It's Megadungeon Month at Backerkit, which means the crowdfunding platform is flooded with ultra-huge TTRPG dungeons. Among them are many that'll appeal to D&D history nerds. Two separate campaigns promised sprawling, unpublished dungeons from D&D creator Gary Gygax, while another 'metadungeon' translates the entire history of tabletop RPGs.
A mega dungeon is any RPG dungeon that's…well, mega. There's no set number of rooms or floors it needs, but you can expect to spend an entire campaign exploring that single setting. Entire civilizations and ecosystems likely live inside.
Of the three megadungeons I've mentioned, Castle Zagyg boasts the most levels - 27 of them. Publisher Troll Lord Games, who has worked with Gygax to publish Castle Zagyg material since the early 2000s, says it's sharing unpublished material based in the 1970s D&D setting.
A successful Kickstarter from last year funded the first three volumes of this enormous dungeon, while Castle Zagyg: Act 2 aims to fund the final three. While these books map one of D&D's most iconic settings, Troll Lord Games has designed the megadungeon for the Castles & Crusades system rather than Dungeons and Dragons.
Next up in size order is DIE: Metadungeon. Rook, Rowan and Decard's original DIE system is about regular humans who get shunted into a fantasy world, where they become their own TTRPG characters. It's very meta, and the Metadungeon is about to break fourth walls we didn't even know existed.
Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's dungeon is based on the fifty-year history of TTRPGs. The Backerkit page describes it as "part history field trip, part punishing gauntlet, part nightmare hellscape made of your own desires, and part lovingly-created Saw trap intended to teach you once and for all what THAC0 means". What a mega-mouthful.
Lastly, there's a Backertkit campaign that hasn't launched yet, so we can't confirm how many levels it has. What we do know is Castle Wolfmoon is another unpublished project from Gary Gygax.
Gygax collaborated with designer Chris Clark on the fantasy setting back in the '90s, but it seems the dungeon never saw the light of day. "Many years later, as Chris was tidying his hard drive, he found a forgotten file with "Gygax" in the name, and thought - why not finally bring the saga of Castle Wolfmoon to a close?"
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