Into the Megadungeon Episode 2 "Little Persistent Worlds"

I'm very excited to release Episode 2 of my podcast Into the Megadungeon. In this episode I interviewed Nick Kuntz about their megadungeon campaign, The Twilight Age. I've known Nick for a long time. They were one of the players in my long-running original Ultan's Door campaign, playing primarily as the saucy teenage gonif Mia. During the early hellish days of the pandemic Nick launched their megadungeon campaign, which I've played in now for a few years as the wizard Phasmo. 

We talk about a lot of things in this episode, including the rewards and challenges of magedungeon campaigns with large player rosters; the importance of factions in megadungeons; and how megadungeons can function as "little persistent worlds", where the stories that emerge are less about protagonists and more about an abiding place.  

Without further ado, here is the episode on the largest of the podcast platforms:

Episode 2 "Little Perisstent Worlds" on Spotify

Episode 2 "Little Persistent Worlds" on Apple Podcasts

Episode 2 "Little Persistent Worlds" on Google Podcasts

Further Reading 

Art by the Inimitable Evlyn Moreau

First off, Nick is starting a megadungeon newsletter! You can read the first issue and subscribe to it here. The first issue, accompanied by Nick's illustrations and maps, "Let the Adventure Begin!" talks about megadungeons as a "good enough" art form, and discusses of Jack Kirby's comics on Nick's faction design. The first issue of this newsletter is the ideal pairing for this episode of the podcast. 

If you want to see what a functional megadungeon campaign blog actually looks like, I recommend highly Nick's Underworld Adventurer blog for their Twlight Shores campaign. Check out some recent session recaps, or peruse the archives for house rules and setting elements! (Attentive readers may even discover the fate of the Eye of Terror discussed at some length in the episode.) For those more interested in Nick's illustrations, check out their instagram account here. 

For more on large player rosters, I highly recommend watching this video by Ben Milton at Questing Beast. Milton here talks about how the presupposed play style of early editions of D&D involved an "open table" with large player rosters. While you're at, it's also worth your time to check out the "Open Table Manifesto" by Justin Alexander. 

For more on emergent stories, you could read this post I wrote on the topic. Nick is arguing that large player roster games megadungeon campaigns supercharge this feature and take it in an interesting direction. This was probably the biggest revelation for me to come out of playing in Nick's game.

At one point Nick refers to an old campaign, where six months of play emerged from a random encounter roll near a castle that resulted in a jousting challenge. For the charming jousting minimgame in OD&D (Original D&D) check out Fantastic Medieval Campaigns Appendix A, pp. 188-189, available for free here.

Finally, Nick refers at one point to the fact that a beholder in OSE is called an “Eye of Terror”. “OSE” stands for Old School Essentials, a retroclone—a repackaging and modern presentation of an older ruleset—of B/X D&D, the Basic/Expert edition of D&D written by Tom Moldvay, Dave Cook, and Stephen Marsh. The Open Games License (OGL) allows reprinting of older ruleset like this, but reserves some terms as proprietary to Wizards of the Coast, including “beholder”, which OSE renames “Eye of Terror”. You can learn more about Old School Essentials here.

You can find a full text trasncript of Episode 2 “Little Persistent Worlds” here.