u/ChickenManB

I am designing a mega-dungeon campaign inspired by fear and hunger. I plan on it taking place inside a massive military fort with a sprawling basement level that opens up to a deeper cave system that unveils ancient demonic forces. The fort was later re-tooled as a prison, so the fort has been retrofitted with lots of torture chambers, tiny cells, etc. I have ideas for the caves and more demonic aspects further below the prison, but I am struggling to add variation and interesting locations within the initial structure.

TL;DR I need room ideas for a fortress/prison that aren't just "prison cell, guard barracks, torture chamber, office, storage...." etc.

Thanks!!

I am designing a mega-dungeon campaign inspired by fear and hunger. I plan on it taking place inside a massive military fort with a sprawling basement level that opens up to a deeper cave system that unveils ancient demonic forces. The fort was later re-tooled as a prison, so the fort has been retrofitted with lots of torture chambers, tiny cells, etc. I have ideas for the caves and more demonic aspects further below the prison, but I am struggling to add variation and interesting locations within the initial structure.

TL;DR I need room ideas for a fortress/prison that aren't just "prison cell, guard barracks, torture chamber, office, storage...." etc.

Thanks!!

I’m heavily considering using DH for a Fear & Hunger inspired campaign, but I’m still quite new to the system and how best to utilize it. How harsh should I be to really simulate horror and difficulty?

Environments/traps: should effects that don’t have a direct damage outcome on failure automatically start instead of PCs rolling reaction rolls? How many different effects should I have on standby to use and how often?

Stress: should I be liberally spending fear to give PCs stress in dangerous situations? Should I give stress without even spending fear if the situation calls for it?

Enemies: big bosses and roaming threats, should they have several relentless tags and countdowns? Should I treat them as environments instead?

Danger: If a severe enough failed roll or event occurs that logically calls for instant death (for example falling down a massive drop), should I still allow death moves? How crippling should I be with scars, like for example if a character’s leg is broken?

I have a lot of interest in this system, especially for its potential with horror, but there’s still so much I’m not confident with coming from years of playing 5e.

I ran a one shot using my homebrew setting I’ve used for d&d. I found myself calling for a similar amount of dice rolls as I would in d&d, resulting in a large amount of fear being generated. So much so, that I didn’t know what to do with it all outside of combat. I’m not sure if that’s common. I know fear is meant to be used as a GM to throw spontaneously throw obstacles in the PCs way. I had one trap set up, but found myself struggling to improvise situations outside of an exact structure where I could use said obstacles. I also almost never inflicted stress outside of adversary abilities, so by the end of the game, the only PC with lots of stress was the Druid due to his rapid wildshaping. I don’t know if that’s common and stress is more of a slow accumulation over an adventuring day, or if I failed to inflict much due to my lack of non-combat interactions and fear-uses.

Also due to my high accumulation of fear, once we reached our first combat I found myself going very easy on my players, because I didn’t want to over do things so early in the fight. I was going easy in part due to it being everyone else’s first time playing DH as well, so at the very least I felt I was appropriately scaling for that reason. The combat took a good 90 minutes or more for a 4 on 4 fight, I don’t know if that’s an average length for a level 1 fight or if we were slow due to unfamiliarity.

Apart from my struggle to use fear in interesting and dynamic ways, I also found I never managed to give control of the narrative to my players like the game suggests, i.e asking them what they find as they search or what their character is capable of, etc. This could be from the time restriction of it being a one shot and so I had to keep tight control of the narrative, but even still I struggled to find the opportunity on where or when to try it.

All that said, does anyone have advice, similar experiences, or thoughts? Much appreciated