The Megadungeon Part 1A: The Base of Operations

So for me, one of the first things I've always done when designing a Megadungeon is to focus not on the Megadungeon itself, but on the surrounding area, specifically, the Base of Operations.  This is important.  This is where the adventurers will go when they return from the Megadungeon [assuming that the DM creates a living world where it isn't safe to camp just outside the dungeon entrance, which I've seen in the past], this is where the adventurers will go to sell their items, to rest, to buy supplies, to learn things, and have brief adventures to take a break from the rigors of the Megadungeon but are not long enough to move the group away completely from the dungeon.

Part of the trick to keeping the group in the town is to make it interesting, to make the people interesting and to make the people in the town needed.  If a monster attacks the town and the group doesn't care, the DM is doing something wrong.

So before we go any further, we need to determine the size of the town.  Do we want a small town or do we want a metropolis?  Both would offer interesting options.  I read one book that had a guild designed solely to help adventurers explore the area beneath the city.  You could be members and depending on how much membership fees you could get help if you passed away.  That could be a neat option, but for me, I like the idea of the small town because it means that buying options are a lot more limited and it will make it more difficult for adventurers to resolve some situations because of the limited resources and options.  All in all it's a personal preference and it'll likely be possible to use most of what I'm doing in a small town like I'm planning or in a large city with the assumption that the people detailed are just a few people the group will meet rather than the primary inhabitants of the city.

So there are two steps to making the town interesting:

1) Interesting location/features
2) Interesting people

Well, I would also include a third, optional, way to make the town interesting:

3) Conflict within the town

So for my town, the primary interesting feature is that it's going to be located in the midst of a series of lakes and channels.  We're going to populate the lakes with some additional interesting things, but I'll cover that later.

As for interesting people, there only needs to be a handful of interesting people and truthfully, I believe this works well whether it is for a small town or a metropolis.  We don't need to detail every single people and make unique background stories for them all.  What we need to do is create some interesting people for the main places they may visit plus a couple of additional things they may not have expected but that we desire to add anyway.

And lastly, conflict within the town.  In my town, there is going to be two sets of conflicts, a conflict caused by a single serial killer and a conflict between differing factions within the town.  These conflicts can either be in the background and there to add flavor or they can be in the face of the group and they can be stuck in the middle of it.

To be continued...