Quote from: Ashakyre;935645This 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.

Meikyuu Kingdom as someone else mentioned is exactly this. The PCs run one of numerous kingdoms in a world of dungeons.

Any RPG setting thats all underground like TSRs whole Underdark series and wasnt there one for dwarves too?

The System 26 version of Metamorphosis Alpha feels like it as well. Far moreso than older versions.

Also there are some massive city campaigns that are effectively open air dungeon mazes. Even one or two infinite cities.

Let's say there are different rooms spawning different kinds of monsters. How would you abstract that information to create a dynamic wandering monster table - a table that changes depending on where you are in the dungeon, taking into account the creation and destruction of monster spawning locations, and whether those monster spawning locations started producing stronger monsters? And how could you do this on the fly, quickly, with minimum bookkeeping?

It seems to me that compiling all this information into a single table that changed practically every turn would be a nightmare. What might be a simpler way?

How about this: each room (area, region, whatever) has a classification: crypt, lava pit, mystical library - you name it, and an approximate power level, 1-20, roughly corresponding to character levels. Each type classification has a single table with various monsters. At low power levels, you roll 3 dice and select the lowest. At the highest power levels, you roll 3 dice and take the highest. This gives you a 7 tiered structure off a single table. Let's say these tables already exist in the source books. (Alternatively, these tables could be broken up by power level as well.)

The GM's map lists which rooms spawn monsters, their classification and power. The likelihood of a wandering monster is determined by the number of adjacent/connected monster spawning rooms. If there is a monster, the GM chooses one room at random and rolls for a monster from that room. And that's it.

So, the tables are distributed and themselves never change. The GM has notes for each room/region/whatever and simply makes notes, as they occur, for classification, power level, whether or not it spawns monsters. A GM makes a single note on his map / room notes, and that's enough for a dynamic wandering monster tables.

Ideas? What would be a better way to do this?

I wanted and infinite "living" megadungeon and a reason that it was not already explored.  I also wanted to make this easy on myself so I can just randomly generate levels from geomoprhs as I go along.  That is I want to avoid mapping ahead of time, so thought what if it kind of "grows" as you explore it.  Things will certainly just spawn within it.  In addition, I wanted a city built up around the megadungeon that derives much of it's trade from what is pulled out of it.

So that there is always "fresh" dungeon to explore I postulate the following.  There is a chamber with multiple portal/entrances to the "dungeon."  You need a token to enter a portal.  There are millions of tokens.  Each token serves as an "address" that in combination with which portal you go through takes you to a unique dungeon.  So there are tens of millions of potential dungeons with potentially infinite levels.  They are "living" in the sense they appear to make little sense ecologically (but some as I will have a bunch of giant rats, and such, running about) or as structures with a practical purpose.  There are levels that get increasing harder.  Clearly these dungeons may be some sort of test, maze, "temple" where going through them serves some "worship" purpose, is there some higher purpose or is it just a game, entertainment for more powerful being(s)...and of course is it for the humans that go into the dungeons or the ever present rats (who I'm sure are seeking the question to the answer "42").   Lastly, only a small number of creatures can go through on each token, if you have too many, the extras go who knows where.

I'm actually worked up these tokens as millions of shards of something that was broken or broke by the humans.  Was thinking a giant piece of pottery/glass of different colors.  Different colored shards doing different things.

I also like the idea of a bureaucracy built up around the tokens,  They are cataloged, you rent them / check them out; there is an understanding that you pay a tax on finds you bring out.  There may be a market in maps, at least of features that appear commonly between dungeons (I do intend to use a lot of geomorphs after all); etc.  

I want this dungeon to be the "world" pretty much so postulate the humans are exiled / trapped here (at least the natives not the PCs who I want to gate in and out as our gaming whims dictate ).  The lands around are inhospitable.   Sentient non-humans exist across the wilderland/waste.  They come to trade for the magic, creature bits and pieces, and coin that comes out. The city used to rely on the dungeons for food, but no they have farmland hard won from the threats outside.  Of course, this human meddling with the dungeon causes troubles that are blamed on the humans, just so we have some strife outside that keeps the humans in one city pretty much.

The players can just have fun worth this, or seek to answer the many questions about the dungeons, the who, the why, the WTF.  I imagine there are vested interests in the answers, what the can and can not be.  Organizations, free-lancers all kinds of chaos.

I think it could work well with a gonzo, almost heavy metal, vibe as well.

Well that's the general idea.

Quote from: Xanther;935915Well that's the general idea.

That all sounds marvelous to me! Write, sell it, so I can buy it.

Not exactly the same, but I just got my signed backer copy of the ADOM Lite RPG book by Thomas Biskup, which includes systems for solo play and random dungeon generation. ADOM the Roguelike includes an infinite dungeon, too. The random solo mode & generator may be the only part I actually use...

I had a concept for something like this years ago. The basic premise was that an Extinction-level asteroid strike occurred rendering the surface world completely uninhabitable. You and the survivors of your village made into one of the nearby dungeons before the whole area got buried under ten feet of dirt and ash.

You further know from legends that this dungeon is connected to a vast underground complex created by a lost civilization so there MIGHT be resources that will help you and the rest of your village survive in their new world and create hope that someday future generations will be able to return the world above. If you fail, your community will become just one more mass grave that some other lucky survivor might someday find and loot for the good of their own community.

I'd use strict resource management and probably B/X or 1e era Reaction Rolls for the game regardless of the specific system I use since the most valuable treasure is not gold or jewels, but food, water, fuel/light and especially ALLIES. In other words, the things you need to adventure with are also the things your community needs to survive so each expedition into unknown reaches of the dungeon must be weighed against the cost in lives and resources to make the attempt and the benefits of a surprise attack in enabling you to survive in the short term must be weighed against the resource cost and potential loss of an ally (or at least information source).

Quote from: Cave Bear;935843Condensation collects on the dungeon ceilings, and falls like rain in heavy droplets.

You can have weather in your dungeon.

There are actually some RL cave systems so large they have clouds. Also the Astrodome would get clouds and rain inside when closed. (no idea how. but recall it was happening unforeseen)

Quote from: Omega;936002There are actually some RL cave systems so large they have clouds. Also the Astrodome would get clouds and rain inside when closed. (no idea how. but recall it was happening unforeseen)

See, now this makes me want to deal with the theme of climate change within an enclosed environment.
Maybe an arcology or a generation ship being forced to deal with their own version of global warming. Even highly advanced life-support systems may be unable to predict emergent interactions within artificial ecosystems.

I suppose you could have PCs that are forcibly confined to the dungeon because they're monsters - the surface might not be uninhabitable, but because you're playing an orc/dark elf/mind flayer, you're just not welcome up there. For extra emo, start with human (ish) PCs and have them set off some sort of polymorph trap or whatsit that does that.

At one stage I had a mega-dungeon (on rpol) which the PC was basically stuck in after becoming a yuan-ti - not planned exactly, he just failed to stop some yuan-ti in the city he was trying to guard. Campaign ran for quite awhile until the PC got eaten by a dragon, oh well.

Arrows of Indra features the Patala Underworld. It's a world-spanning multi-level megadungeon ranging from the surface world down to the hell realms, with entire cities and kingdoms inside it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;937054Arrows of Indra features the Patala Underworld. It's a world-spanning multi-level megadungeon ranging from the surface world down to the hell realms, with entire cities and kingdoms inside it.

Sounds cool. Is it just an idea, or has significant work been put into fleshing it out?

Quote from: Larsdangly;937109Sounds cool. Is it just an idea, or has significant work been put into fleshing it out?

There's a description of its different layers and contents, and there's a whole set of random tables to allow you to create sections of it (obviously, it's much too large to just be mapped out, spanning the entire world over multiple layers of depth).