Gorgon Bones

Zandan Megadungeon, a Retrospective

Zandan Header

As mentioned in the last session report, that was (unless I change my mind), the last session of my Zandan megadungeon campaign. There are various reasons for that, and I will try and go over them here and discuss my thoughts on the campaign overall, what worked, what didn't and so on. I'll be straight with you, I feel this one was overall a bit of a failure, at least with the goals in mind that I had for it, so if anything I feel it is more important to write about that than successful ones.

Campaign Goals

First off, to define failure or success one must define what the parameters for success are. I am not counting broad platitudes of "having fun" and "enjoying the game", as I have said on numerous occasions that that to me is the bare minimum one should expect form gaming, rather than the end goal. After all if your game isn't fun and enjoyable, why the hell are you even playing?

With that said, I started up this campaign aiming to do a few things, which I will go over now.

Run a megadungeon focused campaign

I wanted to run a game focused more on exploring a singular large megadungeon, rather than a broader sandbox with a town or towns and multiple dungeons near it. I ran several of those in previous years, which you can read about in here, but a megadungeon had mostly alluded me. The restarted Greylands campaign which I played with my partners did end up generally being a megadungeon one, with them more or less just spending the time exploring Dyson's Delve, and I thought it worked quite well.

For Zandan I originally was going to have a town and then the dungeon either next or under it, but eventually decided to ignore the town part in general (as I had struggled to do much of any writing) and so just started players in the dungeon itself, and kept them there. The Domovoi Camp on Depth 1 of the dungeon served as a safe place and "town" of sorts for these purposes.

This one I would say overall was a success. I felt that in general I enjoyed the megadungeon as a primary focus of play, and in my experience the players that attended did so too.

Run a campaign using a dungeon of my own design

In all of my previous OSR campaigns I had done some amount of writing and setting building myself, but for the meat and potatoes of them I mostly just used published dungeons that I would usually tweak, reskin and hack to fit my setting better. I enjoy this type of play a lot, however I wanted to try and challenge myself and write and run something entirely of my own making.

And boy was it challenging. Between real life stress and disruptions and general lack of writing focused stuff like a dungeon location, I found the process of creating my dungeon to be slow, tedious and difficult. I feel like I have some good ideas in there, but probably not enough to really fill out the two and a half floors I have written. The process of drawing the map itself was also not really enjoyable to me, as I tried several different ways of doing it before settling on drawing it in Dungeon Scrawl.

The first idea I had was to rip off the excellent Nightwick by Miranda Elkins, and just make some geomorphs for my dungeon. However I abandoned that quickly.

Then I decided to just use one of those random dungeon generators online that either use pre-made geomorphs from others, or just spit out a mess of rooms and corridors. Those were okay, but I found them hard to edit afterwards.

Next I decide I was going to just draw the dungeon myself, which I tried to do on paper and hated the process so much I only got one and a half floors done.

Finally I ended up with dungeon scrawl, which I had used to draw a few maps for our house game, and I found fairly easy to use. It did lead to weirdness like rooms not aligning to the grid (mostly because I find the Dungeon Scrawl grid kind of hard to use), but I also didn't care about that as I was the only person who was going to look at the maps anyway.

A main regret I have with the dungeon is trying to be fancy with the shapes and size of rooms, making the place feel both way too big and way too small at the same time. Were I to redo it, I would likely just go mostly to rectangular rooms for most places, even ones that it wouldn't make sense (as that would actually enhance the feeling of being in an alien environment).

It worked okay on the in-person table, as I use small wooden blocks to basically draw out a map of the room (or however much players can see) on the table itself, and that has worked quite well so far and also helps the mapper as it shows them the general shape of rooms. It was a bit of a pain when play testing it online, and trying to explain to someone how to draw the strangely curved rooms, but so it goes.

However, beyond map nonsense, the stocking itself was...okay. I enjoy the idea of having small sub-levels for levels, as well as ways to connect different levels to each other and have themed sections of the dungeon, however I think I kind of ran out of stuff to really put in it pretty quickly. In total I think I have less than 100 actual keyed locations in the dungeon, and that's not very mega of it.

A positive from this though is that on a week to week basis I did not need to do much of any additional work or prep, as I had everything already written out and ready. The legwork put in earlier as I was writing it paying off big time.

So overall I would count this one as a wash. I don't think I failed in any way, but i am not satisfied with the results either.

Run a campaign for at least one calendar year

Well this one is obviously a failure throughout, as the whole thing only ran for 9 sessions. The follow up subgoal of running a campaign for 100 sessions is obviously also not happening.

See how viable Tunnels & Trolls is for OSR megadungeon play

Now, yes, T&T is a classic and I am fond of it, however comparing my dungeon, and something like Dungeon of the Bear (see my bookclub posts on that) the two really are nothing alike. The version of T&T I used was a hacked together of mostly 5th and 7th edition rules and ideas, with no classes and using Adventure Points to directly level ability scores, rather than as levels (which in T&T only work to raise your ability scores anyway).

This campaign was also a way for me to try out T&T's highly abstract combat as a possible approach to combat in dungeoncrawling games in general, as I mentioned years ago at the end of my "Boring Combat" post.

So, unfortunately due to the short length of the campaign I did not quite get to see how character advancement using this ruleset would pan out, however in the short term I was staring to grow rather dissatisfied with it. Primarily I find that when every player character can use spells there is no reason to not have every character learn every spell the party has access to, which ends up homogenizing the characters a bit more than I like. Yes, attributes do change what kind of gear and weapons they can use, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.

Part of that is of course on me, as a referee I could have simply made it impossible for PCs to teach each other spells, but it is still worth nothing I feel.

Then there is the combat. Due to the nature of the party (mostly Talking Animals) the players did not actively pick fights too often during the campaign, and when they did an issue with T&T combat presented itself - it can be rather swingy. While spells, ranged attacks and stunts can affect that, they can also worsen it as an issue. The best example for me was the "fight" with the Basilisk, which mostly came down to a surprise roll. Had the party failed (and they were very close), he likely would have killed at least 1-2 of the PCs, and from there probably the rest of the party. Instead they saw it in time and used magic to basically one-shot it.

A potential solution would be to run single powerful enemies as "groups" of enemies instead, say giving different body parts their own MR, and making it so you can not just kill it in one single attack. Maybe something to do in a future T&T game! Another solution is a broader one - have longer sessions. The last session involved the party having to fight to make it all the way back to the safety of camp, and they ran out of ability scores to use for spell casting quite quickly. However that is not much of a solution as I try and keep the sessions I run short, since for a weekly game I find longer sessions tend to wear me out over time.

In general, I think T&T as it stands is not really a better solution for what I want out of "boring" combat, and OD&D is still likely better for that. Hence why I suspect my next game will go back to some kind of classic D&D as the baseline rules set.

So this goal I would say was mostly a mixed success.

What Worked

I am quite content with the variety of dangers and encounters within my dungeon. I think I managed to get enough Slavic folklore vibes in there, at least with the parts the players have encounters. That was not really a stated goal, but still something I was trying to do and it worked.

I really liked how the general encounter with the Goat that the players had played out, and it did indeed feel like a horror monster and even after they killed it, exploring its lair made the players kind of on edge about what the hell they had just encountered.

As stated above, writing all of the dungeon myself I think I did a good enough job that I did not have to really add much to it week to week, and it likely would have sustained at least another dozen sessions of play with what I have right now, save maybe for having to add new stuff if players are actively looking for unexplored territory. The legwork I put in was not a lot, and it took me a long time to do, but it paid off.

Also, the backgrounds I wrote as part of character generation are I think quite good, and most people who've read them seem to agree. You can find them in THIS player document.

Finally, I think my scheme for awarding Adventure Points (xp by another name) for exploration works quite well, especially in a level-less game as a benchmark for how far the characters have gotten, since all new party members start by automatically getting the exploration XP awared at character generation.

What Didn't Work

I think the idea of a dungeon town is solid, but I also think I did not do enough with it with the Domovoi Camp.

Related to that, using debt and then barter worked in not having to figure out why the fuck people in this horrible murderhole care about money, but ultimately it felt too wishy-washy and a bit hard on me to track. I think I should have just gone with underground coins and moved on with my life.

As I said above, the system overall did not work amazing. It had some good bits, and I like T&T in general, but it did not quite work for what I wanted out of this megadungeon. So it would mean either changing the system to suit the dungeon, or changing the dungeon to suit the system. In either case that is a lot more work that I don't think has enough payoff to be worth it.

And the big one - my attempt at having a semi-open table did not really work out at all. My first Greylands campaign and my Between the Serpents of Smoke & Steel campaign both were open tables - I advertised the games, and anyone could come in and join if they wanted to. It still had diminishing returns - I had a lot more players in the Greylands than I did for BSSS, but that was counteracted by having a core of 4 players that were there most of the sessions.

With Zandan I wanted to keep things a bit close - it was something I had written myself, it was a bit of an off-kilter system, and so I did not want the added hassle of annoying players. As such, I invited a bunch of people I knew and thought might have an interest in it, with the understanding that like an open table people don't have to show up for every single session.

The end result of that was, unfortunately, that for a good chunk of the sessions I only had 2 or 3 players. While that's not normally a problem, for these types of games (at least in person) I deeply prefer to have at least 4, ideally 5 people at the table. I find the extra players add to the energy of the session and help move things at a good pace, despite attempts to waff about with endless circular discussions. However, the fact remains that when you run OSR stuff, more often than not, the people who are explicitly there to play OSR stuff are also the players you are least likely to want at your table. Yes I do have actual specific people in mind, before you ask.

This is, like I said, probably the biggest failure of this campaign and what ultimately contributed to me deciding not to continue it. Which in turn means that this point is going to be the one where I have to most think on how I want to approach whatever I end up running in January - do I concede the in-person aspect and run a game online? Upside there is easy access to good players, downside is that it's online. Do I go back to aggressively advertising my game? Upside - higher likelihood of fuller tables, downside - you have no fucking idea who's going to show up and stink up the place. Do I try and just have a consistent group of players? Upside - you can experiment with not having to return people back to town between sessions and it makes stopping in the middle of the dungeon more viable. Downside - it just ain't happening lol. I do not have 4+ people that I can rely on to be there every session for a weekly game.

Some personal thoughts and observations

Don't know where else to fit these, so putting it here. I suspect another problem with the campaign is it might have been set up for failure from the start. I was running a niche within a niche (megadungeon crawl, as opposed to broader sandbox+dungeon crawl), I was running something that is completely unfamiliar to everyone who interacted with the game (T&T), and finally, I was planning on starting this campaign in 2024.

I did not, as you can tell by looking at my blog. In fact I barely did any work on it in 2024, as that was a very rough year for me in terms of stress and disruption to my life. 2025 was a bit better, which is why I manged to write up enough of a dungeon to get going, but even then concessions were made. The dungeon could and should have been bigger. The spell list should have been better, but I did not have the energy and so the "Good Enough" of simply using the default T&T spells had to do. And also, while I was hyped up to run this...hyping yourself up can only go so far without running something.

And I have been stuck thinking about this campaign since the tail end of 2023. That is almost 2 years before actually getting it started, and by the time I did I think I just felt tired and done with it already. And with fewer players at the table, there was not enough energy there to help sustain me when my own had ran out.

The puzzling thing with this campaign is that most of the individual sessions were very good. Some better, some less so, but I don't think we've really had a proper stinker in those 9. And yet while the sessions were fun, the campaign as a whole just felt like it never quite started. And in my experience so far, session 10-ish is about where a campaign really properly starts. Where people have had enough time with the setting, the PCs and so on to really see if this is going to be a thing or not. While I ended BSSS due to travel, I also had not felt great about the setting towards the end and decided to not continue it. A shame, since it's probably some of my best work I've done.

But my Greylands campaigns, both of them? I likely could have just continued with those for a while longer if I did not have to deal with disruptions.

So it's not like I am simply fickle and easily bored, though to be fair I am, and so I have to try and work around that character flaw. But I also crave the sustained play of a long weekly campaign. About 10 sessions in you can start seeing it, and it just builds and builds from there. That is still a gaming experience I desire and crave, and so I have to figure out what to change and adjust so that I can have it.

Campaign Stats

With only 9 sessions it was not much of a campaign, but I am still doing this goddamit!

Final Word

In the end I want to say thank you to everyone who has played in at least one session of Zandan, and to everyone who have offered encouragement as I worked on it and as I ran it. I appreciate it deeply.

#Campaign #Megadungeon #OSR #Retrospective #Tunnels & Trolls #Zandan