I love the idea of mega dungeons but I don't have a consistent group. Are there any games for doing mega dungeons in a zoomed out way? I'm thinking that you might deal with a room in as little as a single dice roll, and get through multiple trips into the dungeon in a single session of play.
The interesting thing about a mega dungeon to me is how it changes and evolves over repeated delves.
I could probably build a PBTA system but hopefully someone already has.
THEME: Sped-Up Mega Dungeons
Hello friend, I have a few different things that you might find helpful in speeding through dungeons and getting as much game as you can packed into just a few hours! I focused mostly on games that did dungeon-ing quick, less so on actual mega-dungeons. Also, sadly nothing here is PbtA.
WanderSquares: The Underwood Tunnels, by Dreamjar.
WanderSquares is a fantasy table-top roleplaying game for adventurers 9 and up. It features an ever-changing map, a choose-your-path adventure guide and 16 inspiring characters to choose from.
The WanderSquares map is made up of 32 interlocking Adventure Squares. Each square is a tiny story; with monsters, puzzles and treasure. The map grows in endless combinations with each new direction the players choose. Three Special Squares contain major magic items (and mini-bosses). Recover the treasure and you'll unlock the final challenge.
I don’t know exactly how long it takes to explore each square in Wandersquares, but I think it has two big strengths. The first is that it is designed to be simple, because it has kids in mind, so learning the game should be easy and quick. The second is that the adventure locations come in tiles that you can place out as you explore, with a choose-your-own adventure guide you can use to narrate each option quickly. Even if you don’t like the base system, having these location tools can be a big help in streamlining the dungeon, because all of the information is already there, including some imagery on the tiles that can be very evocative for the players.
Dungeoneering, by Grinning Rat.
DUNGEONEERING is a quick-and-dirty tabletop role-playing game where players explore dungeons, gather treasure, and fight monsters. Game Masters are encouraged to use the sample dungeon within, or generate their own with the creation tools, to facilitate these dangerous delves.
Dungeoneering sells itself as a quick-play game, slimming dungeon crawls into something called dungeon turns. You can explore one room of the dungeon in each dungeon turn, with checkpoints every 2, 12 and 24 turns to replenish torches, eat & drink, and rest.
I do think that Dungeoneering could be a more slowed-down game if you paused to roleplay more often, but rules-as-written, you’re rolling for simple pass or fail, and hit points are fairly low, reminiscent of what I see in gritty OSR-style dungeon games. The game comes with a starter dungeon, but it also has tables to help the GM build a dungeon on their own - whichever way you decide to go, I think that if you’re going to try and speed-run the dungeon, you definitely need to have the dungeon mapped out ahead of time, or you’ll slow the game down simply because generating rooms takes time.
Dungeon Dash, by Cosmic Sorcery Society.
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Described as “fast and furious”, DungeonDash sounds like it can be played in very short bursts. If you decide to use it to play a longer game, I’d reason that you can then go through quite a few dungeon rooms in just an hour, perfect for one-shots. Because it’s meant to be played in short bursts, I don’t know how much of the game focuses on how the dungeon changes over time - that might have to be an aspect that you as the GM bring to your table from somewhere else.
Out of the Dungeon by @toyourstations.
You have arrived at a dungeon rumoured to contain the secrets of a civilisation of wizards thought to be long perished. Your party has reason to believe that they are not – in fact you have reason to believe they are behind everything wrong with your world.
Your world is illogical. You didn’t know it as you grew up but the older you got and the more you travelled, the more you began to see the oddities. Monsters spring from nowhere to attack villages. Bandits haunt every road but don’t seem to live anywhere, or steal anything to eat. Rangers insist there simply isn’t the ecosystem to support the dragon in the mountains.
And then there’s the occasional odd flicker of the sky, a mosaic of quickly shifting squares flittering across your vision like lights dancing on the ceiling of the world.
Out of the Dungeon uses a deck of cards to help generate the rooms that your adventurers move through. More than any of the other games on this list, I think Out of the Dungeon has the capacity to give you the feeling of changing the dungeon as you venture through it, because your characters need the dungeon to change if they’re going to escape it. It’s still in a pretty rough ash-can place, but I think the ideas behind it are pretty resonant with what you’re looking to achieve.
A Golden Flame, by Mundos Infinitos.
A Pamphlet TTRPG adventure where you explore dungeons and survive the Dungeon Master. Based on a Whim-based system, this game is classic-style, not OSR, and is easy to learn, play and hack.
A short pamphlet game, A Golden Flame doesn’t come with a pre-generated dungeon, but it does come with dungeon generation tools that the GM can take advantage of during their prep. A unique game system for this game is called Whims - a resource that is given to everyone at the beginning of the game, and can be used by players to level up, expand the world, conjure magic, or engineer a lucky circumstance.The GM uses Whims to eliminate people or things precious to the players, change how effective an action is, create custom challenges, etc.
I’m not so sure I’m a fan of the rules that penalize players for poor table manners by giving the GM more in-game powers - I’m a believer that out-of-game faux pas are best met with out-of-game responses, rather than in-game punishments, but I do like the idea of giving the GM visible currency to give them a reason to generate challenges for the characters.
Overpowered, by Technical Grimoire Games.
Overpowered is a solo framework for speedrunning your favorite tabletop rpg adventures. Manage your power, choose your path, and perfect your strategy. Achieve a high score and dominate the online leaderboards. Try the demo adventure for free right now!
Overpowered converts adventures from various ttrpgs into something that can be played through solo, using specific pieces of information as challenges that your character will have to overcome. The game seems to work best with pre-written dungeons, and rewards play that is cautious but ambitious. If you have a lot of adventure modules that have creatures, treasure, and puzzles, you can probably speedrun them using Overpowered.
Overpowered is also probably the most professional-looking game on this list, and that's simply because Technical Grimoire really knows what they're doing when it comes to making a nice-looking product.
Bite-Sized Dungeon by @sprintingowl.
Bite-Sized Dungeon is a 9 page tabletop adventure game that you can play with absolutely no equipment.
You can use it to dive a forbidden ruin, fight monsters, steal treasure, and hightail it back to safety---all in the time it takes for your pizza to arrive, or for the bus to show up, or for the doors to open at the convention hall.
Use your hands to resolve checks, play modules from other systems with very little trouble, and hack to add in additional content.
Bite-Sized Dungeon uses some very simple rules to determine whether or not your adventure succeeds or fails in any given action, and has a simple way to keep track of your health - you can get Squashed five times before you’re eliminated, and you need a new adventurer. The game is designed to be able to be played anywhere, which is useful for the players, but I’m not sure how well you’d be able to play the dungeons on the go, unless the dungeon master has either a printed reference or a very very good memory. I do appreciate that the game has links to 5 different dungeon modules that you can use with this game, or any other dungeon game!
You can also check out the Remastered version of Bite-Sized Dungeon if you want to see what the author’s been doing with the game recently.
If you want more Dungeon games, I recommend checking out some of my following recommendation posts:
I also think Planet Dungeon does some great dungeon-crawling stuff.
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