Megadungeons are dungeons so large and complex, an entire D&D campaign could be played within them. They are multi-leveled architectural monstrosities filled with dozens of passages leading up to previous levels or down to lower chambers. These multiple points of connection created a savage labyrinth that made navigation as great a challenge as fighting monsters or outsmarting traps. Adventures like The Temple of Elemental Evil were once the stuff of legend. Defeating Zuggtmoy in the adventures’ eponymous temple was nothing short of a badge of honor for old-school D&D players, for not only did they have to defeat hundreds of powerful monsters to reach her, they had to meticulously map out a multi-level dungeon filled with confusing, criss-crossing architecture.
There’s a stereotype about megadungeons—perhaps wrongfully inspired by hack ‘n slash dungeon crawler video games—that megadungeons are all about monster slaying and treasure gathering. Over the past few decades, megadungeons have fallen out of vogue as more and more people have begun playing D&D for the stories they can tell with their friends, and not exclusively for the thrill of killing monsters and looting their lairs.
This stereotype is false. Or at least, it can be false. If you started playing D&D because you loved the storytelling of Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, or other story- and character-focused streams or podcasts, you may have noticed that these shows rarely delve into large dungeons, let alone campaign-sized ones. At first, I thought this was because megadungeons just aren’t good for storytelling. It’s all monster fights and no roleplaying, no story, no stopping giant monsters from destroying your village and going on grand world-spanning quests. You’re just trapped in a dumb underground maze for a whole campaign.
Turns out, I was wrong.
Just a taste of a single level of the massive Temple of Elemental Evil.
Storytelling in a Megadungeon
Stories of heroes, thieves, villains, and scoundrels can be told in megadungeon campaigns like Dead in Thay just as well as they can in globetrotting campaigns like Storm King’s Thunder. The stories are different, of course. They don’t really have an equivalent in fantasy literature. They’re more akin to Howard’s Conan stories or Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth than they are like Lord of the Rings, as megadungeon stories focus on very personal character motivations and tales of survival in a hostile and alien environment.
Megadungeon stories are often episodic, and tend to put more of the storytelling work on the player’s shoulders than plot-heavy campaigns. Let’s take Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage as a timely example. Undermountain is as mega-dungeony as megadungeons can get, with no fewer than 23 distinct dungeon levels, each with a different environment, villains, and treasure. Each one of these different levels can feel like an episode of a TV show (even though each level will probably span 2 to 5 sessions of play, depending on your party’s preferred pace).
In an episodic TV show with an ensemble cast, like the new She-Ra or Star Trek, each episode is incited by a plot, but the real draw of these shows is to see how characters we’ve come to know and love overcome the challenge in their own way, while pursuing their own character-driven goals. This holds true whether they’re Adora, Glimmer, and Bow, or Kirk, Spock, and Bones. Megadungeon stories can be about uncovering ancient prophecies and saving the world from a mad mage, or they can be simple stories about treasure hunters getting in way over their heads.
One tiny cross-section of the massive Doomvault from Dead in Thay, a single story within Tales from the Yawning Portal.
NPCs and Roleplaying in a Megadungeon
My biggest concern about playing in my first megadungeon campaign was that I wouldn’t be able to meet fun NPCs along the way and roleplay with them. If we couldn’t visit any villages in a dungeon, then there wouldn’t be anyone to roleplay with. Once again, my fears were unfounded, though I have found that roleplaying encounters are less structured in a megadungeon than they are in other campaigns. Typically, I’ve been able to intuit which creatures I was “supposed” to parley with, and which ones were simply monsters to be killed.
Things aren’t so clear in a megadungeon. When you’re deep in the bowels of Undermountain, sometimes forming temporary alliances with hobgoblins or making a desperate bargain with drow raiding party is the only way to survive. Realizing this instantly flipped my false perception of megadungeons on its head. Hack ‘n slash isn’t the only way forward. Diplomacy and cunning isn’t just a method for dealing with the vast numbers of monsters in the dungeon—it might be the best way. Identifying warring factions in a dungeon and turning those forces against one another, like allying with goblins to overwhelm a rival adventuring party or a wererat gang in Level 2 – Arcane Chambers is a brutal, despicable, and absolutely brilliant way to solve an otherwise-insurmountable problem. Especially if you then stab the weakened goblins in the back and loot their belongings anyway.
And if the prospect of never returning to town worries you, let those worries be dispelled. Megadungeons thrive from having a nearby town, and all the best ones have a local village. After all, where are you going to sell all the treasure you’ve accumulated during your most recent delve? The Temple of Elemental Evil had the villages of Hommlet and Nulb. Undermountain has the Yawning Portal and Skullport (within Level 3 of the dungeon itself!).
These gith from Level 15 of Undermountain may not be your allies yet, but perhaps you could sway them...
Coming up for Air
Speaking of which, I’d like to dispel one final myth today. I always worried that playing a megadungeon meant spending the entire game within one dungeon. And while the dungeon will be your campaign’s primary setting, you won’t spend the whole game down there. Adventurers have to come up for air sometime. All that gold is going to weigh them down, and you have to sell treasure. Dungeon of the Mad Mage cleverly introduces side quests that begin and end in the Yawning Portal inn, encouraging adventurers to pace themselves and exit Undermountain every now and then.
This serves a couple of vital functions for both the players and the Dungeon Master. First, it lets the players return through areas they’ve already cleared and marvel at their own power and perseverance. They are mighty adventurers, and seeing the realms they’ve conquered in their quest is a great feeling. And, taken sparingly, stomping low-level monsters can be great fun. If your fighter had a nightmarish experience with a rust monster on the way down, letting her mow down a horde of them as she returns to the surface could be immensely satisfying.
Then, when the characters have sold their treasure, turned in and accepted a few quests, and spent the night partying at the inn, they can return to the dungeon with new purpose. Or… they can leave! Megadungeons don’t have to be all-or-nothing affairs. Maybe they found a magical spacecraft down in the dungeon, and now they have a new quest: find someone who can repair the craft so that they can explore the cosmos. Let Halaster rot in his dungeon, it’s not like he’s bothering anyone anyway. The party is rich, and they need someone who can repair a ship!
Let the party go off on their own and adventure elsewhere in the world for a spell. Then, when the need for gold and dungeon-crawling strikes them again, they’ll return to the endless pit of wealth and power that is Undermountain.
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, the DM of Worlds Apart, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and his corridor critters, Mei and Marzipan. You can usually find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
I just got my copy of Dragon Heist, and I can't wait to get my campaign into DotMM. I feel like they probably won't care about any sort of story I try to intertwine, but seeing them not in jail will be fun?
This is great! I always have trouble make long dungeons interesting for my players. Thanks!
What the HAeck is a Megadungeon.
Hi! I love Megadungeons, and just bought The Dungeon of the Mad Mage here, on D&D beyond. Here, in my store, we are working on an Megadungeon in D&D 5ed, but with the style of Ultima Underworld, where the players are left prisioners in a Underworld, and have to survive in a place plagued of other prisioners and strange civilizations. I liked a lot the new Undermountain, and they did a great job with Halaster.
Undermountain is, of course, a classic megadungeon, but I don't consider Temple of Elemental Evil to be one. It is too small, and too structured. In many ways it is more of a really big lair.
I'm not sure this is accurate. The Mines of Moria from the Lord of the Rings is to me the closest thing to a mega-dungeon in fiction. Days of travel, multiple levels, intricate backstory, varying character motivations, bad ass villain, not to mention a thousand orcs.
The 3.0 Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil had much more of a mega dungeon with the competing factions of the Crater Ridge Mines, Outer Fane, then Inner Fane. I remember first looking at it and thinking going in hack and slash would get boring and tedious real fast. But instead, I nudged the party towards infiltrating the competing factions. They the worked to drive them to go to war with each other and it was so much more interesting!
Missed opportunity 🤣
storm you
DM'ing my first game in 25 years I'm taking 5 new souls through nothing other than "The Temple of Elemental Evil"... using 5e rules and monsters of course and I'm also writing in my own unique story line as a sub plot that runs side by side the main line. After a half dozen sessions they just finished the ruins of the moat house and are just now entering the town of Nulb where they are begining to stage their first foray to the temple. They've been warned this place is huge...and so far they say "bring it on!"
In all your ramblings you still did not mention the biggest. I remember loving our 5 year campaign of Worlds Largest Dungeon and reveling in the fact that inside the Dungeon was cities and so many stories within that you didnt miss that you couldn't leave the Dungeon until you got to the end of the main quest. Later I laughed because Sword Art Online ripped the heck out of that concept...
I wish they would update WLD to 5e from 3.5....😓
Just know that I found this more hilarious than I probably should have and I thank you for it.
I think the key to making a Megadungeon interesting is making sure that your players have a compelling reason to explore it. <i>Dead in Thay</i> felt very tedious and hollow to me (despite some memorable encounters) because the only motivation my character had was "**** with the Red Wizards." There wasn't even much in the way of treasure.
You young'ns! Megadungeons used to be the norm. My biggest megadungeon has 63 levels and includes an entire town run by a lawful good cleric who provides a bit of safety to those who delve past her underground keep.
"Over the past few decades, megadungeons have fallen out of vogue as more and more people have begun playing D&D for the stories they can tell with their friends, and not exclusively for the thrill of killing monsters and looting their lairs."
You know something? I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons since the early 80s, and I'm fed up with the characterization of older players as exclusively hack n slash, with no roleplaying.
You nu_DnD players act as if you invented roleplaying, and that somehow it didn't exist before 5e came along; you also act as though diversity and inclusiveness didn't exist before you as well.
The reason that megadungeons fell out of vogue is because people in general don't have the attention span for the level of commitment required in order to complete them. For that matter, you don't have the commitment for a long term campaign either. I can't tell you how many older players I know who have been playing in the same campaign for a decade or two or three. Empires rise and fall, as do heroes; worlds are explored; gods overthrown.
The problem is that it's not a quick hit and you're done, on to the next easy thrill with a brand new character like 5e is geared towards.
There's a fair amount of things that I like about 5e, and I do enjoy the game; that being said, what keeps me from joining any kind of 5e gaming group is encountering the attitudes that I mentioned above. I'll keep playing 2nd edition with my friends, and continue to introduce new, younger players to that edition, thanks.
The next paragraph literally starts with "This stereotype is false."
I like megadungeons. I actually based an upcoming campaign for my players on the Divine Dungeon book series, which I think combines the best of megadungeon action with story-driven roleplay. For those who haven't read it, it's essentially a D&D story as told from the perspective of the dungeon. Instead of following a group of adventurers who have to delve its depths and uncover its treasure for (insert reason), the book is about a childlike intelligence inside a diamond called a "dungeon core". It can sense and manipulate the environment within a few feet of itself, but everything beyond is a mystery. It encounters moss and learns it can draw life from the plant to grow its sphere of influence. Gradually, it learns to maintain an ecosystem within itself and build cunning traps and long mazes to protect itself, because at the end of the day it's a powerful artifact that can fit in someone's palm. Whatever it kills and absorbs, it can turn around and manifest, including whatever belongings are on adventurers that die to its traps and monsters. It's a really cool take on just why a dungeon is the way it is, and I thought that giving my players a portable home base that likes them well enough but isn't above killing them for sustenance was an interesting plot hook. Do they sell it? Do they worry about it being stolen? As the dungeon core in their pocket grows larger, do rumors spring up of a "teleporting dungeon?" If creatures from Infernal get loose in its depths, does the party go down and root them out like white blood cells killing an infection?
Really great stuff! My first ongoing game I played was Dead in Thay. When our group ran it a second time in TftYP with new characters and some new players too, we revisited some of the consequences are previous characters actions had on the place. It was really fun to have that continuity.
Maybe "nu-DND players" invented reading.