The World's Largest Dungeon

Upon finding out that the maps for The World’s Largest Dungeon are available online for free I just about made a mess in my pants.

For about 9 years I’ve had a copy of the book The World’s Largest Dungeon (TWLD). It is a supplement by AEG for Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition. When released it was a $100 book with over 800 pages, 16 full color poster sized maps, and it even came with a couple miniatures from Reaper. The thing is a work of art. It is designed with the express purpose of taking up to 2 years real time to get through from start to finish. During one of the many moves I had while in the navy, all of the maps for this book were lost and I was really upset about it. It has sat on my shelves waiting for me to find a use for it ever since. At least until now.

The book also claims that it uses “every monster” in the 3.0 Monster Manual. Which is partially true, it doesn’t use regular animals and it doesn’t use every single version of things. For example they use a single Sphinx in the entire dungeon and you will never see the other two types. There are also a lot of things that have odd templates added to them as well. I haven’t read all of it over the years because I want to keep it a surprise, but from what I hear they are at least interesting.

The whole concept for it is really neat too. The Dungeon that the PCs wander into is essentially a completely sealed prison for celestial beings forgotten for an untold number of millennia. It is filled with some of the most dangerous creatures in the game and has been reshaped from its original design by countless beings and natural disasters. The dungeon is designed to take a single party on a one way journey (because the entrance is a one way wall of force and the entire thing is sealed against interdimensional transportation) starting at level 1 and taking you to level 20 at the end.

It is rough, difficult, and unforgiving. This thing is one of the most brutal endurance tests of the gaming world. Oh how I wish I could play this. I haven’t met many gamers who haven’t wanted to take a crack at it. It is a challenge that we all have wanted to take on at some point just for the bragging rights. No one ever does though because of how big of a commitment it is. Plus, outside of my high school gaming group, I don’t think I’ve ever had a gaming group that I’ve had 2 or more continuous years with gaming on a nearly weekly basis. I think the group we had on board the boat is the second closest and we were getting interrupted by that whole “deployment” thing every once in a while.

As much as I love the campaign I’m currently playing in it just happens far too infrequently due to a variety of real life factors to satisfy my relapsed addiction to tabletop gaming. I also want to practice my GM skills to hone my very dull instincts. Then there’s also the want to try out many different and bizarre character builds that have been running around my head for a while. I also want an excuse to be gaming more often; enjoying the great nerdy gathering that is a game night. Mostly I just want the company of fellow nerds on a regular basis, oh how I miss it.

So, as much as I’d like to run TWLD I know I can’t realistically get a dedicated and enjoyable group together to run it. Not without making the game flexible. Plus there will always be the inevitable GM burnout that can kill a game as well. If I were to run this I would need to have a rotating GM, a flexible player base, and a regularly scheduled session with casual requirements for who is playing and who isn’t.

While thinking about those requirements I remembered something I had thought of back when I first picked up the book. It could be run in an X-Crawl campaign. Then an idea started forming in my head. If this was used in an X-Crawl style tournament or marathon, then we could just do it in a completely casual and semi-goofy style. Maybe X-Crawl isn’t necessary, but it gives us a viable story-like reason to justify it. Basically I just want to run a 4thcore style gaming group every couple of weeks using TWLD as the primary module.

I want to play some good old fashioned dungeon crawls with no real storyline and/or run some classic modules in addition to using the world’s largest dungeon. I want some min-maxed powergaming with a flexible group of people who are there to kill some monsters and take their stuff.

I guess X-Crawl isn’t needed in all reality. We can just do some hardcore dungeon crawling on a virtual tabletop in non-sequitur dungeons while enjoying silly game mechanics. I think I might explore this concept a little bit more.

More on this later. I've got some numbers to run and things to look up. There might be some conversion issues because of 3.0 vs Pathfinder, but I doubt that it's much of an issue.