Let’s Build a Low-Prep Mega Dungeon: Part 3
Clocking In
Hello and welcome to part 3 in my ongoing series about building an engaging, low-prep mega dungeon. In part 2, I covered a basic plot for the dungeon, and discussed how we could co-opt the excellent Sunless Citadel module to use as the entry point to our dungeon. This week we will delve a little deeper (pardon the pun), and cover managing our dungeon’s factions as the player characters move through the dungeon.
Getting the PCs into a dungeon is often easy — there’s treasure/some villain/something which needs rescuing there, and they’re incentivized in some way to get it out/deal with it. In our case, we’ve got an old ruin on a rocky beach, which is somehow causing everyone in the area to have terrible nightmares. A previous group of adventurers went into the ruin and never came back, and now the characters; one of whom is a cousin to the previous group’s leader; has come to town, looking for their kin and hoping to stop the nightmares. Once the party is in the dungeon however, we need a way to keep it interesting. We could simply populate the place with a bunch of terrible monsters (or roll on some random tables), but that usually ends up being a really odd, mostly boring, slog. While this type of “funhouse” approach can be interesting for certain groups, it doesn’t work well over a long campaign, such as the one we are prepping. Instead, we should take a little more care with our dungeon inhabitants, and think about why they are in the ruin in the first place, and what they want for themselves. In short, we need factions!
Factions inside of dungeons go nearly back to the beginning of Dungeons & Dragons. The Caves of Chaos dungeon in Keep on the Borderlands is populated with a couple of them, and DMs have always been encouraged to use the factions as levers to motivate the PCs. For example, if a group of goblins controls the upper floors of a dungeon, they might grant safe passage to the party if the characters agree to kill the ogre which has been menacing them. Or perhaps the goblins are warring with some bandits who have a hideout located in some part of the dungeon. While the goblins might make a deal with the characters, the bandits may decide to counter the deal, or offer the characters something else. In this way, factions accomplish a few things: they give the dungeon “life,” by communicating to the players that things happen, whether they come to the dungeon or not; they provide the characters with opportunities for role-play, and; they give the characters agency over the plot by allowing them to support certain factions over others.
Unfortunately, D&D doesn’t really help us when it comes to managing our factions. Like many of the story aspects of the game, D&D just gives some general tips on how to run things, and then gets on with the business of being a game about killing stuff to get at the sweet, sweet loot inside. Thankfully, other games; games which do give us tools for managing factions; have been written in the years since D&D was originally published. Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Stars Without Number and others offer systems and tools we can appropriate for our own uses; and the choices available to us run the gamut from “super low prep (Apocalypse World)” to “an entire game within themselves (Stars Without Number).” For our purposes, we’re going to utilize the fronts/threats system from Apocalypse World. This will give us just enough direction to keep track of things, without bogging us down in a full-fledged faction turn.
Before we write our front, let’s remember which factions are operating in our dungeon (so far):
- A cult, led by an evil druid and populated with humanoid cultists and Koa-Toa fish people. They guard and venerate some kind of evil thing on the second level of the dungeon.
- A clan of kobolds, recently arrived and hoping to take the ruin for themselves. They are at war with the cult.
- A mysterious presence deeper in the dungeon, which the druid is trying to communicate or meet with. What does it want? Who knows (yet)?
Great! With our factions described, we have enough information to answer the questions needed for our front.
- Name: The Sunless Citadel
- Scarcity: Space, time (the cult needs time to find what they seek; the kobolds want all the space they can get).
- Agenda: The cult makes contact with whatever is deeper in the ruin; regular nightmares become living nightmares as the Far Realm starts to leak into the real world. The kobolds drive the cult out, and then begin harrassing the locals. The estate never recovers. The dark presence from below makes contact with whoever’s left standing. Things go from bad to much, much worse.
- Stakes: What will happen to the the kobold’s dragon? Will the Koa-Toa rise up against the druid if they realize he’s not a true prophet? Will the dark presence succeed in swaying the PCs to its cause?
- Cast: The PCs, Belak the Druid, Blilglubplub the Koa-Toa whip, Yusdrayl the kobold chieftan, and Calryx the wyrmling.
Our front is really taking shape! We now have a quick way to reference who’s involved, what they want, and what will happen if things go unchecked. But there’s still a little work to be done. With the basics of our front in place, it’s time to build a couple of countdown clocks to keep track of more granular changes in the plot. I’ve written about using clocks before, and I cannot recommend them enough. With few exceptions, I now use clocks to help manage all of my games, no matter the sytem.
In case you haven’t read my previous post, or are unfamiliar with the concept of countdown clocks, in a nutshell the represent progress toward an end goal. They can be broken down into as many or as few segments as you want, but typically there are six per clock. The clock begins with more “benign” outcomes; things that represent progress, but aren’t yet snowballing to an ultimate conclusion. The latter half of the clock represents an inevitable outcome — after a certain point, things will get worse, and all the players can do is control the fallout. In the case of a six segment clock, things go from bad to worse at 22:00.
So, what do our clocks look like? How about:
The Cult Communes With the Deep
- 15:00 to 21:00 — Progress is slow. Belak is trying to unlock the location of the presence, but hasn't found it yet.
- 22:00 — Belak makes a breakthrough. The whispers are clearer. The fishpeople grow stronger.
- 23:00 — The Altar of Flesh births greater terrors. The cult pushes back against the kobolds.
- Midnight — Calcryx is sacrifed at the Altar. The presence manifests in the upper levels. The nightmares become real.
The Kobold Invasion
- 15:00 — Stalemate. The kobolds are checked and not making progress.
- 18:00 — Flanking maneuver. Yusdrayl finds a way around the cultist’s territory.
- 21:00 — Hard fighting in the upper levels.
- 22:00 — Calcryx is delivered back to Yusdrayl.
- 23:00 — The hoard overruns the ruins, and comes to the Altar.
Excellent! Now we know what will happen if the players don’t intervene, and possibly what will happen if they do. Each of our two big factions has goals and outcomes, and we (as the DM) can easily keep track of the major plot beats.
Knowing what might happen is key to any good RPG session, but with a mega-dungeon, it matters even more. Dungeons can become a grind very quickly, and those tend to fizzle pretty quickly, in my experience. Populating the dungeon with factions, and then using fronts and clocks to manage those factions, will help us tell an engaging story, where they character’s actions have real repurcussions. Of course, our front doesn’t cover every outcome, and nor should it! As the players take action in the dungeon, we want to leave things mysterious (for them and ourselves) so we can discover the story together.
I have no idea what the presence deeper in the dungeon is, for example, and right now I don’t really care. As the party moves through the upper levels, I can start building that faction by making notes as to what they find, what they thing, and what interests them. Then, when it turns out to be what they thought it was (only worse), everyone is already invested.
I hope this post helps you when running your own games, and as always, would love any feedback you might have. Do you use clocks in your games, or is there something else you prefer? How do you feel about leaving things “undiscovered” for yourself as the DM? Let me know!
