Megadungeon: flow(chart)ing from room to room

 I feel that with projects, especially large ones, there is an ebb and flow much like waves. Things move along, slow down with blocks and problems, and speed up with break throughs and new ideas. I've been working on a megadungeon for a while now, in various iterations and having put it aside several times too, and the ebbs and flows have been keenly felt.

Recently I've been playing around with a new, drastic idea. The last time I did this, my 3+ levels were all smashed together into a single level, massively changing the dungeon's layout. Now, I've been thinking about the map itself and how I present it.

Up until now I've been working on my maps the classic way; ten foot grid, everything laid out in near exact measurements, all that jazz. However after reading through Gradient Descent, a megadungeon for the horror sci-fi game Mothership, I had a thought; did I need to do it this way?

Gradient Descent uses a flowchart type layout to represent their maps. Rather than worry about scale, rooms are either "human scale" or "industrial scale", drawn as rectangles of various sizes linked by lines for corridors. It's not the first time I'd heard or tried something similar myself, but it renewed the thought in me.

I've also been writing some route maps for designing large city and wilderness locales, which I've enjoyed and also inspired this effort.

To make progress and not get bogged down in the size of the place, I cut off part of my megadungeon to begin working on the key. This is that part. I also reckoned that, once complete, I could run groups through this part of the dungeon while I work on the rest.

This is the part I attempted to "flowchart-ify"; Corridors reduced to lines, some rooms linked together into larger rooms. My main concerns while doing this were;

• Does this map the map and key easier to understand?
• Does this make the dungeon easier to run?

Draft one. Boxes are rooms, double line boxes are large rooms, circles are doors. Rooms take about 10 minutes to explore (1 dungeon turn), large rooms 30 minutes.

It's a hot mess, but it's not a blank page and can thus be edited. Areas with lots of smaller rooms, crypts in the original, were joined into "large rooms", the idea being that in the key I would note "x crypts along walls" and include a random table for generating the contents.

I'm not sure if this will stick, or if it would actually to use at the table, but I'm intrigued and keeps up the momentum.