Campaign long dungeon crawling in D&D 5e

>>51152879

I think it can be done, but you need to change how you set up your game normally to keep things from getting samey.

Take a page from 'Is it Wrong to Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon?', stupid name of the show aside.

Basically, this absolutely massive dungeon is there that regularly spawns monsters out of the walls. Even the gods don't know where it came from, which both intrigues and scares them a little.

An entire economy has build around getting resources out of the dungeon, and there is a city built right on top of the entrance, with various adventuring guilds (Familias) stationed there.

Because of how everything is set up, the guilds have set up a system that makes their exploration of the dungeon easier. Small havens (basically settlements and trading posts) have been set up are various points in the dungeon network where the monsters either don't spawn or only spawn rarely, providing small pockets of stability and safe zones to rest and resupply. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the rarer these havens become until eventually you reach areas no one has mapped or really managed to explore beyond the lucky few that barely made it back alive.

For what you are doing, I would say start them off as new recruits of one of the guilds, and they perform some low-level missions going in and our of the dungeon's shallower levels. Let them build up some reputation and get used to the guild system, and learn the rules of how the dungeon ticks. Introduce them to other adventuring groups, both from their own guild and from other guilds (rivals or allies).

And then pull the rug out from under them. During a routine mission, something happens to the dungeon. Everything shifts around, and the normal rules of the dungeon are broken. Maybe the floor falls out from underneath them and they end up tumbling down to a much deeper level than they are used to.

>>51153118
Sounds like the Dungeoneering lore from Runescape, honestly. Makes me want to run a Daemonhiem campaign tee bee aich

>>51153118

Now the players don't know where the exit is anymore. A bunch of other adventurers are trapped down there too.

From this point onward, the rest of the campaign takes place in the massive dungeon. If the players want to see daylight again, they have to find out what has scrambled the dungeon and get it under control. But doing that means going deeper into the dungeon than anyone has ever gone, and finding the often rumored center of the dungeon. Some say its a library where every book is a level of the dungeon, others say its a throne and whoever sits in it commands the maze, or a massive clockwork room full of levers and gears that run everything.

Something like that must really exist. And some idiot must have found it. What else could explain the mess you are in?

So you are trapped in a dungeon, but there are small towns so you have safe zones to do shop things at. Other areas might have traveling supply wagons and merchants who got stranded during the scramble, and you find them either alive or dead.

In this tense situation, other members of your guild that you find will be valuable allies, and other guilds might be deadly enemies. Finding the control room might be the only way out now, but whatever guild ends up taking it will wield immense power.

If any of your PCs die, maybe there is something in the deeper levels, some treasure, that can return them. But odds are better than you just introduce a new adventurer also trapped down there in the dark, preferably but not necessarily from your guild, who joins up for survival.

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>>51153118
This is good, but can I just skip to the last part? I was planning to start with the party getting lost into the uncharted part of the abandoned city, where they got cut off from any human contact, like the expedition outpost stationed just outside.

I'm really trying to limit the human interaction bit of the campaign, to change things up. Sure, sometimes the party finds a sentient artifact, or some river monster, or a shriveled and undead mage, or a scavenging... "thing" to act as NPCs and storekeepers, but they're rare. As the "safe zones" are basically parts of the city the monsters tend to avoid, somewhere the party can take a break without the risk of meeting a wandering underground demon.

Basically it's the Mines of Moria but in a campaign scale. I want to drill down the "isolated" and "surrounded with danger" aspect of things.

>>51153332

Alright. I see the appeal of that, but I would warn you that not all players are going to be happy with that sort of campaign. With that kind of setup you have traps and you have monsters, and unless you can get creative with both players are going to burn out at some point. A big part of the fun of playing an RPG is the role playing, and its hard to roleplay without NPCs.

You also will need to give very strong reason to push ahead in that sort of game, especially early on. These are players. If you tell them that the only thing between them and a camp of allies is a cave-in, their priority will be to dig out the tunnel, not explore 200 levels of a dungeon to find another way out.

Be up front with your players as to the nature and tone of the campaign from the get go. This is not a game where bards and illusionists will do well.

>>51152879
It can definitely work. In fact, that was the basis of most of the hobby for its infancy. But I will warn you that setting up a megadungeon is no small feat. It'll take some doing.

>>51153525
That's what I'm afraid of. It's a fine line between "wow, this place is rough, better tread lightly" and "wow, this place is rough, let's stop playing."

Same goes with NPCs. I need to work on the encounters so that the few encounters the party find will be important and engrossing so the adventurers can roleplay with it. A zealous paladin gets to be self righteous when he meets a friendly (if a bit weird) lich, or a curious mage will start fidgeting with and annoying the talking statue.

I guess instead of a cave in I can have the players being sent on a mission to explore the city and due to logistical reasons, external support will be limited/nonexistent. But yeah, the roleplaying aspect will be very difficult to manage, I must activate the roleplaying genes in my players with sparse but unique NPCs and complex puzzles.