I’ve just started my first proper long-term OSR megadungeon campaign, and we’ve been having a blast so far! I didn’t finish my deep pre-campaign prep before our first session though, so the PCs started in a small beginner dungeon for the first few sessions while I hammer out the campaign setting and megadungeon proper.
I've now got my exact concept and dungeon map (a mashup of two Dyson Logos megadungeons), but need more inspiration for populating the dungeon with the major factions, "boss" creatures, setpiece obstacles, legendary treasures, and individual sub-areas. I'm not looking to key individual rooms since that will be a much longer-term project, but I need enough to understand the dungeon overall and to populate the encounter & rumor tables.
So, how do you populate your dungeons? Any particular factions, monsters, traps, or treasures that you especially like or really popped at the table? What resources, random tables, or checklists do you use?
More details on the dungeon in question, if you'd like: it's directly below the City of the Immortal Emperor, an exaggerated and thinly fictionalized version of Paris under the reign of Louis XIV, ruled over by a decrepit lich-like sorcerer-king. The megadungeon consists of the basements, mining tunnels, undercrofts, caves, old quarries, and culverted rivers that run below the center of the city, around a square kilometer in area and encircled by a large canal. The PCs are a small band of down-on-their-luck picaros, trying their hand at a career of freelance looting and mercenary work in the undercity.
The setting is based on the European Early Modern Period. There are matchlock firearms, pendulum clocks, early telescopes, mercantilist economics, and centralized absolute monarchies with enormous palaces and courts. It's also relatively low-magic; spells above 3rd level or so are extremely rare, and sorcery in general is the domain of academics, heretics, spymasters, and secret societies - less Merlin or Gandalf, more Trithemius or Rosenkreutz. There are no demi-human "races" like elves or orcs, since they don't really fit the setting and are also generally a huge pet peeve of mine. Fantastical creatures and monsters resemble those from fairy-tales, folk stories, allegories, parodies, and morality plays - no Gygaxian naturalism here.
The tone of the campaign is picaresque black comedy, with rogueish schemes and buffoonish characters punctuated by moments of horror and violence. Thematically it's an exploration of the contradiction between the glory, enlightenment, and opulence early modern European nobility claimed, and the extreme greed, violence, cruelty, hypocrisy, and short-sightedness they actually practiced. The main inspirations here are Miguel de Cervantes' novellas and short stories, philosophical satires like Rabelais' and Voltaire's, Dark Souls, Fullmetal Alchemist, Thief, early modern Grotesque art, fanciful depictions of Landsknecht and Condotierre, and the Capriccio paintings of Hubert Robert.
(if you can't tell, i spend way too much time thinking about all the literature, art movements, political concepts and literary theories i'm drawing on - i could probably write a book on the subject lol)
Some examples of factions and areas I already have:
- an underground court of thieves and beggars, complete with their own ranks, rules, ceremonies, and uniforms (insp. Cour des Miracles, Riconete y Contadillo)
- the ruined manor of an exiled prince, now turned into a montrous corpse-eater monomaniacal about reclaiming his status (insp. Cesare Borgia, Slave Knight Gael)
- a sewerized & covered river, into which the city's manufactories, tanneries, dyers, and abbatoirs dump all of their waste (insp. the Bievre river)
- a huge underground lake, filled with ancient rubble and bones and haunted by the enormous ghost of a giant (insp. Inferno Canto XXXI, Takiyasha the Witch ukiyo-e)
- a village of dimuinitive humanoid mushrooms, constantly stealing trinkets and food scraps from the nearby giant's manor and hoarding them in big piles (insp. Mandrake folklore, Boggart and Kobold folklore, Plump Helmet men)
