DISCLAIMER: Potential spoilers for “Waterdeep:Dungeon of the Mad Mage” ahead! If that doesn’t bother you, then read on! TL;DR at the bottom.
THE POINT OF THIS POST: What I’m looking for here are fun things and potentially story elements in the form of GRAFFITI on the walls of the dungeon that I can use in my DotMM game. This can be complete nonsense (or super helpful/fairly vague tips) written by other adventurers passing through the dungeon or even by Halaster himself. The purpose of the graffiti found in the dungeon is to be a source of either entertainment, lore (doesn’t have to be specific to Forgotten Realms), warnings of danger ahead… that kind of thing. Feel free to be as creative and clever as you can! Alternatively, the things you guys post could also be things that NPC’s in The Yawning Portal might say to anyone that mentions an interest in going down the hole.
CONTEXT: I’m going to be changing some things about this campaign to make it a bit more fun for me to run it. I’m going to pull some inspiration from some Lovecraft stories and the video game Bloodborne. For some reason that weird Cthulu shit is just super entertaining for me lately. I’m very excited for Level 17: Seadeeps, for this reason. However, I’m looking to make this theme stretch a bit further than just a level or two way down in the deeper parts of the dungeon. I’m wanting things to seem like a pretty standard dungeon more or less for the first handful of levels with things slowly getting weirder over time (This goblin has his usual set of eyes on the front of his head, but as he charges closer, you see he has an extra set of eyes just sticking out of his ears). That kind of thing... all the way up until that last few levels where I plan on everything being just a big WHAT IN THE ACTUAL CLUSTER **** maddening horror/psychosis fest.
THINGS I WILL ALSO ACCEPT: Hints/tips/suggestions/general help on how you would run a Super Dungeon like this? As far as players that don’t mind spoilers or have played through this campaign already, how would you feel playing in a game like this? Things that I’d like to hear about specifically are ideas for pacing and exactly how weird things could/should get. Also, are there any parts of “Dungeon of the Mad Mage” that I should look at outside of levels 16 and 17 that might be interesting or that I might find conflict with given how much of this I plan to revamp/homebrew? Do you think that this theme will get old quickly, given your experience, running/playing D&D?
TL;DR:I’m going to Cthulu-ize the shit out of Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Give me crazy ideas for graffiti as well as “do’s and don’ts” for progression, pacing, ideas for describing things to incite terror and horror at the table without boring my players with it, and how to avoid accidentally overdoing it on the weird shit so bad that they wanna quit the game.
Dungeon Wall Graffiti and Cthulu-y stuff (WD:DotMM)