Make Sure of Your Wilderness Travel Rules

 Do not make my mistake. Make sure your wilderness travel rules are set in stone before drawing the map.

Guilt Free Bags of HP

 Complexity is good. Thinking deeply is good. That said, always have some faction that is just purely evil as sometimes players want a guilt free reason to have combat. Undead are great for this purpose.

50 Years

D&D is 50 years old this year and the hobby of roleplaying is not much older than that. It is astonishing to think how long it took for roleplaying to be invented considering the only technology needed is access to something to write on and something to write with.

It is an exciting time to be alive!

Selling a Megadungeon Crawl to Players: The First Delve

What makes a megadungeon great, the part that makes you excited as a referee to run it, you need to show the players this experience, all of it, during their first delve.

A megadungeon is a hard sell to players and you need to sell it right from the get-go. Yes, megadungeons get better the more you delve them, but if you do not convince the players that it is worth coming back for a second delve, they will never experience the deeper play.

This means players need a taste of:

Faction play, not just meeting a faction, but learning how to join them and how to manipulate them.

Mapping the dungeon leading to dungeon knowledge that they can use to have an advantage over the dungeon's inhabitants.

Choices and mechanisms in the megadungeon that impact the entire floor.

Small amounts of the lore of the megadungeon and hint at a hidden and strange history.

Rooms with radically different scenery. Assure them that just because it is a megastructure that this doesn't mean it will all be the same.

The weird. The idea that really, anything could be down here.

If this seems like a lot, it is because it is. I don't know how to incorporate all of this into one session, but I think we should be attempting it.