I would like to design a dungeon-like location, a city surrounding a keep built on a limestone hill littered with caves. Tunnels and caverns would connect certain city locations to keep dungeons but also to some natural formations, which are used as building parts, free storage space, or in some deeper cases unused, abandoned or unexplored.
The whole structure has at least five levels, but unlike in premeditated multi-storey design, natural and organic cave formation does not follow a set of distinct, parallel "floors". And most importantly, I have to explain that network to players.
I'm looking for a good methodology of wholesome design and representation of a three-dimensional dungeon. It has to be representable on paper as a map (innovation welcome – folding paper structures?). It has to include non-sequential "levels" (e.g. ramps going through a level without accessing it or "half levels"). Is there any such methodology available to players, short of making a 3D model with Blender or something similar?
The map is supposed to help players realise which bits of the city are connected and what is required to travel underground. E.g. in Game of Thrones, you could travel by horse underground from the Red Keep dungeons to city docks. I want that fact to be immediately recognisable.
Best Answer
Forget about floors and levels, and think in sections.
Split the map into manageable sections. Each section could be a large room with several entries, a corridor with some rooms and two exits, etc. Give each section a name and each exit/entrance a number. While the players explore the complex, you just handle them the relevant map section, and make handwritten notes on which section/door connects to which section/door as the player discovers them. Or let the player make those notes themselves.
Additionally, in our group the DM usually keeps for himself a very simple flowchart detailing the sections and the connections between them, both for reference and as a place for writing quick notes about specific sections and rooms for whatever thing you see fit.
You really should not concern yourself with making perfectly realistic simulation of an underground complex, and your players probably do not need it neither.