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Megadungeons 2

I have read a lot about megadungeons over the last week or so, and the more I read the more I want to run one. I have never run a megadungeon before. In fact I hardly ever run dungeons at all. I can think of two real, multisession dungeons I have run. The most recent was the 4th edition module Keep on the Shadowfell. This combined two things I am usually wary of doing in a game: a pregenerated module and a dungeon crawl. It was one of the worst modules I have ever read,let alone ran. We made it maybe 4 sessions in before going back to Traveller.

The first dungeon run I did was shortly after high school. We had been playing for around 8-10 years at this point and I put one into a long running campaign purely because we had never done one before. It took about three long sessions to run through the dungeon and many great and memorable stories game out of that adventure. So this one was overall very positive.

Generally my players pretend to be in the political thick of things, even at low levels so we tend not to do a lot of dungeon crawls. Oddly my Traveller games have always had a lot in common with a dungeon crawl. The players always have hirelings or troops of some sort, I start them in the thick of things, and most of the actual roleplaying in those games occurs in the retelling of the story later. I just never thought about megadungeons that way until reading about the recently.

But even then I don't want to do things totally traditional. Mutant Future is on its way to my house right now, I want to use it to run a megadungeon. I want to take the city of Camden, NJ and have huge chunks of it swallowed up by the earth. Anyone I am likely to be playing with at this point is going to be familiar with Camden and the idea of an event so cataclysmic that Camden would get worse is just wacky enough to fit into a Gamma World type game.

I already have a bunch of ideas floating around that I need to figure out how to glue together. Most of them are faction ideas (I love wacky cults):

1) A cult that worships Walt Whitman's statue

2) The RCA cult

3) A cult that worships the statue of the Campbell Soup kids

4) A cult that hires the characters to find special offerings to their god. Their god is a nuclear missile and the offerings are parts of the launch mechanism.

5) Philly has turned into a hellish wasteland and there is a creepy guy who operates the ferry to hell

6) The entrance to the megadungeon is through the base of the Ben Franklin Bridge

7) People smuggle food into the city from South Jersey farms through the PATCO tunnel

8) The guy who lives down the street from me who wears a Cat in the Hat hat and talks using a sock puppet, who is running for mayor. Just use him, somehow.

9) All the big scary churches need to be standing. Obviously Father Doyle will have to be still running one of them because he is just that much of a bad ass.

I haven't really thought it through more than that yet.

Has anyone else run a megadungeon in Mutant Future? I'd be interested to hear about it, especially if you keep a blog record.

Comments

  1. Some great ideas, here, rmckee78---lots of local lore and environs to play with/mock/mutate too! I particularly like the cult of Whitman! :D

    Some other ideas:

    Cooper Hospital as a towering complex that survives, with the parking garage turned into a giant sniper tower

    City Hall's clock shoots out strange beams from the clock face at random times, like searchlights, but they cause even more mutations

    The USS NJ is a floating fortress that runs up and down the DE river, levying tribute---or else!

    The various fish/etc. from the state aquarium were let loose into the DE, and thrived, therefore it's full of horrible, mutated hazards like giant sharks (a la Megalodons), mutated octopi that squirt acid clouds, piranha, etc.

    Allan.

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