[OD&D] Halenar Frosthelm: One Million Room Mega-Dungeon –001

[ThePerilousDreamer]

This dungeon is part of the Ruins of Murkhill campaign, with the name coming from the first game session of the campaign that started on July 11th of 2009.

Murkhill is the name of the large walled village that is located on a hill that rises 3500 feet above the broad flat plain that surrounds it. The main reason for the village location is the pure clean water that flows from a powerful artesian (magical) well in the center of the hilltop at a constant temperature of 34°F. Since the whole center of the hilltop is a rough jumbled mess of large stones covered with some soil, trees and grasses the village is built on the south facing side of the hilltop and a 1000 foot wide meadow rings the remainder of the hilltop.

The hilltop itself is somewhat rectangular and the rough jumbled area measures about 5000 ft. by 8000 ft. in size (1.4348 sq. miles or 918+ acres). The area of the entire hilltop is approximately 1607 acres.

The artesian (magical) well produces water that wells up about 8 feet above the original courtyard level and the well opening is 20 ft. in diameter at the surface and the water flows without any seasonal variation. The water emerges from the jumbled area in polished granite channels the at each of the four different points (each of the four directions) and the channels extend all the way down the hillside and out to a quarter mile distance from the hill where each channel ends and four large streams begin. None of the jumbled mess seems to have interfered with the well in any way.

There are additional flows of water coming out of the hillside into the channel at many different points that all together quintuple the flow of water in each of the channels. Once the dungeon was re-discovered, it was eventually learned that an unknown number of taps into the central vertical channel of the artesian (magical) well exist. Other knowledge is that the diameter of the artesian (magical) well at the level of the surrounding plain is 100 ft.

When the PCs showed up and started investigating a breach into the dungeon from a supposed surface collapse, they figured out that the entire jumbled area are the ruins of what used to be a large castle and city contained within walls estimated to have been 20 feet thick and extending 30 feet into the air and 60 feet into the bedrock.

There is a roadway that starts at the center of each face of the hill at the base and by the time it makes one trip all the way around the hill the four starting points have joined and they continue around the hill as a single 60 ft. wide paved roadway that circles the hill all the way to the top where it ends at the village on the south side of the hilltop.

More to follow about the area and then after that I will get into describing the dungeon. Room by room and level by level. It would be a miracle if by any chance I ever post any drawings. All of my drawings are produced on the fly and are very rough and dirty and not remotely suitable to post, sorry about that.


Disclaimer: Please note that anything I post in any thread I create here in the Workshop is solely intended to illuminate what I do IMCs and, where applicable, the reasoning behind it. Anything I post here in the Workshop, is not intended to comment in anyway on anything you do in your campaign or on any opinion or belief that you may or may not hold in regard to anything, but to solely and exclusively be my opinion as it relates to my campaigns and game worlds alone.

[SamualT. Barronsword]

Sounds like an ambitious project. I'm interested in seeing what emerges.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

Sounds like an ambitious project. I'm interested in seeing what emerges.

Thank you!

However, in fact there was no surface collapse into the dungeon and eventually it was learned that the original dungeon dating back at least 15,000 years was capped with a 20 ft. thick cap of unknown material with only one entrance left accessible, but sealed. On top of that cap there were two levels of “dungeon” consisting mainly of storage and with a small prison area. On top of that was built the castle and the city. This “dungeon” had many openings into corresponding areas above. It was estimated that the city and castle were demolished about 3000 years ago give or take a few hundred years or so. When this occurred, the “dungeon” was also destroyed. Therefore, the dungeon that remains is the original pre-cap dungeon. After the original single access through the cap was located the breach into the dungeon mysteriously disappeared.

Before the breach disappeared, the PCs lowered themselves down with ropes several times before they began searching for a better way in. After the breach disappeared they had little choice but to clear the access stairway. That alone took them several weeks.

I hope to soon start posting the rooms with comments. This thread is numbered 001 since I am guessing if I live long enough to finish this project it will take over 600 threads of about 3000 posts each (5 rooms to a post) to complete the project. But at least this project should keep me out of trouble, as I avoid all the other forums like the plague.

As it becomes necessary I will add an index to this post. I have debated how I will number the rooms for you and I have decided that I will number them as follows L-001 would be Level one and L-095 would be Level ninety-five and so on. Each level has between 5000 to 60,000 rooms per level, so the room number is noted as R-00001 for room number one and R-00957 would be room number nine hundred and fifty-seven and so on. The total line for each room will read L-001, R-00001 and so on. Sub-Levels are designated as L-001A, L-001B and so on.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

The well, previously noted, is located in the exact center of the site and immediately to the southwest of the well is the main staircase that goes down into the first level of the dungeon. The total distance from the surface of the cap to the base of the stairway is about 40 feet. The stair way has treads about 20 feet in width leading downward and the stairway is composed of granite and marble. At the base of the stair way is a large room (L-001, R-00001) that is 50 wide and 80 feet long. This room was partially filled with debris with was cleaned out by the PCs. There were various stands and benches in the room as well as a fountain. Nothing of any real value is present in the room and there are eight door ways leading out of it, two in each of the four directions, equally spaced along the walls. The marble floor, walls and ceilings are covered in designed formed by inlaid stones depicting scenes from battles and other momentous occasions. All of the doorways had very heavy oaken doors with steel reinforcing and were found in an unlocked condition but were very difficult to open. All of the doors opened into the stairway room.

Perhaps I should clarify, there are about 40 stairways from the 1st level running up to the surface, these are covered by the cap that was installed long after the dungeon was built and the original builders were gone, the dungeon was used for thousands of years before the cap was installed and someone, as noted above, knows how to breach the cap and restore it. There are other openings that lead from the dungeon out to the outside world on the sides of the hill, those are currently undiscovered, well hidden on the outside and sealed. I am presenting this dungeon as it was for the first few months after the players arrived.

So what I am going to do is present the dungeon as it was in a certain period of time and occasionally give you glimpses of what happened later in one reality. One of those snippets is to let you know that about 3 months in all of the stairways were revealed and open and that caused the players some problems and anxious moments.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

I like multiple dimensions and alternate realities. The megadungeon beneath The Ruins of Murkhill has many portals. Portals come in different colors and types. The types are as follows: fixed portals which are always found in the same place, moving portals which are found in a specific area of the dungeon but vary in their location within that area, and random portals which can appear any place throughout the dungeons at any time. Every so often in addition to a wandering monster roll, there is a wandering portal roll. All of these portals show up in corridors or doorways. There are also portals that show up in certain types of rooms. If you enter any room that has more than six visible doors it is possible that some of the doors are portals to somewhere else. Rooms that rotate, spin or move in odd ways also may have portals involved.

The portals show up as a faint shimmer in the air and if players are running/fleeing something it is possible that they can pass through a portal before they realize that they are doing so, which is why I introduced them to portals that just appeared ahead of them so that they knew it could happen and is one of the risk of blindly fleeing in this dungeon. That faint shimmer in the air can be black, brown, red, orange, green, yellow, blue, purple, violet, gray, white, silver, and gold. The color tells you specially or generally where you might be transported modified by the type (fixed, moving or random. The only thing I will reveal about the portals right now is that it should be easily guessed that the black portals lead to certain death so you might lead or drive a monster(s) into it.

What the players have discovered so far is that:

Fixed portals of brown always transport you to the same location somewhere else on the level you are on. Fixed portals of yellow always transport you to the same location somewhere else on several levels deeper than the one you are on. Fixed portals of gray always transport you to the same location somewhere else many levels deeper that the level you are on.

Moving portals of blue always transport you to some other dimension, apparently an alternate version of the world you started on. Random portals of silver transport you to somewhere else on the same planet a very long way away.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

From (L-001, R-00001) the two doors on the north wall open into a long corridor and along this corridor there are 3-way intersections and at the next intersection north each of those intersections are 4-way until the northernmost intersection is reached and those are also 3-way intersections. This area was the dungeons cell part of the dungeons and consists of rooms L-001, R-00002 through L-001, R-35022). This are covers 2500 X 8000 or 20,000,000 square feet and there are 10,000 cells of 100 sqft., 10,000 cells of 400 sqft., 10,000 cells of 1000 sqft. and the remaining space is taken up by corridors, store rooms, torture rooms, gladiator style areas, experimentation rooms, guard rooms, barracks and many other miscellaneous rooms. There are fountains located and spaced throughout, some still running and others that seem to have been turned off. These areas are the least interesting of the entire dungeon, with most rooms filled with piles of rust, bones that disintegrate at any touch, and such like. This is also one of the areas the easiest to get lost in since so much of it looks alike in every direction. However, there are some surprises hidden in this area and perhaps to someone it might be worth taking a look and over the last 10 years some new occupants have started to move in.

[ThePerilousDreamer]

From (L-001, R-00001) the two doors on the east wall open into a large open room (L-001, R-35023) with raised stepped seating on all four sides. There are access corridor from the cell corridor immediately to the north. The walled center area is 200 feet wide and 400 feet in length with a sand floor. This appears to have been an arena where prisoners were brought to fight for entertainment. There are many stairways visible in this area that lead up to the cap above that was placed over this dungeon.

From (L-001, R-00001) the two doors on the west wall open into a very similar, but much smaller room (L-001, R-35024). This area also has seating but arranged more for small parties or groups and with all of the intricate carvings and other richly appointed details appears to have been for the nobility and royalty to witness special entertainment. The center area here is 100 feet wide and 100 feet long for much closer and better viewing. One especially opulent area was surely intended for use only by the King.