As someone told me earlier today, back to our original programming!
With my last mini-campaign done and completed, I’m getting ready to start playing my new homebrewed campaign centered around the Primal Dungeon and The City Within.
One of the key challenges that I’ve found with campaigns with an overarching story arc is that I often lose sight of the story and the campaign simply becomes a Problem of the Week type of stringed adventures. This often happens when I shift from homebrewed to published adventures mid-campaign when I find myself running out of time to write the adventures.
While such a campaign model isn’t wrong or unfun, I often find myself unable to bring forward the cool idea that birthed the campaign itself and the campaign ends up feeling to be same old same old.
That’s why I want to explore how I intend to bring to life one of the core tenants of our next campaign: The Sentient Dungeon, and maintain a focus on this throughout the campaign.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Primal Dungeon is built around an imprisoned Primordial whose bonds are slowly unraveling as the dungeon ‘eats up’ the world by growing outward from the prison. The way I currently picture it, the primordial has a vague sense of what happens around itself from picking up the surface thoughts of its minions and from accessing various scrying device (both manufactured and “natural”) found within the Dungeon and the City.
Now while I have no intention of making the Dungeon into some sort of omniscient Chessmaster or Super-Computer. However, I still want the dungeon to be some sort of NPC that the Player Characters will interact with, if only indirectly.
Whenever I sit down to prepare an adventure, I’m going to brainstorm a few generic adventure ideas, probably something from the Netbook of RPG plots, and I’m going to ask myself:
“Okay Phil, how will the Dungeon fuck this up real bad for the PCs?” (Pardon my French)
I’m going to borrow heavily from the Evil Overlord, Chessmaster and Super-Computer tropes, the Paranoia roleplaying game and probably also from Castle Heterodyne from the Girl Genius webcomic in order to create a completely dispersed, schizo personality. Through the powers of psychic influence it has over it’s minions and the capacity to shift some part of itself, I plan to have the dungeon hatch multiple cross-purpose plots that push forward its agenda of growth and destruction of the City Growing within itself…
The Dungeon would “talk” through dark nightmares, through the disturbed minds of prophets and other creepy types of communications…
While the party rests in an emptied chamber after having slain a Troll, an odor of charred flesh spreads througout the area. Investigating this troubling smell, the PCs find that abyssal runes are slowly burning through the skin the deceased Troll, saying “Who are you? How Dare you?”
Once in a while I may stage a scene where the PCs get into direct contact with the dungeons’ consciousness. Through these scenes, I could try to foster an antagonistic relationship between the party and the dungeon. While the party won’t be able to actually kill the dungeon (at least not before the end of the Paragon tier), I intend to make these scenes be milestone to allow them to measure their relative successes in dealing with the dungeon as a recurring villain.
I also would like the personality of the Dungeon to be stamped all over the campaign world. To that effect, like I wrote way back when in my Overlord Trope post, I’d like to have some sort of Symbol that can be found everywhere in the dungeon: on the equipment of its minions, in lost temples and collapsed crypts.
I picture a planet being fractured in pieces, the broken chunks of it suggesting a humanoid form taking shape.
Damn, If only I was a better artist.
Anybody want to help me or suggest a different symbol that I’d have an easier time drawing? Maybe one of the symbols of Chaos from Monte Cook’s Chaositech?
Actually the one I just posted on the left is pretty nifty!”
Anyone else have ideas or suggestions to make the dungeon be a living part of the campaign? I think I’m onto a good idea, I just hope it makes the jump from Blog post to tabletop reality.
Cheers!
Image Source: Paranoia RPG game cover (Mongoose Publishing), Symbol of Chaos taken from here.
Love this, on many levels! I dig the idea of the sentient dungeon as a whole. I’ve already got images of the Bold Adventurers taking a Fantastic Journey style trip through, what is essentially the Dungeon’s “body”. Perhaps certain locations are analogues for different organs – there could be a Heart Room, or a winding labyrinthine Brain Maze. Watch out for the Otyugh in the waste disposal room……
Ok, maybe not.
On a more metaphysical level there’s the whole idea of the dungeon trying to communicate with the heroes, and the repercussions that could take place as a result. Having an entire freakin’ dungeon as an enemy would be bad. But I suspect that having one as a friend would be even worse. I mean, what do you do when it comes round to visit? Just clearing room on the couch just won’t do.
Good stuff, Phil. I’ll be watching this one with great interest 😀
greywulfs last blog post..This just in from RPGNow Central
*Och, Captain. The ship’s computer has developed a mind of it’s own.
This works better if read with a Scottish accent.
Vulcan Stevs last blog post..Role Playing: where my hobbies meet
I’ve been wanting to do something like this since I got the Dungeon Keeper 2 game. It’s a computer game where you play a dungeon heart, using minions to build corridors and rooms, hiring wandering monsters and paying them with resources mined by the tunneling minions, and finally pitting it against adventurers and trying to kill them.
Doing that in a tabletop venue (at least the last part) would rock.
@Greywulf: Happy to see the idea get the Loup Gris seal of approval! You know that I never imagined that the Dungeon could consider the Party as “friends” although now that you mentioned it I’ve got a whole series of ‘Dobby the House Elf’ flashes coming to me.
PC “Man, I hope we’ll be able to rest here without getting surprised by monsters…”
All exits to the room collapse.
@Vulcan: Har Har Har… voiced by Simon Pegg maybe?
@Czarzhan: Hey welcome to the blog. I’m definitively going to borrow from the Dungeon Keeper series for the campaign! Thanks for reminding me… I still remember the awesome voiceovers between missions.
Reminds me of an adventure I played in waaaay back in high school. The DM ran some sessions based around the Star Trek episode “The Return of the Archons”. Villagers have gone missing, then end up being found inside the dungeon which is Landru. If you are going to do a whole campaign based on the idea, mix in “Shore Leave” also. 🙂
Oooh and of course there is always Amber. Maybe the Pattern or the Logrus. Or Ghostwheel’s personality. hmmm.
I had to IMDB the Star Trek episode. I probably saw it, but I was 7 when I watched French Dubbed re-runs of ‘La Patrouille du Cosmos’.
Hallucination induced by the dungeon is a GREAT idea especially if I wanna run a WTF session à la Dungeonland.
Great call Buzz.
Heya, long time lurker, first time poster. I love this primordial dungeon idea, and envy your players. A suggestion for the symbol: rather than having the exact same symbol everywhere, perhaps instead have tons of symbols which are very similar and influenced by a central symbol, but each is different. I get the idea that lots of the monsters/cults/organizations don’t realize they are being manipulated by a central entity, so they’ve each seen this symbol in their dreams and thoughts but each recreated it differently, imperfectly.
The idea being that perhaps at first players dont recognize that they’re seeing the same thing over and over, but over time see the central theme.
A very warm welcome to you Waneta. I’m always glad to see lurkers come out and become active commenters. While I can look all day long at my stats and know how many people visit this site, having a reader reach out always brings a fuzzy feeling.
I’m glad you like the idea, it really is going strong right now and my players are brimming with enthusiasm about starting the campaign. In fact I’ve got 3 of them showing up for an unofficial pilot game this Friday…
Your symbol idea is a great idea, I’ll need to start drawing some models methinks.
…now if only I could get inspiration for the actual adventure.
Dungeon Keeper 2… mmm …
I still play this game. Once a year I install it and rush through the campaign. Then I uninstall it, and stay away for a few months before I come back to it.
My favorite CG movie from this game is the Ogre praticing nunchaku with chickens… lol.
And for the campaign. If you take the Paranoia style, I will even more be interrested by it (like if it was possible!). Paranoia is an awesome game. You get to kill PCs, PCs trying to kill other PCs… PCs trying to kill PCs while getting killed by the DM… hehehe HAHAHA -EVIL LAUGH!-
I assure you. I always take medicine before I DM a game. I SWEAR!
The fractured psyche/eating the world thing just gave me an idea: What if there is (what is mistaken to be) a species of these earth-dwelling “Living Places”? Some of them are quite close to the surface, and have cities built atop them. All of them understand they have a symbiotic relationship with the lesser beings that inhabit them, and make some minions to allow them to face (talk to, attack) the other Living Places. Many are stable, some even appear to be “good”. In actuality, this is one being whose separate personality fragments are battling for dominance. Some of them are allying together, forming coalitions, trying to be part of the conglomeration that survives the final consolidation…
Sounds like you have a really cool idea here. But you’re trying to work out the modus operandi of your monster. One of the ways I help myself along with this process is to grab a music track or three and brainstorm. They help me to see different sides of how my bad guy might act, from suave to common to downright loony. I use a lot more than these but they’re among the most important:
Sympathy for the Devil – Rolling Stones
Behind Blue Eyes – The Who
I Can’t Decide – Scissor Sisters
You probably haven’t heard the last one. Go here to see a brief snip of a Doctor Who episode to see how I was introduced to it. The young guy in the suit is “The Master” (a villain) and everyone else is a pawn or enemy under his thumb.
For the first adventure, what do you say to throwing an unusual team-up against the town? Say a couple races that normally hate each other. The kind where if one were burning the other wouldn’t cross the road right away to get to them because they’d need to grab some marshmallows first. As a possible example, maybe kobolds and whatever passes for evil elves these days. But make the kobolds the dominant partners. Gradually your guys will kill their way to the top of the heap while you drop little clues all along the way that these guys couldn’t possibly have dreamed this up by themselves.
As far as symbols, if I were you and wanting to NOT draw anything I think I’d just do a google image seearch for “triskelion” and gleefully grab away. If one demihuman tribe uses a simple triskelion of curved lines which blend into a circular border and a mysterious cult in the city uses a central eye with three bent legs emerging from it then it might take your players awhile to really link them, although a feeling of vague similarity would probably exist from the start. And it’s a form of spiral so it should feel right for a chaos beast.
For some reason my thought process is going from “dungeon + town = yum” to visualizing masses of rats boiling up from underneath the city to devour it.
Sorry if this feels disjointed, had a bunch of different thoughts on this one and kept getting distracted. Also, not quite certain which direction you want to go with it yet so not sure which way to pitch. 🙂
Yes, seriously, hardcover. I want to play this. Although I’ll settle for a *cough*PDF*cough*. 😉
Looking forward to future installments.
Maybe the dungeon can read minds of its minions, but only in a limited way. Maybe only a handful at a time, or maybe only the intelligent or devouted ones.
The dungeon can easily make life difficult for invaders: Stuck doors (but not for monsters), collapsing passages that block their way, wandering monsters, earth elementals or some other suitable direct manifestation of its will and earthen nature.
The challenge will be doing some real harm to the dungeon before it can react; if some intelligent creature figures out there’s dangerous surface-dwellers incoming, it might alert the dungeon and then there’ll be a world of trouble. (Skill challenge, for example, each failure adding more obstacles on the way.)
Maybe there are some anchors the dungeon must use for extending its power: Specific creatures, maybe, or items, or sacred places with regular sacrifices. Something that can be destroyed. Should that be done before the dungeon realises what is happening, it will lose its ability to finely manipulate the physical corridors and whatnot; instead, it might make the entire area subject to a sufficiently destructive earthquake. (With Bond-esque explosions, should it seem fitting.)
I tried some of this with Pyramid of Shadows. The Pyramid itself was a large sentient creature that shifted and moved depending on those within. I never did fill out a motivation for it, though, some sort of entity that liked to eat people or entrap them or whatever.
I’m considering turning the Thunderspire Labyrinth into a super-dungeon, though, and it might be fun to have an overall personality.
Mike Sheas last blog post..D&D Dungeon Tile Tips
Oh man! So much great stuff to digest. Lemme see…
@D_Luck: I swear to god man, you scare me as a DM. If i ever play in one of your games, I’ll make sure never to grow too attached to my PC.
Seriously though, the inspiration I’ll take from Paranoia will be the relative insanity of the Dungeon’s multiple personality fragments (possibly the growth of the city is the cause of this fragmentation of the dungeon’s psyche) and possibly make the whole of City Within run a bit like Alpha Complex (Bureaucracy, factions, Secret societies, etc)…
…plus I feel that there will be a little silliness in all of it. What is a Megadungeon without a bit of wackiness no?
@Czarzhan: Your musings would make a great spark for a entire new campaign world. In fact, if my campaign lasts long enough, I may borrow it as the actions of the PCs could cause the dungeon’s psyche to collapse more than it has already and fracture in-something similar…. especially if one of the campaigns reveals is that the dungeon covers most of the volume of the planet.
@Lanir: This is all fantastic stuff you got there. Thanks for the triskelion tip! One thing worth noting, I won’t make it a campaign secret about the dungeon being alive. It’s going to be part of the campaign’s basic knowledge that something’s imprisoned somewhere very deep and influences the dungeon’s denizens.
I’m already cogitating a first adventure and will work on it today.
@Kevin: Gee man, thanks for the vote of confidence. As I said a few weeks ago, I’ll try the concept on my buddies and may work this up to something more later.
@Tommi: Yes! That’s exactly what I want. The Dungeon is going to be slow to react, being more likely to hatch plans than react to a infestation. Having points of Power that PC can knock out could very well become a mid-term goal of the campaign. Once such points are taken out, the city can grow into the reclaimed area and the dungeon must start planning anew to recapture it.
Great stuff!
@Mike Shea: Thunderspire Labyrinth is a great model to work from to build a sentient dungeon. In fact, with a few twists, you can have the Duergar, Gnolls and Paldemar work together to bring about the dungeon’s awakening.
How about the dungeon being able to read players’ minds? When they try stuff, it knows what they’re planning and blocks them? Maybe a Will check to plan without your motivations being known? That might be good, but only in certain rooms as I’m sure the players would get bored of constantly rolling checks.
Tahakkis last blog post..My Local Gaming Store – Or Lack Thereof
Here’s the thing Tahakki, I don’t want the dungeon to be Admiral Thran or any other type of Chessmaster.
The way I’ve been doing it is to add elements to each encounter that showcase the dungeon’s influence. For instance, I have an encounter planned with Shadowhounds and the dungeon will dim the lighting of a random part of the dungeon map each round… (Shadowhounds have an aura that dim light further, so if they are lucky, they’ll be in complete darkness)
That’s the kind of thing I’m thinking.
Ah, I see. I personally am quite a fan of the ‘chessmaster’ idea. I think my players would enjoy fighting against the dungeon itself. Nevertheless, you’re right. So, more like the environment changes in favour of the enemies?
Tahakkis last blog post..My Local Gaming Store – Or Lack Thereof
You can definitively take the idea anywhere you want.
Yes I’m thinking environmental changes and pushing dungeon denizens to do things that they aren’t sure why they do it.
Tommi expressed something I was thinking but wasn’t quite sure how to get out without rambling on a whole lot. And his description prompted another idea, but I’m uncertain how well it would go over.
What if some of the denizens are empowered if they’re in the right area? Good guys, bad guys, however you want to spin it. Whether it’s Evil Clerics of This Hallway Right Here or crack commando town guards who rock socks if you’re being naughty in the town square but won’t set foot outside the walls because they’d lose a lot of strength, toughness, whatever. The only thing I don’t like about this idea is I’m not sure if your players would get interested in tricking opponents into moving the battle or if it would just sound like a gimmick.
You hit something I’ve been thinking about these last few hours Lanir. One of the things I want is that the PCs will sometimes be allowed to fool the dungeon and exploits its powers and boons before it realizes that it’s helping enemies.
If the players did manage that, it would possibly be one of the most satisfying moments as a DM. 🙂
It’s good you have a reason why the enemies do what they do. Too many generic adventures have monsters killing adventurers for what seems to be sport. Maybe they are that evil, though!
Tahakkis last blog post..My Local Gaming Store – Or Lack Thereof
The dungeon creates (or discovers, either way works) places of power. Any who observe the correct rites, which the dungeon imparts in dreams to those serving it (PCs would have to be smarter to obtain any), in the correct places can benefit from their boons.
The dungeon can withdraw power from these sites, but creating them is a drain, so it is not inclined to destroy them without good reason. Hence, with good play a bunch of adventurers just might be able to use one before it figures out what is happening.
Also, using any two times is unlikely, as the dungeon will withdraw its power from sites profaned by intruders. Hence, only one-time boosts. Say, for the next encounter or day.
Maybe there’s something similar in the city: Those who take an oath to protect it and never step outside its walls get benefits as long as the oath is unbroken. (Conveniently, they won’t be thrilled with looting random caverns due to the very oath. Hence, adventurers are useful.)
I define a Runaway idea by something that its creator can’t contain and pushes others to run with it and build on it without effort.
This my dear friends, is a runaway idea all right.
And I LOVE those.
I wrote a 5 page adventure in the space of one afternoon for something that was only supposed to a throwaway adventure for 3 of my players who couldn’t bear to wait for next week’s game.
In it I already created 2 new City Factions, a slice of the City’s history and several examples of the dungeons’ involvement in the various areas the PCs will explore.
Heck it might be good enough to make it into a full 5k word writeup! We’ll see how it goes tomorrow!
Expect a game report next week!
Oh. I love this.
And I’m reading back old philosophy books from college – everything to help build the creepy personality of something with too much time on its hands to think…
And the logo you found works pretty well, methinks. You can scribble it easy as a circle with outgoing arrows. Nifty.
Eric Maziades last blog post..Kobold Keep Remix Finale – Showdown