In the first and second posts in this series, we saw how a megadungeon concept can develop based on a handful of central themes, and how this can then guide the sketching out of a rough, bird's eyes view of each dungeon level, with ideas about contents.
The next step is by far and away the lengthiest, though one can cheat a bit by leaving the higher/lower levels for later on. It involves actually creating the map itself, chamber by chamber, and then stocking them with contents.
I tend to adopt a principles, rather than rules, based approach to this nowadays - I create as many rooms as feels right on the page, and usually keep things fairly abstract, with circles or oblongs to signify rooms and lines joining them together to indicate corridors, paths or other connections (more on this technique below). I find this more than suitable for what happens 'at the table', where the action can quickly get bogged down if there is too much detail. I don't worry about how much or how little treasure is on each level, trusting my instinct as to what 'feels' appropriate, and I tend to think that the ratio of rooms with monsters to those with traps to those with treasure, etc., can also really be left to common sense. As the DM, you know, taking a neutral perspective, whether there are (for example) too many monsters or too few in a particular area, or whether you're creating a 'Monty Haul' - and if you're not aware of it when jotting down notes on contents, you certainly will be when re-reading your work dispassionately a few days or weeks later. The one rule that I do have is that there should be something for the PCs to interact with in every room. That doesn't mean a monster or trap, necessarily, but something they can at least fiddle around with or manipulate, or which provides a clue to some other physical element of the dungeon or something about its history. Each room should have a reason for the PCs to stay for a bit (and possibly trigger a random encounter).
I tend to do my detailed mapping on A3 paper, because that creates a lot of space in which to make notes on the map itself, which is handy both for reference and during play (you can just consult the map for a lot of the information you need, and only need refer to your notepad when in need of a greater level of detail). I begin by drawing biggish circles which break down the area I am mapping into manageable chunks which each may have a loose theme, such as 'temple area' or 'earwigman lair' or whatever. So, taking the example of the Aviary area from level 1 of Lost Eskinoot (see last week's post) I might subdivide it as follows:
So here we have, going clockwise from 12, a large dome containing an artificial forest with owl automata; the home and workshop of the 'flying wizard', who is attempting to construct a flying machine; an area where vulture automata lurk; the quarters of the effete aesthetes who worship the avian automata; a zone featuring mechanical songbirds in cages; and a large area for various attempts at creating automata of peacocks. And, in the middle, a flamingo lake.
Now that I have this basic subdivision it's then a matter of mapping out the rooms themselves. Hence, for the aviary:
Here, a lot of the locations are in the open air, so the 'paths' between them may represent trails through undergrowth/trees, but you get the idea. It's then a 'simple' matter of numbering and keying them. I think there are about 40 here, which if multiplied across the other four areas of level 1 of Lost Eskinoot would result in 160 rooms. I might therefore might make some of the other parts of the level sparser, or come back later and reduce the number of rooms in the Aviary. But this is a good starting point.
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