One Million Room Mega-Dungeon – 001

The title is several things, it is partly to get your attention, partly a joke and partly serious. 

This dungeon is part of the Ruins of Murkhill campaign, with the name coming from the first game session of the campaign that started on July 11th of 2009.

Murkhill is the name of the large walled village that is located on a hill that rises 3500 feet above the broad flat plain that surrounds it. The main reason for the village location is the pure clean water that flows from a powerful artesian (magical) well in the center of the hilltop at a constant temperature of 34°F. Since the whole center of the hilltop is a rough jumbled mess of large stones covered with some soil, trees and grasses the village is built on the south facing side of the hilltop and a 1000 foot wide meadow rings the remainder of the hilltop.

The hilltop itself is somewhat rectangular and the rough jumbled area measures about 5000 ft. by 8000 ft. in size (1.4348 sq. miles or 918+ acres). The area of the entire hilltop is approximately 1607 acres.

The artesian (magical) well produces water that wells up about 8 feet above the original courtyard level and the well opening is 20 ft. in diameter at the surface and the water flows without any seasonal variation. The water emerges from the jumbled area in polished granite channels the at each of the four different points (each of the four directions) and the channels extend all the way down the hillside and out to a quarter mile distance from the hill where each channel ends and four large streams begin. None of the jumbled mess seems to have interfered with the well in any way.

There are additional flows of water coming out of the hillside into the channel at many different points that all together quintuple the flow of water in each of the channels. Once the dungeon was re-discovered, it was eventually learned that an unknown number of taps into the central vertical channel of the artesian (magical) well exist. Other knowledge is that the diameter of the artesian (magical) well at the level of the surrounding plain is 100 ft.

When the PCs showed up and started investigating a breach into the dungeon from a supposed surface collapse, they figured out that the entire jumbled area are the ruins of what used to be a large castle and city contained within walls estimated to have been 20 feet thick and extending 30 feet into the air and 60 feet into the bedrock.

There is a roadway that starts at the center of each face of the hill at the base and by the time it makes one trip all the way around the hill the four starting points have joined and they continue around the hill as a single 60 ft. wide paved roadway that circles the hill all the way to the top where it ends at the village on the south side of the hilltop.

More to follow about the area and then after that I will get into describing the dungeon. Room by room and level by level. It would be a miracle if by any chance I ever post any drawings. All of my drawings are produced on the fly and are very rough and dirty and not remotely suitable to post, sorry about that.