03-08-2023 "Hiatus? Never heard of them..."

03-8-2023

FUCK me its been a while…

I had to take a break from working on the mega-dungeon to finish writing a book you might have heard of and then delay it even longer to finish writing another (smaller) publication you also might have heard of. So before I stumble into some other book and leave this project in the cold for another indefinite span of time its time to follow through and get this damn thing done.

Unfinished business and all that.

Deciphering Old Notes

So, while I’m glad I laid out 80% of the mega-dungeon on paper and it has certainly provided a road-map for what needs to be done and typed, I realize that there was some other unwritten “big-brain” stuff regarding balance and certain quest progressions that I have either completely forgotten or failed to make any form of notes on.

Also, if I’m being brutally honest, some of the notes I made are completely indecipherable. My favorite example is a part that says “Mouth Thing; Treasure – eels,” which your guess is a good as mine for what THAT could mean…

My advice to anyone reading this: make sure your notes are legible and thorough.

Establishing Threads

As I was sorting though the notes, typing the outline into something a little cleaner and legible, I made it a point to go through and catalog the “threads” of the mega-dungeon. What I mean by “threads” are the persistent and connected elements of the dungeon.

Some of the current threads include:

• Intricate and magical Sun-Keys used for opening impenetrable Sun-Locks. The Sun-Locks hide secret areas, hoards of treasure, and are needed to progress to the endgame area of the dungeon.
• Ghostly spirits and their remains. Give the remains a proper burial on the surface and the restless spirits will cause you no harm (treat them well enough and they will reward you with a powerful artifact in the depths), sell their bones for profit on surface and they will spring traps until they are appeased.
• Knife-man and his meats, a twisted denizen of the dungeon who rewards the players with tools and a few artifacts if they can procure their requests for meat of particular beings found in the dungeon.
• An obsidian mirror housing a demon, broken into several pieces scattered throughout the dungeon. Collect more to increase the power of the artifact (but be warned if you complete the mirror...)
• Some others include: A pipe-crawling merchant, a spurned mutated dragon wizard, and an un-killable being with a grudge to settle.

I use the term “threads” rather than “quests” for a few reasons:

Player Agency: This is the big one for me and something that I picked up from various theory of OSR style games. I want the dungeon exists as a sandbox, where elements of play are determined by the player’s actions and reactions to events and items. Players are never forced into a task, rather led on to rewards and boons by following the points along a threads.

Simplicity: As much as I enjoy a spiderweb of intrigue and domino-effects, keeping track of expansive intrigue in a ttrpg can be a pain in the ass as a designer, a GM, and player group. It CAN be done with a decent amount of bookkeeping, but considering I already have a few other elements of the adventure that will require time-keeping and records (spoilers), I have to cut the mental load on GMs and players somewhere. With that in mind, the threads are relatively static: a thread progresses by players seeking out or stumbling into the next point of a thread. If a group cares about a thread, they can follow it through to its end for a large reward, follow it partway through for a series of smaller rewards along the way, or ignore it entirely and focus their attention on some other element.

Impetus for Exploration: While a smaller dungeon operates on a singular goal (kill the lich, find the artifact, or save someone trapped inside, etc.) the mega-dungeon of Ave Noctis does not (in the beginning) have a singular end goal. Instead, it exists as a massive sandbox for players to determine what their goal for delving this decaying bunker city is. The threads, therefore, establish small manageable goals that point the players to certain areas of the dungeon, offering rewards for seeking out areas that they may have missed or chosen to bypass earlier. 

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That’s all for now, next post will be on the overworld setting and home-base of the characters!