The Fearless DM

#dnd I love multi-level dungeons. Two or three levels of 10-30 rooms each is a nice minimum for me (I know there’s something in either the 1st Ed DMG or the Holmes Basic D&D book that suggests 10 levels is a good minimum). I have built more than a few of these structures for every edition over the years, not counting the OD&D booklets. (If you count basic D&D in all of it’s forms as OD&D - which I don’t- then I guess I have covered them all).For the most part, they are never fully explored, but I think that’s ok.

The dungeon, to me, is a wonderfully surreal environment. It starts at as kind of mundane - hallways with rooms, or just caves.. or some combination..and some of them might have monsters. It all just happens to be underground.. and then suddenly you round a corner, or you descend a set of stairs, and you come across an opening to an unknowable netherworld. 

The Black Key is what I’m working on now, which is literally a dungeon in that the entire structure acts as an extradimensional prison to several mythic entities bound by a powerful sorcerer. So the deeper you descend, the more hallucinatory and surreal the place becomes. By the lower levels you will have realized that you are no longer even on earth.

I was watching the movie Videodrome the other day, and there’s this great quote that one of the creators of Videodrome relates to the James Wood character after he’s been exposed to the signal: “Your reality is already HALF video hallucination. If you’re not careful, it will become TOTAL hallucination. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.”

Right now, the first level is complete- it ended up being about 38 rooms- around 14 or 15 pages. Includes wandering monsters and I’ve written several pages of two appendixes (New Monsters and a DM Notes appendix). Onwards to level #2.

So that’s what I want for this dungeon as well- the dungeon changes people who experience it. A little more about the “story” of this dungeon in my next post.