Ostensible Cat

Alrighty, I'm working up some maps for my latest dungeon and I was wondering, at what point does a dungeon go from being an encouter site to a megadungeon? I'm no expert certainly but I do have some thoughts. It seems to me that a megadungeon involves a fairly sizable locale that has an ecosystem that periodically replentishes itself. Also a megadungeon in the classic sense doesn't really need any reason to exist other than because it's there (mad archmage decides to tunnel into the earth or some other vauge hand wave of a back story). An encounter site dungeon seems to be one that is designed with a specific purpose and once the players have attained the goal, they "conquer" the encounter site. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying things here a bit. At any rate, I'd kind of like my new dungeon that I'm working on to contain elements of both. It is a site adventure that has an objective, but with an ecosystem that is self contained and regenerat...

So, as I've mentioned, I'm building momentum on my gaming projects. I think one of the hardest things for me is to scope out my projects effectively and then keep within that scope (Hrm, I'm wondering if I should take some project management courses). Anyway, I think I'm on to something that is pretty exciting for me at the moment. I'm going to modify the idea of the funerary island and create a self contained megadungeon adventure on the island. This will be part of my Shadows of the Umbra Palace adventure series and falls somewhere in the midlevel portion of the mega dungeon. I've finished mapping out the first level of a palace located on the island and two minor sublevels. I'll post those soon.

I've been working on some dungeon maps for my project and I finally feel like I'm going somewhere with this. I'm not exactly sure as to the end result. So far, judging by the first almost complete dungeon level, it looks like it will be fairly sizable. And it will also have around three levels and some sublevels. So, what do you think? Would a weird fantasy dungeon be interesting?