

But there's no reason that system can't be extracted and used in another game after it's created.

I'm in the finishing stages of a kind of similar project, where I basically laid out rules that are structurally similar to a tactical combat game (melee) but apply in concrete ways at all different scales of play (e.g., a campaign week, a combat round, or an hour of outdoor exploring all have similar kinds of trade offs of action and movement; menus of actions; etc.). As you suggest, the idea is not to force everyone to be a robot. The idea is that if you make all these different parts of the game actually work like a game, people will be more engaged because they get to make concrete decisions instead of just listening to the DM tell them what to do. Anyway, I think it is actually quite good (and I've written enough bad games to feel I can tell the difference!).

Quote from: Larsdangly;935793I'm in the finishing stages of a kind of similar project, where I basically laid out rules that are structurally similar to a tactical combat game (melee) but apply in concrete ways at all different scales of play (e.g., a campaign week, a combat round, or an hour of outdoor exploring all have similar kinds of trade offs of action and movement; menus of actions; etc.). As you suggest, the idea is not to force everyone to be a robot. The idea is that if you make all these different parts of the game actually work like a game, people will be more engaged because they get to make concrete decisions instead of just listening to the DM tell them what to do. Anyway, I think it is actually quite good (and I've written enough bad games to feel I can tell the difference!).

I'm curious to see what you come up with. Stars Without Number's faction system seems cool at first glance, but it doesn't have enough vertical connections between the off-camera faction mini game and the players. All you get is one little paragraph basically saying "things that factions do show up as rumors or nightly news." For my taste I'd want to see much more than that.

Would love to see both these games.  It sounds almost like the could be system independent because what you are really doing is developing an infrastructure to tract these things and how they relate.  

Was hoping this was an infinite dungeon thread, been working on one for a living megadungeon world and ways to have it make "logical" sense.  Think I'm there.  Also to make it a "zero-prep" dungeon.

Make it an infinite dungeon thread. Let's do the thought experiment! Post your weird ideas, now that folks know why I brought it up.

Quote from: Ashakyre;935794I'm curious to see what you come up with. Stars Without Number's faction system seems cool at first glance, but it doesn't have enough vertical connections between the off-camera faction mini game and the players. All you get is one little paragraph basically saying "things that factions do show up as rumors or nightly news." For my taste I'd want to see much more than that.

Thanks; my intention is to post it online for free and offer it through Lulu at cost so interested people can check it out. The basic design concept is that it stitches together a personal combat system closely similar to Melee/Wizard, with a skirmish and mass combat system (same system with different scale) that is basically derived from the Panzergrenadier board game rules, with a campaign game treatment inspired by En Garde!, and a treatment of economics that is sort of like a mash up of Classic Traveller and En Garde and 1E D&D. I'm sure it sounds like a cobbled together nightmare but I actually spent a lot of effort to make the monster's stitches invisible, and large parts of it are pretty well play tested. So, hope springs eternal. Another thing: I really wanted play to have lots of things going on, but characters to be pretty simple. There is no skill system or any of that hooie - you have a half dozen stats and a social level and that is it; anything you are good at or bad at is cooked into those numbers, and the rest is things that emerge through player choices.

There's no sun. Much like the bottom of the sea, organisms in the dungeon would derive nutrients from volcanic activity in the lower levels of the dungeon. Creatures get bigger and more densely packed the farther down you go.

The idea reminds me a bit of Philip Jose Farmer's round robin series The Dungeon.

In my home setting there's a pocket universe that's pretty much nothing but a vast 3-dimensional pile. Like a low-tech version of 40K's Necromunda hive city (and a bit of Gaiman's Neverwhere). There are steady locations but when exploring beyond those I use random tables to roll up features... chasms, bridges, mazes, caverns, arcane machinery. The place has its own reality though so I make no attempts at making it 'realistic'... it's a sub-urban Wonderland, but can still generally be dealt with in a somewhat rational way.

Condensation collects on the dungeon ceilings, and falls like rain in heavy droplets.

You can have weather in your dungeon.

Isn't this similar to what you have with Metamorphosis Alpha (different genre, of course)?

Isn't that basically Belly of the Beast, which is currently one of the top sellers on Drivethru?