D&D co-creator Gary Gygax
Posted by greenycao on March 14th, 2019
D&D co-creator Gary Gygax’s starting home campaign was held beneath the ruins of Castle Greyhawk, which supports the honor of not just being the experience’s first dungeon but its first megadungeon. It’s what its name implies: a deep group of underground halls, with multiple levels and sublevels, packed with monsters, puzzles, and traps which get more challenging while you delve deeper in to the complex. The threat gets greater, but so too does the reward (in player experience, treasure, and lore).
But a megadungeon may other purposes too. Castle Greyhawk stands out given it’s greater than a megadungeon filled with monsters and riches — it’s a trap for that land’s gods. Its creator, the archmage Zagig, used the potency of those captured deities to propel himself to Buy POE Orbs demigod status from the Greyhawk campaign setting. Undermountain is the one other megadungeon, this one inside Forgotten Realms setting. It might be also deeper than Castle Greyhawk, and it is creator is yet another archmage, Halaster. But he’s also known because Mad Mage, so when he dug deeper in the Realms’ City of Splendors, Waterdeep, Undermountain didn’t just grow. He connected it to several parts with the Realms as well as the multiverse having a host of portals. As he descended into madness, he dug deeper, with the exceptional halls expanded. His apprentices, some bearing similar broken minds, added amounts of POE Orbs their own. And others even founded a town, Skullport, which serves as not simply a link on the Underdark and also the seedier side of Waterdeep. Without Halaster, Undermountain unravels, its portals losing their mind and sending monsters in the city above. It creates trouble for the rest with the world. So if Castle Greyhawk would be a trap for your gods, and a second could see Undermountain as being a containment system for any mad archmage … and also the terrors from the dungeon itself. It’s a trap as well as a prison, around Castle Greyhawk is to the gods.
