The Huge Ruined Pile

This is D & D

First, the referee must draw out a minimum of half a dozen maps of the levels of his “underworld”, people them with mon- sters of various horrid aspect, distribute treasures accordingly, and note the loca- tion of the latter two on keys, each corresponding to the appropriate level. This operation will be more fully described in the third volume of these rules. When this task is completed the participants can then be allowed to make their first descent into the dungeons beneath the “huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses”.

There's something magical in the very concept of The Huge Ruined Pile. All in all, what do we know about megadungeons? I think basically three things:

1. They're big, so much so as to be virtually endless.
2. They're old, so that each and every level has been colonized by dozens of different civilizations.
3. They're dynamic, so much so that levels are never the same whenever you enter them.

Most people (including illustrious ones), tend to bother about the megadungeon's background, treating it as an unicum. Think about Moria, Dwimmermourt, Rappan Athuk, and others. So what about the ruined pile?

Let's say no one in particular has built The Megadungeon. Perhaps a Mad Archmage started to build the first levels, and eventually abandoned the project to leave the Multiverse for more interesting places. Then the dwarves came, and found the work half started. Great! The dwarves decided to dig a little more and renovate the architecture. Then, after hundreds of years of reign, a dragon came and claimed the pile for himself. Cool one. The dragon eventually destroyed much of what the dwarves had done, except for the very secret tunnels. Then the dragon hibernated. Some dozen years later, the Drow found the dungeon while digging some tunnels to expand their city. Look at that, now you have an entire new dungeon to merge! Then eventually the Drow found a secret chamber buried a dozen miles beneath the surface, and actually opened it. Bad choice, there was a Balrog in it! Thus the Balrog devastated some of the lower levels, and various demons took possession of them. In the meantime, a new powerful sorcerer has arrived in the realm, and building his own dungeon (I'll never understand why sorcerers bother so much with dungeons) (no wait, now I get it: because is fun, that's it!) eventually found the one built by his predecessor and owned by the dwarves. And so on, ad infinitum.

So why even bother with background?

On the other hand, there's the other kind of megadungeon: the one where there actually is a goal. Or prize, if you prefer. Perhaps the dungeon was built by a single mad wizard, who has buried the secret for immortality in its deepest recesses. Weirdly enough, no actual example of this kind of megadungeon jumps into my mind when I close my eyes. And this is strange, since this is the way pop culture often represents dungeon crawling. Understandable, by the way: who can believe D & D players delve into dungeons just for the sake of killing monsters, taking their stuff, solving mysteries and gaining more and more power and loot? And, even worse, that the game has no such thing as an ending? This would pretty much scare the hell out of me if I wasn't introduced to D & D when I was still a young and impressionable kid.

Having never played in a megadungeon campaign, I couldn't really say which of these would work better in actual gaming. Perhaps I'm a little more inclined to The Pile, but maybe it is just because it sounds so cool?