Roaming the Dungeon

Alright, Halloween is in just a few days so I've been thinking about my Ravenloft/Castlevania  inspired mega-dungeon Losh Nekkar.

I'm thinking the random encounter tables will be really small, probably only d6 or d8 tables, because there will be lots of planed encounter areas with more interesting stuff, and I don't want a huge number of random creatures running around.

So the creatures in each area should kinda be simple stock creatures and make sense for that level of the dungeon Exterior sections will have both night and daytime random encounter tables.

Like I said earlier though I want monsters to start to roam and migrate as the players unlock  different areas. To this end the 6th entry (or 8th if that's what I go with) on each table will be a redirect to a monster from a random adjacent (and unlocked) area of the castle.

So say I'm rolling a random encounter for the Great Hall and I get a 6- which indicates the encounter is a creature from a nearby area. I then randomly determine its from the Ballroom. I roll on the Ballroom encounter table and get a 3- A dancing ghostly couple appears in the Great Hall. If I had rolled a second 6 it would have meant a roll on the Treasury encounter table. Using this method something could theoretically crawl up from the Crypts and menace the PCs out on the Battlements.

I'm going away for a bit and might not post for a week or so.
 So....
Happy Halloween!!!

Castlevania Inspiration

 So just posting a few pics from the internet that I'm looking at as inspiration for Losh Nekkar. Two of them are art from the resent Castlevania Lords of Shadow game, the tall castle is from an artist on deviant art (sorry not sure who, I think I got the image from one of  the posts on The Land of Nod). The last one is a really cool map from Simon's Quest, which was my first Castlevania game as a little kid.

 

Have a fun and safe weekend!

Nekkar Cross Section

This picture is really the meat of what I have so far. Its kinda a cross section of the castle, but the main purpose of the pic is to layout the various levels and sections- and show me how they relate to one another. I like how many of the levels are interconnected. It will eventually become possible to unlock direct paths between certain lvls.  For example the Inner Courtyard is initially inaccessible from the Lower Court, but after fighting through to the Upper Battlements the party will be able to lower a draw bridge to connect the two courtyards.

Also the Chapel deserves some mention. It is intended to be a safe zone so the party can withdraw from the dungeon and rest in relative safety without having to slog it all the way back to the town.

I'm planning for Losh Nekkar to start in a kind of dormant state a gradually "wake up" as the PCs explore it. The dungeon for example will be sealed off from the rest of the castle until the PCs blunder on down there, releasing various dungeon themed creatures. Gradually the dungeon creatures will start appearing in other places as they migrate around the castle.

And this is a very early sketch which was super heavily based on the stages from the Super Castlevania IV game, the names of boss creatures and things are scribbled all over the place. The game is a linear sidescroller so I was trying to figure out how the various locations would logically fit together in a "real" castle.


(Click for larger Pics)

More  later...

Nekkar Exterior

Ok, so here she is. my fairly rough diagram of Losh Nekkar and the surrounding area (click the picture for a much better view) . I'm pretty happy with the design of the Castle itself but the nearby village and stuff needs a little work, but most important elements are visible.  That's a bat's eye view of the castle in the lower right. Losh Nekkar is gonna be kinda of like a giant haunted house/fun house dungeon.  All the classic horror monsters will be lurking somewhere nearby if not in the castle directly.

  

The castle will certainly be the "tent pole" of the setting but there will be several other adventure sites located in the area.  Much like Ravenloft or any of the games though the action will be fairly restricted, there is a sort of contained sandbox around the castle and a well defined border keeping the PC's trapped in the Count's blighted domain.

More pictures and detail soon but feel free to ask questions or offer up ideas.

"What is a man?...

 .....A miserable little pile of secrets! But enough talk... Have at you!"
                 - Dracula (Castlevania Symphony of the Night)
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MM_Q0nfaG0
Awesome piano tune.

So, one of my many back burner projects is the creation of a mega dungeon. A mega dungeon heavily inspired by Dracula's castle from the SNES game Super Castlevania 4 and Castle Ravenloft, with a good measure of my own stuff thrown in there.

As soon as I stop being lazy and actually unpack my scaner I can post some digrams and sketches I have come up with -boy do I love maps.

So for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the Castlevania game series I will tell you why it is cool. Well it pretty much is just cool, particularly the early stuff, before it got all melodramatic and Japanese rpg style soap opera all up in there. Its basically just a rad story about a guy with a whip fighting his through a castle to get to Dracula.

As a young kid playing snes I made up an imaginary rip-off castle based on Castlevania (the literal name of Dracula's castle), I named my version "Losh Nekkar"- im not sure why. I pretended Losh Nekkar was in the woods on the other side of a swamp  just down the street from my house.  Anyway though, I'm naming this mega dungeon Losh Nekkar,and this will be the first in a series of posts about the place. Theres actually quite alot to tell. Not sure where to start.

More on this later...