Fire Citadel of the Dragon Kings

Today has been a monumentally creative one for my Mistamere Fells Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Inspired by yesterday’s play and my forthcoming plunderous adventures in Rappan Athuk, I have begun work on my very own mega-dungeon – the Fire Citadel of the Dragon Kings.

It’s fair to say that, ever since playing Barrowmaze and then planning for a foray into Rappan Athuk, the idea of the mega-dungeon has proven a lot of fun. The big problem as a Dungeon Master, however, is the one best summed up by Peter V. Dell’Orto in his blog article on the same:

“You need to become intimately familiar with someone else’s work. Not only that, but they need to have written in a way that’s accessible on a read-through, clearly communicates intent, and which is easy to use in actual play. You get that with any published adventure or setting. But the scope of a megadungeon can make this so much harder.” – (“OPM – the problems running Other People’s Megadungeons“, Dungeon Fantastic, 5th May 2016)

The answer, of course, is to write your own. Except if, like me, you’re too scared.

Taking the Plunge

So what has changed? Interesting question. In short, I read Peter V. Dell’Orto’s entire blog content on mega-dungeons – filled with awesome advice and suggestions – and felt that I could give it a go. There are other posts out there too, many of which are referenced by Peter, but he basically inspired me to make the attempt.

One image haunted my dreaming last night: the Fire Citadel, high in the Mistamere Peaks, waiting for my players to plunder her.

Step One: Sketch a Side-view Map

The difficult thing about writing about a dungeon some of your readers will play in is that you don’t want spoilers. For that reason, I’m not showing a clear picture of the current draft map… but I am happy to show some photos taken of portions of the early draft, albeit covered in dice.

Guys from my table, if you’re reading this just promise not to spend too much time zooming in the maps. 🙂

First, I took some advice and drew out a side-view of the great mountain volcano that is home to the Citadel. With that in place, I can start to sketch out the interior maps of the first few levels – in line with the advice to draw a couple of rooms every day, come what may.

Ideas flowed freely and, after an hour or so, I had a workable initial sketch. There’s lots of white space there, which is deliberately left so it can be filled in as the mega-dungeon grows. It’s truly a vast location – some levels are perhaps 2000-2500 feet in length – but it really fired up my gaming heart!

Step Two: Draft The Backstory

I wrote two chunks of backstory for the Citadel – both the “official legend” and the “secret story” – and I’m quite happy to share the first draft of the legend. It starts something like this…

It is said that, perhaps three thousand years ago, the ancient Fire Mountain fell silent. At this time, at the birth of the great Dragon King Empire, the three Great Drakes flew to the mountain and desired it as their home. In time, so the legends say, the Dragon Kings raised an army of slaves and drove them high into the Mistamere Peaks to the foot of Fire Mountain. Here, in an act of sheer hubris, the Dragon Kings forged the Fire Citadel.

Deep below the mountain, the Dragon Kings ordered their Dwarven slaves to construct mighty flame forges which tapped the very power of the mountain, channelling molten magma to heat the furnaces. Using a grand elevator that is said to have run through the heart of the mountain, prodigious quantities of metal goods flooded into the Empire. Traders would haul the goods on mighty wagons out to the surface and then distribute them across the land.

This stage was a lot of fun because I got to outline how the various elements on my map got to be there. I also got to differentiate between the knowledge that is relatively easily obtainable for players, and the rest of the secrets that get revealed through play. As Matt Finch and Bill Webb write:

“The backstory is the answer to a question: what happened to change this location from a normal place into a dangerous place of adventure, with treasures and monsters? Players love to discover the answer to this question, and an adventure feels incomplete, from the players’ perspective, if it ends without this loose end being tied up.” – (“Tome of Adventure Design“,  2011, page 7)

Step Three: Update The Local Hex-maps

Updated map at 6 miles per hex.

When I first ran the First Adventure from the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons Red Box, I created a local hex-map for Mistamere Fells. Grabbing a copy of one of the Hex-crawl Worksheets from the d30 Sandbox Companion, I sketched out the local area in 1-mile hexes.

With my recent decision to use a different village map for Woodfell, I realised that I needed to re-work the local map.

Given the desire to orientate the Fire Citadel to the village, and wanting to show where the newly visited Lost Tombs of the Dragon Knights lay too, I decided to re-draw that map. In fact, I went one step further and sketched a hex-map at 6-mile scale to match the movement rates possible when playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Next Step: Begin Mapping!

This afternoon, I’ll begin mapping out the first few locations at the Fire Gate entrance to the Citadel. This is my projected first adventure area and promises to be a lot of fun to create. I have a bundle of cool ideas racing around that, frankly, need to get drawn out and written down.

I’m excited to get things to a place where we can start play within a week or so. It’s likely that, given the usual schedule of the Friday Night Gamers, we’ll not start this mega-dungeon until well into September. That said, with the new school term starting, what I want to be able to do is run the mega-dungeon with any of the three groups I Dungeon Master with. The plan, albeit seemingly audacious, is to update and develop the dungeon in response to each group’s delve.

With that, I’m off to score some lunch and then get back to the map paper.

Game on!