I've heard some people criticize DotMM for being somewhat aimless. Sure there's a lot in it, but I've heard it's kind of cookie cutter, more useful to steal rooms from than to run in its entirety. That said, I don't own the book and haven't played it, BUT, I had an idea that could make it work as a campaign.

WHAT IF...instead of it being a megadungeon that adventurers are welcome to take a crack at, it's a mega-PRISON, all of the monsters, npc's, and the party, are all inmates, and the pc's have to try and escape.

I'm picturing the upper levels more represent the safer areas of the prison where the lower levels house the high profile "prisoners." And since it's such a massive facility, the wardens decided there's no need for locked cells or bars since it's so dangerous to wander around there'd be no point. That way the pc's can still have a degree of autonomy even within the prison, you can add some "safe" areas where prisoners have banded together to form microcosmic societies, factions, additional NPC's, and the players will have to survive the prison on a quest to retrieve things needed for their escape.

Whaddaya think?

Seems good to me, I'm assuming the lowest level is the way to escape. However, were do you plan to start the players at? If there in prison, perhaps they should start with no gear, there is no money, and they have to scrounge and barter everything.

I actually REALLY like this idea, however, my concern is the "door out of the prison" would be on the last level, which means that the exit to this prison would be with the most dangerous criminals? It seems like the exits should be at the highest level so that if there is a prison break, it would mostly be the weaker characters. So there would need to be a reason as to why the exit is on the same level as the most dangerous criminals.

Yeah I was thinking maybe it's an extra-dimensional prison and they need components from throughout the prison to portal out? Or maybe if not dimensional, like if the prison is in the PMP, the door is right there in the safe area but there's just no way to open it without going on some long quest, or finding a secret back way.

The dungeon(prison) itself is also full of treasure, so maybe that's kind of a greed-trap keeping in some people who can't bring themselves to part with it, but can't manage to sneak it out.

Oh I can get down with that. There's what 15 levels or something like that, so maybe it's 15 pieces of something, one on each level, and on the last level, maybe they learn all 15 pieces for a key or are the pieces to a puzzle or something. I'm down with that.

 Prison of the Mad Mage - with Warden Halester

And maybe every level isn't required for the escape, but maybe the players want to do some exploring, sidequests, persue legendary loot, etc. That way you can merge a story campaign more with the hardcore dungeon crawl it was made as.

I think this is a brilliant idea, but it's going to require some pretty drastic rewrites. It certainly introduces a lot of fascinating questions. Who created this prison and why? Who runs it? What role does Halaster and the story surrounding him play in this scenario? How does this change Jhesiyra and her goals?

I second the idea of making it an extradimensional cage that can only be escaped through some very complicated means, requiring the party to go on a quest through the many levels of this dungeon. Also, I could see Halaster being less of a warden here and more of a gang boss who's beaten the system; maybe he knows all the nooks and crannies of this place, and he's been inside too long to ever want to leave.

In my headspace, Halashtar is the creator of the prison and upon its completion was locked away by the person/nation/entity he created it for, so his powers could never pose a threat to them. Leaves room for moral ambiguity in whoever runs the prison, allowing the Pc's to choose to play as good characters and still have it make sense to be imprisoned. Prisoners could range then from cutthroat and murderers to heretics, political dissidents, or terrifying hellbeasts and old gods' spawn

Quote from CharlesThePlant >>

In my headspace, Halashtar is the creator of the prison and upon its completion was locked away by the person/nation/entity he created it for, so his powers could never pose a threat to them. Leaves room for moral ambiguity in whoever runs the prison, allowing the Pc's to choose to play as good characters and still have it make sense to be imprisoned. Prisoners could range then from cutthroat and murderers to heretics, political dissidents, or terrifying hellbeasts and old gods' spawn

This is actually a really good way for players to do an evil campaign. Which I find hard to do in most settings.

At least a couple floors are basically just "prison floors." You could start a party out on any one of those and extrapolate from there.

Apologies for thread necromancy, but I'm finally getting a chance to run this and want to keep all my notes in one place. Here's a little blurb I'm doing to describe the events/world leading up to their imprisonment to the players: 

The Kingdom of Shale is a land of power and intrigue. It's capital city of Waterdeep is a dangerous place where the wrong friends can cost you dearly, and the right ones can cost you more. King Alphonse has held this city suppressed beneath his fist for nearly 1000 years, aided by the Court of Masks-- anonymous nobles who enforce the King's will through politics and wealth-- and his often corrupt magistrates who govern the realms in his name and stamp out any who refuse to fall in line, with prejudice.

Luckily for you, you're about to leave this world of social hierarchies and intrigue behind. Unluckily, after having been arrested for a crime you may or may not have committed and sentenced without a trial, you will soon be exiled to The Undermountain. Just what is the Undermountain, you ask? It is nearly as old as the King himself, an extradimensional prison created by the King's First Mage, Halaster Blackcloak, to house the King's enemies without hope of escape. There, no matter what god the enemies of the King may have pledged their souls to, the King is secure they will suffer before they achieve the escape of death. Having created the perfect prison and used his magic to extend King Alphonse's own life, the King began to see Halaster's magic as a threat, and he was entombed in the very prison he created, as both the Warden and first prisoner of Undermountain. 

Since then, nobody has ever returned, and to people on the outside, exile to The Undermountain is looked on as a death sentence. Over the years of King Alphonse's reign, in his paranoia to stamp out any threat to his power, he has become quicker and quicker to sentence his enemies to Exile (and empowered his magistrates to do the same). Criminal syndicates, Drow noble houses, goblin armies, and creatures deemed too powerful by the King to be allowed to walk or fly free in his kingdom have all succumbed to Exile and been banished from the world. Increased fear of The Undermountain has driven the people of the kingdom into further subservience, and few will dare openly oppose the King, the Court of Masks, or the magistrates anymore.

Now, you find yourself on the ritual stand, ready to be banished to The Undermountain, the nexus of Lost Things, home to all the most unruly and dangerous creatures in Shale, the 'prison without doors' itself with nothing but the torn, sack cloth garments generously provided by the King's jailers  and (in Charlie's case) a ferret. Good luck. 

Seems like a good start.

Quote from CharlesThePlant >>

I've heard some people criticize DotMM for being somewhat aimless. Sure there's a lot in it, but I've heard it's kind of cookie cutter, more useful to steal rooms from than to run in its entirety. That said, I don't own the book and haven't played it, BUT, I had an idea that could make it work as a campaign.

WHAT IF...instead of it being a megadungeon that adventurers are welcome to take a crack at, it's a mega-PRISON, all of the monsters, npc's, and the party, are all inmates, and the pc's have to try and escape.

I'm picturing the upper levels more represent the safer areas of the prison where the lower levels house the high profile "prisoners." And since it's such a massive facility, the wardens decided there's no need for locked cells or bars since it's so dangerous to wander around there'd be no point. That way the pc's can still have a degree of autonomy even within the prison, you can add some "safe" areas where prisoners have banded together to form microcosmic societies, factions, additional NPC's, and the players will have to survive the prison on a quest to retrieve things needed for their escape.

 

Whaddaya think?

 I love this idea, but sadly you would have to completely rewrite the book and change EVERYTHING. Rather, I think you should just make your own extradimensional prison to have the characters escape. But hey, if you're willing to do that much prep, go for it. 

Would love to know how this is turning out! Reminds me of the Impel Down arc of One Piece! Keep us updated!

So far it's working well. They've just made it down to level 2, though they haven't fully cleared level 1 yet. They were able to learn about the goblin market where they could get supplies (they found food on level 1, but no water, so that's the big thing they need right now). They did a deal with the Xanathar Guild to help kidnap one of the leaders of the Undertakers in exchange for being allowed through their blockade, and they've acquired an idiot goblin follower who nobody in the XG liked, so naturally they adopted him and named him Steven. They've also met Halleth Garke, and were able to deduce from several somewhat subtle dialogue clues that he was a reverent hells-bent on killing his former partners, and they're following along for the ride. 

Other points of note are that the bard got landed with the cursed sword that you can't drop, and the Warlock discovered the wand of secrets. They just fell short of figuring out how to use it to activate the mirror-gate on that level, but that's probably for the best haha. I was gonna have Jehesrya warn them that they'd be going into far more dangerous territory, but I talked with the party before we started the campaign about whether they want the opportunity to wander into level-locked areas or not and they said they wanted to, so I wasn't going to have her stop them. 

One thing I'm liking about the 'dungeon/prison as setting' and there being no in or out, is that it gives the various factions locked inside a much greater incentive to be squabbling over territory, since space is at a pretty high premium right now. Like, whoever takes over level 1 has a pretty good chance of taking over the marketplace on level 2, which I've updated for the sake of the setting to be a full-blown settlement complete with its own resources and defenses, either solidifying the Xanathar Guild's hold on the upper levels, or establishing the Undertakers as an influential power in the prison. It even kind of opens the door to inter-faction war later on. Like, with the XG now in position to launch offensives to control levels 1-3, they could possibly take over all of Skillport. I'm thinking the drow houses and the hobgoblin army wouldn't be too pleased with that, we might even begin to see an alliance form to take down the Guild.

Not saying that's for sure gonna happen, but it's interesting. 

I had a tangential question about the Mad Mage adventure - I understand it's a dungeon crawler where roleplaying is probably taking more of a backseat to the game than in most published adventures, and the focus is on combat and exploration. What I'm a little unclear on is how it is intended to be run. Have DM's who have run this module found that the group runs through treating it as a gauntlet to the very last chapter, or are they supposed to dip in and out, picking up where they left off after doing other adventuring or downtime in Waterdeep?

Quote from syzygyeolith >>

I had a tangential question about the Mad Mage adventure - I understand it's a dungeon crawler where roleplaying is probably taking more of a backseat to the game than in most published adventures, and the focus is on combat and exploration. What I'm a little unclear on is how it is intended to be run. Have DM's who have run this module found that the group runs through treating it as a gauntlet to the very last chapter, or are they supposed to dip in and out, picking up where they left off after doing other adventuring or downtime in Waterdeep?

 It's definitely intended for you to be able to dip in and out, since it has that section of side missions from people in the Yawning Portal, but I'm having a lot of fun running it as a gauntlet. The players having to forage for resources and scout out safe places for rests is a fun extra element. So I just made all the quest-givers fellow prisoners and slightly changed up their motivations. For example, Obaya, the priestess looking for spellbooks is now a resident of the goblin market settlement who the party met exploring level 1, and she's collecting spellbooks not for her master back home, but because she's trying to supplement all the magical knowledge they've lost having been cut off from the outside world. 

Ok, a new development has taken place that I'd be interested in hearing people's opinions on, and is very interesting. 

SO. My party reached the goblin market on level 2, which I've re-worked into the Rustbone Village, an independent settlement that is interested in expanding into more of the level, but is held back by the Xanathar Guild's recent encroachment into their territory. The settlement is not 100% goblin, there's some humans and orcs and other folk, but it's still led by Yek the Tall and and the Rustbone Tribe. Or rather...it was. 

You see... the party took it over. 

They initially ingratiated themselves with Yek and were discussing doing some work for the town in order to earn access to the town's springwater, since they still didn't have another water source. However, tensions flared when Halleth Garke, who was with them, identified Copper Stormforge as one of his Vengeance buddies, and threatened (i.e, promised) to kill him. Yek wanted to very publicly punish Copper for stealing from him, and was going to sentence him to years and years of hard labor, and thought a death sentence was too easy an out for him. But, the party convinced Halleth to wait for them to sort  few things out before making a move on Copper, to which Halleth tentatively agreed.

Meanwhile, the bard in the party wasn't allowed into town because they have a strict "no drawn weapons" policy, and she had the cursed sword you can't put down, and no scabbard to put it in. Instead, she was escorted to the Gibbet area and encouraged to wait there-- not that she was locked up, they just needed her to wait there. While there, she met Glom, who upon being fed a ration, spilled all the beans about Yek's "curse" and specifically how many of his goblin lieutenants resent taking orders from him now.

So, on the way back from Yek's throne room to go pick up their errant bard friend, the ranger suggests that since Yek seems like kind of a d*ck, and things might explode between him and Halleth anyways, and this town has a lot of resources they could use anyways and they wouldn't have to bend the knee to Yek... what if they just took him out? So they discussed plans and then, after meeting back up with the bard and learning all the stuff she found out about Yek's tenuous grip on authority. They made contact with one of Yek's lieutenants and, after finding a way for the bard to hide the sword (they were able to find a broken wooden crate that she could look like she was carrying with the sword hand inside). So, they went back to Yek and said the box had a present for him inside. They waffled a little with Yek trying to figure out amongst themselves whether or not to just go for it in front of all Yek's minions, but the Warlock did convince him to send 2 of his bugbear guards away (funny story involving pizza and ice cream-- they're not the brightest and rolled low insight so it checked out). Then the ranger just goes for it. Casts magic stone and tells Yek the glowing rocks are "wishing stones".

The catches his attention and gets Yek off guard. Ranger then throws two at Yek, hits with both leaving him with 3 hp left. Then it's initiative and the ranger rolls high with a 23, going first in the turn order he runs into the melee and takes a few attacks of opportunity from Yek's toadies, but he makes it and kills Yek outright right there. 

Now, I had to think about what happened next. The book specifies that none of the goblins are going to fight to the death to defend Yek. It says if they have to, they lose morale after half their number are defeated, but, the ranger gave a speech after killing Yek about how the rest of them would be safe under the new regime and that Yek had been a wicked ruler anyways, and he bribed the bugbears who were only in it for the coin anyways. I had him roll persuasion, and I rolled insight for every goblin in the room. They all put down their weapons and waited to see what else the ranger had to say.  At this point, the ranger is feeling a little hot under the collar because for someone with a -3 charisma, he's got by on luck till now and is looking for someone else to take over. He says he's just the muscle, but...

And that's when I had a stroke of inspiration and had Steven, the dopey goblin they adopted on level 1 after the Xanathar Guild bugbears almost killed him for being annoying, speak up. Steven declared the party were his minions and that he would be their new, one, true goblin leader. He gave a surprising good speech (rolled for it and everything) and between that and his extravagant appearance (the party dressed him in a bunch of flamboyant garments from Haria Valashtar's chest of costume pieces and used her markup to give him David Bowie face paint), the other goblins went along with this apparent larger than life figure, and they stepped in line behind Steven.

So now, the party has installed Steven as their puppet ruler of the village (Steven is fully on board since he owes the players a life debt), they were able to let Halleth kill Copper without occurring any wrath or having to kill Halleth, AND they did that without killing a single other goblin other than Yek.

So now they have the Rustbone town set up as a base of operations, but I thought it would be cool (and I would run this by the players first) to maybe try to set up a mechanic for actually running the settlement. Figuring out what resources they need to manage, allowing them to reclaim areas of the dungeon that they've cleared, maybe even recruit other pocket settlement dotted around the dungeon to join them, definitely they'll have to deal with Xanathar Guild raids at some point, especially as they expand.

Has anyone had success with running settlements in the past? What worked?

TLDR: my players took over a town and now I'm wondering about a good way to run 'running a town' between excursions deeper into the dungeon. 

I actually ran Dragon Heist for my group of 5 and they turned the broken down tavern into a "Gentleman's Club" where they had "exotic dancers", an in-house casino, and a tavern. Each of the players were involved with a different aspect of the business. One was in charge of the dancers, two were in charge of the casino, one was in charge of the bar and the last was in charge of the entertainment at the tavern. I actually made quick resumes that were turned in. I fleshed out each character with a 1-3 sentence "pitch" to be hired, along with the name, gender, and race and wage they were seeking. They were given a budget that they all had to balance to get their crew to work efficiently. It probably took a good two hours of the session for them to look through the resumes, conduct interviews, and then hire people based on the budget. Then they would roll every month of game time to see how much they made, then I subtracted what they had to pay their workers. It was a nice little side plot that they liked to take care of.

Now getting to the meat of what you're asking, your situation is completely different because they already have a crew. If I was the DM, I would just have some time pass in the game world, anywhere from 1-3 months if possible and really flesh out some of the goblins with names, backstories, and personalities to really have the party begin to care about them, which is good because you can kill them later in the story to set up a pretty nice gut punch or to invoke a character to behave out of anger of the death and do something they wouldn't ordinarily do, maybe if you can swing it, even a romance. There's a bunch of cool stuff you can do, maybe the goblins have requests of their own that they need help with, missing possessions or family members, maybe one of them is trying to start a rebellion, or has a drug addiction and is slowly killing other goblins to rob them to feed his habit.

I would then try to have them maybe put certain goblins in charge of groups of other goblins, sort of like a chieftain, and then designate an area to each group. That's pretty much all the ideas I've got at this time lol hope you can use at least some of this!

Now all of this will ultimately delay the greater plot of trying to break out of the prison, by potentially many real-time hours of play, because you still want them to get out, so don't give them too much incentive to stay put, otherwise, you'll have to bring the game to them, instead of letting them continue how they please, which isn't bad or good necessarily, but you still want the players and the characters to WANT to continue the main plot.