The Dungeon, within the Dungeon

A re-cap on February's #dungeon23 level. First thought, perhaps including an area inside the mega-dungeon called "The Dungeon" is confusing, but I have faith that players will figure it out. I suppose I could have called it "The Prison", but that sounds less fun.

Some of my favorite areas to date ended up in this section of the mega-dungeon. The Encephalon of Justice, especially. I always enjoy a good courtroom drama, and the idea of having players on trial appeals to me, if only to re-cap some of their past hijinx. Especially when it might devolve into some level of mayhem, in a room that is otherwise reserved for order. 

I had a lot of fun writing all of the NPC prisoners. I've made most of them fairly sympathetic, with (hopefully) interesting skillsets and backstories. Someone you'd want to help and have join you on the adventure. I see it as adding additional options to the existing player party, setting up for a huge jailbreak. The guards are pretty plentiful in this area too, so thought it might be a good way to even the odds. I was able to think up 25 of them during initial writing in February, and added five more while I was putting the PDF together last week, for a grand total of 30 random prisoners you might run into. Get out your chunky D30 dice.

I wonder if maybe I overdid it with the having two giant monsters in The Dungeon. The hulking Horruffunderbits, and the mythical Yor Beast. Though maybe there are some interesting opportunities for some kind of showdown between them, and the players end up in the middle of it.

I leaned into the Brain-Can Automata a bit  more again. They are turning out to be pretty tragic figures, so... I like them. First introduced in The Sewers (from January) we now get to find out how the automatons are created, in the Extraction Chamber. I think this area has a lot of great quest opportunities, people to rescue, dismantling Rx-13 so it can't harm the prisoners any more, etc. Even if it wasn't part of the mega-dungeon, "The Dungeon" could be used for a stand-alone adventure. Let me know if you try it out.

I had a few more ideas for the Hall of Records, how to tie it into the rest of the mega-dungeon a bit, but didn't want to spill over to two pages and disrupt the layout. Generally, it was meant to not only be data storage for the prison, but also for the rest of mega-dungeon. I suppose that frees me up to have more data storage locations elsewhere in the mega-dungeon. 

It's interesting how some areas that don't exist just pop into being as part of something else. For example, several of the prisoners were imprisoned because they were found somewhere they shouldn't have been. "Vault Prime", "The System Clock", to name a few. I'll have to keep tabs on these named rooms, to see where they end up, when I actually get around to creating other areas later this year.

A note on having 28 days to build out The Dungeon, I thought maybe having a shorter month would be easier, but the way I work, frontloading areas in batches, I really felt the effect of having fewer days to work with, compared to 31 days in January. It's been interesting to see how my pace fluctuates.

Well, it's mid-March now, and I still have some writing to do for the remaining areas in The Gatehouse (the newest area in my mega-dungeon). Back at it. I'll try and post a re-cap again sometime next month. Big thanks to everyone for following along and chatting me up, it's been very motivating, gets the creative juices flowing. Also love to see what you have going on with your dungeons, I hope to see you all at the finish line!