[Fun]

[patricks]

Considering working on a delve - my term for a massive D&D dungeon designed to carry characters through three levels. Question: What kinds of underground ruins would you expect to find beneath the fallen towers of a wizard tyrant? Say, Isengard or Barad Dur?

Comments

[doccross]

Ooooh! Dungeon delve! Count me in if you want to run this.

Under Isengard, I reckon the first level or three would be the abandonded war machine ruins they showed in the movie (once the flood waters ran out) if you are going to use it after the events of LOTR. Below that, you'd possibly have living quarters for orcs and UrukHai...storage areas...prison cells...maybe a few secret rooms that Saruman used.

Below that, you could have the ever popular "natural caverns".

[patricks]

Trying to decide between 3e & 4e. Just picked up the 4e books at A1 Comics (20% off!) to check them out, since everyone says it's much easier to run & play.

[bobmungovan]

In a more general D&D sense, the Bestiary and/or Summoning Chamber and/or Laboratory come to my mind first.

[reapersaurus]

my idea would be (if we're talking a REAL powerful wizard like Sauron, etc) that under his fortress is where he'd be really trying to summon some serious magical shit - there would be entire caverns/rooms that were infused with magic.
It would be spilling over, during sorcerous experimentation/practice. There may be areas where magical powers would be elevated/heightened.
Maybe some areas where magic was completely burnt up during a particularly powerful summoning or artificing ritual.
Other areas might have spontaneously-appearing magical lifeforms or artifact creatures, almost like a spring flowing, or more accurately a magical pipe leaking/bursting and noone was around, or cared enough, to patch it up or maintain it. These forms probably would be more mutated or odd than actually powerful or useful to the big Wizard-guy.

Many other ideas could generate around the concept that it's a old munitions stockpile/factory long abandoned, but substitute magic concepts in for technological maintenance.

[reapersaurus]

Actually, why not make a connection between the eldritch energies that this uber-mage was working with, and meld it with the Cthulu monsters?

You could have the magickal summoning & artificing energies meld with some nightmare dimension and as you descend below the ruins, you encounter hideous monsters from some nameless dimension that phase in and out of our reality (walls shift between common wall mold and alien gook, etc).

Take advantage of your background knowledge in more than 1 system... make it easier for you.