Megadungeon Monday: Introduction

I introduced the idea here for my Tuesday Talkies (and have failed to follow-up since then).  As fantasy language creation is one of my many interests, I decided that each Tuesday I will post about how my efforts at that are going.

I'm here to introduce another weekly feature that, I hope, will become a standard here at Carto Cacography: Megadungeon Mondays.  Here is my thinking:

If you followed any one of the many megadungeon discussions that took place last year, whether in the blogosphere, at EN World, at Knights & Knaves (more specifically here), or elsewhere, a common idea is that one easy method of building a megadungeon is to create a few specific locations (areas, set pieces, or whatever term you prefer) per level and let everything that happens between them be generated randomly or on the fly by the DM.  I actually really like this method as I believe that it lends to the organic or living nature of true megadungeons.  I also think that it relieves the DM of a lot of possible work: He can concentrate his efforts on the really cool encounters or locales within the megadungeon and spend less time on the stuff in between.

In support of that, I'm going to present what I will call a "Location of Interest" each Monday for inclusion into your megadungeon or campaign.  Usually it will be in the form of a map with a few paragraphs explaining what I see when I look at the map.  It will not be fully keyed and will never contain stats of any kind--I don't think that it will need those things to be useful.  Theoretically, you could take my location and drop it straight into your dungeon as is, or you could take the idea and leave the map, or you could use the map with your own idea.  I have ideas for several and, hopefully, more will pop into my head in the coming weeks.  Heck, I'll even take ideas from the readers and map them (if people are willing to contribute ideas).

I don't have one ready for this week but there will be one here next Monday.  I'll hope that you'll be here to take a look.

(You might think that this idea is similar to what Tony is trying to do over at year of the dungeon, and I would have to agree.  I love what he is doing there and think that his pieces are extremely inspirational.  Megadungeon Mondays are going to be a similar contribution from me.  [If they are even a fraction of how inspirational I believe Tony's work to be, it will be successful in my book.]  The major difference that I see when envisioning this is that his are more abstract--philosophical even--whereas mine will be little dungeon maps, grids and all, that would fit right onto your graph paper scribblings.)