This is the first part of a series about the The Prison, by John Schutt, a dungeon locale set high above the seas off the coast of Loaerth City. The Prison will be found in the upcoming adventure setting Loaerth & Feywyrd for the Savage Worlds Roleplaying Game.
by John Schutt
A cave complex. An ancient citadel. A mansion long forgotten. A demiplane hidden in plain sight. What do all these things have in common? They are dungeon crawls, usually, with a lot of checking for traps and cautious listening, the occasional monster fight and a lot of loot. The tradition of dungeon crawls goes back to the beginnings of the hobby, and remains a good way to cut one’s teeth in the design business. The thing is, though, dungeons, with over 30 years of history, the burgeoning debate on their realism and its importance in the game, and the sheer number of them out there, and you have a recipe for boredom and even disdain.
I do not disagree with this sentiment. Not only is the idea of a dungeon rather absurd, its idea having roots in the prisons of old and moldy cellars filled with supplies, among other things, but they are stagnant things. You can’t just clean out a dungeon and expect it to go away. As a place outside the common people’s eyes, degenerates of all kinds quickly flock to dungeons, and all manner of foul things appear in their cobwebbed, darkened halls. The process repeats itself endlessly so long as there is a ready supply of baddies and an equally sizable number of adventurers willing to kill them. The best dungeons, those that affect the world around them, tend to be filled not just with muck and small evils, but demon lords and archdevils and liches and aboleths and whatnot. Still, though, the dungeon itself remains rather static, never truly changing its form barring some major worldly event like an earthquake or the passing of time or a major magical catastrophe. Did the Tomb of Horrors become a completely different complex of rooms after the PCs cleared it of whatever lurked within? I don’t really thing so. Indeed, the only real modification I’ve ever seen to a dungeon has been puzzle hallways that move at the will of the villain. These too are limited to the determined settings in the maze-like structure. What I want, and what I plan to make, is a truly dynamic dungeon. Not only in its occupants, but in its design and function in the world around it.
I call my creation The Prison, for no other name truly fits. A floating mountain off the coast of Loaerth, ever circling, no map of The Prison exists, because the rock itself is always shifting, always flaking away. Having appeared suddenly after the Helfay ritual went awry, it is a quiet place that seems to have been irreparably damaged by the huge magical backlash the ritual caused.
And that’s all I’m willing to say about it now. What I want to talk about is how I plan to reinvigorate the dungeon crawl genre of adventure. Where Monte Cook’s DungeonaDay.com goes back to the roots of classic dungeon crawls and perfects them, I want to experiment and invent a whole new system of crawling through mortared stone and steel barred doors. This post, and the one to follow, should lay out, without too many spoilers, how I want to do that.
My first topic for discussion is The Prison’s location itself. It is not grounded in the planes outside the Material, nor is it in the ground or within the earth at all. It sits a thousand feet above and a half-mile out from the Loaerth coastline. To make it visible, I decided to make it the size of a small mountain, carved into the rough shape of a prison, castle or cityscape, perhaps a dark mirror of Loaerth City itself. What I like about making a floating dungeon is the difference that creates with the idea of actual dungeons. Classically, such places existed below the ground or within something large or anchored to some place. In challenging these assumptions, I’ve taken a risk. First, because low level characters usually can’t fly or even acquire the means with which to do so, I have seemingly removed them from the equation. Second, I may step on the toes of long held beliefs and loves about dungeons. Third, how does one escape something that high up without flight, compounding problem one.
In addressing the first issue, I thought, why not have low level characters trapped inside The Prison itself, in the highest reaches where the threats are lowest? Whoever or whatever controls the dungeon might find them, for whatever reason, particularly interesting and decide to give their prisoners a little sport. Another answer might be making a campaign arc that entails somehow getting to The Prison in the first place as well as establishing a good, low-level reason to do so.
As for the second issue, all I can really say is that when something needs to change, some people won’t be too happy, and I can only hope my work makes them at least condone what I’ve tried to do.
The third issue, that of escape, is perhaps the hardest one for any level character, seeing as whatever holds up a small mountain must contain some potent magic of its own. Is there a dimensional lock on the entire facility? Is gravity different in and around it? Could anything even fly to it in the first place? Given these questions, and a few other factors I won’t reveal yet, I added the flaking of the rock or whatever material makes up The Prison’s walls. Different in its construction and composition than almost anything in the world today, or at least, the known world, the flakes sometimes don’t fall like giant stones. Sometimes they float, other times they drift, and some of them even sit in the air and wait, resisting the pull of the planet below as if it were not there. Is there a way to control which stones do what? If so, how and where is it? Could the stones have minds of their own, and if so, how do you talk to what was once very much a wall or floor? The questions on this matter are endless, and endlessly interesting to boot, and to all of them the answer might be, “Yes, but you don’t know yet. Go find it.”
Then again, this last quote is really the genesis for all adventures, and dungeons are just the tip of the iceberg.
