Rebooting the World's Largest Dungeon

[Hussar]

Inspired by MadCartographer's attempt to build the World's Largest Dungeon, I've finally taken the plunge as well. I played through this bad boy a few years back and I want to dust it off and give it another whirl. Two of my current group played in the first time around and they'd like to take another crack at it. Since we only did about half of the regions, I'll just excise those and concentrate on what they didn't do. Still lots of material to play with.

I'm planning on making a number of changes. One thing I want to add is verticality. Stairs, platforms, pit traps and chute traps that lead to other areas, that sort of thing. So, I'm going to break up each region into six or seven levels with various methods for traveling between levels. We'll see how that goes.

Also I want to avoid the big monster small room problems with the original, so I'm going to expand a number of the room.

Additionally, this is going to be a 4e effort, not d20, so I have to really concentrate on making each section of each level work as a sort of stage complete with props, things to challenge the characters and various other terrain effects. I'll be adding those later as time goes on, quite possibly the night before play.

So far, I've been using Gimp and Rob A's Subterainean Map Prettier script. I took the original pdf image (freely available from AEG), chopped out the bit I wanted to work with, used the threshhold tool to make it black and white and then cleaned it up. Then I fiddled for a while making sure all the walls and whatnot snapped to the grid. Maybe not as artistic as it could be, but I hate half squares.

Here's two versions of the first map, sans any dressing. The first is higher res and probably a very bad idea for any sort of VTT play. The second one weighs in around 500k, so it should be fine on Maptool or Open.

Criticism is most certainly welcome.