The End is Not Goodbye

On completion, procrastination, and a cave full of orphans

As the Moss Hound reaches for me, a pale shape springs forth from the shadows. The shade of Wesmyn! Wesmyn the Wise, founder of our endeavor, acolyte of Consertil, the Lady of Feast and Ferment. As he passes through the pool of burning oil, he becomes like a torch himself, a glowing pillar of white flame. Spreading his arms wide, he meets the Hound's embrace. It is engulfed, shrieking madly, as they both turn to ash and the flame dies. The other creature gets a tendril on Elmo and tears at his flesh with its thorny jaws. A lucky throw of my dagger releases him and he is able to get away. I skirt around the tunnel mouth in the cave floor and find myself backed up against the remains of Wesmyn's corpse. Something clinks...an oil flask, still intact!  Elmo drops his torch in fright and retreats as the Hound coils and bursts towards him. In desperation, I let fly. Direct hit! The creature bursts into flame and tumbles over itself into the pit. We are alive!  

Wesmyn stands there above his torn and chewed body, little more than an outline in the smoke. If I squint I can make out his broad smile, warm as ever. He does not speak, nor does he need to. I grasp his charm, which I now wear, a small crystal vial of otherworldly nature, full of a potent and hearty culture of bread flour and wild yeast. I scrape up a small amount of his blood, congealing on the floor of the cavern, and mix it with this culture. It gives off a pinkish light and grows warm to the touch. The shade of Wesmyn glows white hot, his smile filling the room, and vanishes. The last bit of fire is snuffed out by a gust of damp air and the cavern grows silent. He is at peace. Let's go home.  

Unrelated Slug

Hi! Thanks for sticking around. I clearly have not been blogging, but I've got a few more pages of maps to show you from my completed #dungeon23 challenge!  It's been a long time since I finished it and I wanted to make sure I share it so I can start to show you some new things I've been working on. I've had the opportunity to playtest this dungeon with my regular Friday night game group, but I haven't felt ready. I have mostly felt like I needed more distance from the dungeon before really diving back in (no pun intended.) Revisiting these last few pages has me thinking about it more and I think it will happen soon. 

In the meantime, I've been contemplating the larger world in which this dungeon exists. The whole continent is new and largely unexplored, but it is teeming with refugees and explorers, trying to understand their new home. So, as a means of worldbuilding and idea generation, I've been doing some solo roleplaying to get the imagination flowing. I'm using Old School Essentials for familiar rules, Patrick Stuart's magnificent Veins of the Earth for abstract cave generation, and a wide variety of solo resources and random tables. I'm trying to only take suggestions or broad ideas from these sources and shape them into something new and weird that fits the flavor of the setting. I have no lack of ideas, but these prompts help get things going.

The main settlement here is a densely stacked conglomeration of ramshackle dwellings, made from various scavenged bits of wrecked ships, older ruined buildings, unfamiliar large plants and trees, and occasional chunks of bone or shell from some massive sea creature. It clings to the walls of a huge crater sheltering a deep bay and many of the dwellings and structures are built into the openings of hundreds of holes and caves, many of which lead further into the rock. These sketches are early attempts to try to capture the density and height of the city I am imagining. I have some ideas for a system to determine how the buildings and passages are connected and how to move through them. More on that sometime!  

A rotating group of orphaned teenagers has set up shop in a large cavern and has been methodically exploring it. This has led to some astonishing finds, but also a lot of horror and death. Since I've been running two low-level PCs at a time, they are woefully unprepared and running away is really the best option. The dice rolls have been very swingy, and some miraculous things have happened, as you can see in the above snippet. That is more or less how a single encounter went down, and they were prepared for that one. It's been a good exercise in imagination. I've also used an adapted version of Ben Laurence's Downtime in Zyan to help this weird community create the resources and support they need to survive and continue their explorations. The process of procedurally exploring the cave system and encountering its horrors has generated a lot of new ideas about the monsters and weird powers at work beneath the surface. The goal of this exploration, in a meta sense, is to find a network of caves that lead from the city all the way inland to the megadungeon. What will I do with the results of this? I don't know!

I have so much more to share, but let's get these maps out of the way. Then I can write about the Mothership thing I'm excited about, or my Play-by-Post Traveller game, or a dozen other unfinished or unstarted projects. So...in all its unsatisfying glory, the END (of the dungeon. I'll be back.)

Week 48: Three ancient beings of tremendous wisdom and power guard the entrance to the final level of The Occlusion. Descend with their approval, earned or stolen, and never return.  Gravity means nothing and the deep black of the sea surrounds you on all sides. Yes, I got tired and ran out of ideas and created an invisible maze full of inexplicable creatures and strange machines floating industriously through the unknowable void. Thanks for coming!

Week 49: What more do you need? Not only is this an invisible maze, it's also the closest thing to a funhouse level in the whole dungeon. Not really, but this level breaks any unspoken rules or guidelines I had about making individual levels make some vague sense in an ecological/sociological way. (Re-reading bits of previous levels proves this to be a dubious claim.) Level 12 is mostly an illusion and follows some sort of dream logic if anything. Oh, and it's broken!

Week 50: I know you're thinking: "Invisible Maze? No problem, I'm at least a level 12 adventurer, almost a god," but what if I told you that big chunks of it are missing and deep currents are waiting to wash you away into the depths? How are you supposed to know which parts are missing? Beats me...haven't written that part yet. If you've made it this far it has become clear that whatever this thing is, it's not functioning the way it is supposed to. If you've made it this far, your character has developed some unusual, unpredictable, but hopefully useful abilities. Only a fool would claim to understand the gifts the dungeon gives and the solutions it provides.

Week 51: Maybe you can fix it? This place is swarming with activity and contradictions. Tiny flying machines pass through air in the same space that fish and glowing worms swim through water. You can feel everything and nothing at the same time. The frantic energy of collective panic is contagious. Re-reading this reminds me how much these last few weeks of the year were written in a kind of delirium as the whole exercise drew to a feverish close. Notable creatures I had forgotten: Spider Jellies and the Ghosts of Sail.  

Week 52: Here it is. All 52 weeks. A whole damn year. How does it end? Even if you could read my handwriting, it wouldn't make sense. I haven't explained anything, I haven't resolved any of the questions this whole mess has presented. I don't care, it's a first draft and it's done!  And I think it has potential. Certainly there are a bunch of dumb, fun ideas in here that I will use for something. Nobody's gonna play your megadungeon anyway, but maybe somebody will enjoy reading it and looking at the maps. I hope this chronicling has served that purpose for now!  

Stick around and find out what I'm working on next. As promised, this post took less than five months. I've also got a bunch of art to sell. Subscribe at the top and you'll get the next one of these as an email. Drop me a line, tell your friends, and thank you again! 

 Click the spoiler button below if you want to find out what's in the very last room. No, it doesn't make sense.

It's a fucking Great Glass Elevator...totally forgot about that.