Back in August, I wrote the following to my players:
"Going to the Brotherhood Complex is fine, but:
1) If it's not in current use, it'll be a lot of exploration to see what you can find.
2) If it is in current use, it'll be a straight-up fight against organized, intelligent foes . . . so you can't get away with what got you mauled the first time (blundering into a large fight without being ready for it) or killed the second time (boxing yourself in.) It's an assault on an enemy complex, not a room-by-room exploration of a megadungeon with small areas controlled by small groups you can pick off as you please.
As long as you're okay with the possibility of #1, and ready for #2, I'm game for it."
A little discussion after that resulted in the following:
- My suggestion that the PCs get hirelings in actual numbers. Vic put it as a "10 good men" kind of thing. Probably a few more, but yes.
- There was a suggestion of finding folks who hate the Black Brotherhood to come along.
- I pointed out that there would be loot, for sure, with intelligent foes, but getting reinforcements would be costly.
At the moment, the PCs are in a large fight I'm not 100% sure they're ready for, and not quite boxed in but cut off from the exit. The enemy is between them and the exit, and the probable path of additional enemy reinforcements is also into that same area.
We'll see how it goes . . . but I just wanted it on the record that I made it clear what the Brotherhood Complex would entail and we discussed what it would benefit from.
This, though, is also the current problem in Felltower. 12 years now of exploration of - largely - 4-5 levels, often over and over again - has cleared out most of the things that can be picked off without any complications. Most of that picking off was done in the first 3 years. So much so that I needed to launch a new side dungeon in March 2015 and another in September 2015 to allow for weaker delvers to have places to go. So much so that I had to do a pause and restock twice, including recently while the PCs dealt first with one side area and then another.
Much of the problem with Felltower, now, is that you can't just go and wipe out some hapless foes with no friends and lots of treasure.
The dragon in the caves below the gate level is next to a beholder, so it's not clear how to deal with one without having to deal with the other in some way. The six-fingered vampires - the Gith, as the players have named them - guard their areas with magical defenses the PCs can't just avoid and will respond to incursions in force. The gates lead to places with similar issues - raiding the apes might work but they're not going to go down house by house without responding in numbers. No one wants to go to the "Hell Gate" and the Air Gate is still being pushed back because, athough people can now fly, they don't have tactical flight so they can't fight airborne* and don't seem willing to risk what happens against flyers.
Even the unguarded areas - like the ruined city on the bottom of the second GFS - are just going to be exceedingly dangerous. It's a fine place to explore but they're scaled for PCs who can handle the stuff above.
All of the remaining areas present more of a thought challenge than a power challenge - they'll take some clever and thoughful play, I think, to defeat them. You'll need power, too, but the usual delving rhythm of "door, lure the foe into a bad spot, kill it, loot it, rest and recover, repeat" isn't going to be valid anymore. It hasn't been in a while, but against orcs and puddings and gargoyles and the like, the lopsided power of the delvers vs. the foes made up for it.
I suspect this is why a lot of megadungeon plan can peter out. Not from boredom, but from challenges that are different from what people are ready to solve and a limit on what you can do to advance your cause. The way of playing might need to change, or I need to basically toss the levels below the ones explored already, and just keep filling in monsters unable to coordiante in order to keep it going. I'm a little too stubborn and lazy for that, though. I constructed some challenges to require more than just brute force and killing foes in isolation. I'm wondering if those being the blockers to other areas have effectively put Felltower and its related areas into an adapt-or-end-the-campaign situation.
Hopefully this will be useful for my players as a glimpse at the forest and not just the trees. If it's of general interest, too, and help to GMs with their own long-running megadungeon games, that's good, too.
* If people are waiting to accumulate enough magic to have cheap, effective, reliable, tactical combat flight . . . better take Breath Control. Letting a party become a group of routine free flyers changes the game substantially, and turns all fights with non-flyers into a bit of a joke. So don't expect to see that handed out.
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