Inspired by the very informative and useful thread regarding building a MegaDungeon, I've decided to try my hand at a similar project. Being fascinated by geology and caves for a large part of my life, I'm going to tackle a sprawling cave system “dungeon”, if you will. While Benoist's excellent dungeon uses a natural feature as it's base (an extinct volcano), it has been heavily modified over the centuries by various races for various purposes. In my example, I will stick primarily to some of the natural features of cave systems, with areas modified by sentients as needed to make it interesting-er (after all, blind cave salamanders rarely have treasure for adventurers to loot).

As with other examples of dungeon design, I'm not going into this with a preconceived notion of what I want this to be, aside from interesting. As we develop the project, ideas will present themselves, and of course, everyone is free to chime in with their own – group projects are fun! Although I did take geology classes back in the day, it has been a long loooong time -  if I post anything that is incorrect, please call me on it. I'm not as mentally agile as I once was - and get off my lawn, while we're at it.

Initially, let's talk about what makes caverns. As most of you probably know, most cave systems are formed by water seeping through porous or semi-porous rocks such as limestone, slowly eroding away the solid material so that over time huge underground spaces are formed. The timescales involved are on the order of tens of thousands of years (if not longer), so this is a very long-term undertaking. Examples of cave systems that I am using for inspiration can be found all over the world.









So, the essentials for a cave complex are water, porous rock, and time. While it is possible to simply draw a cavern to suit a particular adventuring purpose, I'm going to try to stick closely to actual geology in terms of places, layout, and complexity of this MegaCavern, and then turn it in to an actual “adventuring space”, if you will (not too narrative a term I hope).

Phase One will focus on choosing a suitable location, determining the surface and underlying geography, and will include sketching out the “soft” surface details as well. Is it a forest above? A jungle, or desert? Is the cave underwater? Etc.

Phase Two will determine how the location will affect the “evolution” of the cave system, including things like types of rock, water flow, current status of the system (i.e. is it a “living” or “dead” cave, or a combination). This is where the actual cave system will begin to be mapped out. We will reference maps of existing systems as a guide, and will gain insight as to how rock structure, faults, etc. impact the current state of our caverns.

Phase Three will involve populating the caves themselves. This will include creatures or civilizations above the cave system and how they relate to it (as partially determined in Phase One), and any modifications to the caves that may have been made over time by said beings. During this phase plot hooks, interesting locations, and other things that make the caverns “adventure worthy” will be developed.

Phase Four involves everyone sending me money for this totally sweet and awesome adventuring location.

Phase Five – no, really. PayPal is fine.

Phase Six will be going back over the whole thing to determine what we missed, what we might add, and what might be able to be taken away, to make the final product a tight, interesting, and challenging setting for future exploration.

A bit of a disclaimer as well – I'm not nearly the artist that Benny is, nor do I have the 38 hours per day he apparently does to come up with all this stuff, so I'll be relying on pictures and crudely drawn maps (mostly), and I won't have 10,000 word updates every other day, but I'll try my best to keep this moving.

So, let's spelunk, shall we?

Totally! Definitely interested here!