As I said in my last post, I want The Prison to be a truly dynamic dungeon within itself and in its relationship to the world around it.
My first design choice to accomplish this was the addition of a failing superstructure. With parts of The Prison constantly falling from the stone that makes it up, I provided many hundreds of reasons for people on Loaerth’s surface to be at least somewhat curious about it.
For my second choice as to its dynamic nature, I’ve decided that its floor layout is alway, always shifting. This is not a fast process, because even the Prison’s caretakers, the Sath, need to know the general layout from day to day, and a room shifting, while a minor inconvenience, is never a problem. Whole levels appearing, changing and disappearing daily, or more than once a day, would of course be an issue. Rather, every century the Prison has an entirely new layout, with every decade encompassing about ten percent randomly shifting to a new form or disappearing altogether. The Sath have a sixth sense about what areas are not long for the world and which rooms will soon come into being, but they don’t know the exact timeline. For the odd adventurer though, his map of the Prison and those of his grandson are likely quite different. This whole idea does, of course, cause problems to the GM, but it opens up opportunities as well. One of the main faults of the dungeon, for me at least, as I’ve said, is its static nature. By adding variety within the same dungeon from adventure to adventure, even across gaming generations, makes it a place that players might want to come back to again and again, if only because the loot will be different from the last time.
The third thing I’ve allowed the Prison to do is move in the skies surrounding the continent of Loaerth. Being a several thousand feet in the air and a good hundred miles off the coast, the structure looks like a sinister moon within the atmosphere, and scholars would jump to discover exactly why it is at that height and that distance from land. Moving at a rate of a mile every two days, the Prison orbits Loaerth every five years and eleven days. Because it never stays in one place for too long, people from all over the continent, if not the planet, can see, and perhaps get to, the Prison, would the various powers of the world not wish to know or even control the powers that lie within it? Suddenly the dungeon in the sky ceases to be just a place to kill monsters and take their stuff. It is a seed for political campaigns as well, I would hope.
The fourth idea I had about the Prison harkens back to the fragments of the stone I mentioned in my last post. These tiny shards are not the only things that fall, or sometimes float, off of the cracked and crumbling stone. The Prison is the size of a small mountain, filled with powerful magics and ancient secrets the oftentimes power that magic. This does not even consider the Sath and their agendas. What I’ve decided, therefore, is to have huge boulders, rarely smaller than twenty tons or so, break off and hover around the prison. In the event of a huge release, a gargantuan staircase forms, spreading in all directions much like a skirt of giant floating rocks. At these times, the Prison is far more accessible to the world around it, not only because of the easier means of ingress, but also because these boulders leave huge holes that the Sath, or the Prison itself, must refill, a process which takes several weeks.
Of course, if people can get in, things within can get out, and that is the final piece of the puzzle here. The Prison is just that: a place to house foul beings that they might not harm the world around them. And like more typical prisons, this Prison is subject to break outs. What would an obviously hand crafted structure like the Prison house, especially at its size? Demons? Lost Feywyrd monsters? The souls of the universe’s foulest and most brilliant minds? What would happen if even one of these things got out? Again, adventures are endless when they come from a mountain in the sky.
I think this is a great idea, and one I’ve never seen before (which is always a plus). It seems that the prisoners could be like an Arkham Asylum/Rogues Gallery bunch – some conglomeration of the worst-of-the-worst villains and freakshows of the world, too dangerous to even allow on the surface of the planet. Maybe even a place where misunderstood PCs get thrown in if caught. Which could lead to an escape adventure, or maybe PCs hired to figure out if escape is possible or something. Just random thoughts here, but it definitely sounds like something I would play.
Yeah – The Prison is something I REALLY hope JS continues to develop. I would even venture that it would be the first “dungeon” for Loaerth & Feywyrd. It’s just such a super cool idea – especially with all the airships. My head explodes with the imagery!
As long as the excitement holds, and for me, at least, it certainly will, I’ll crank out new ideas and monsters to fill our mountain in the sky.
Honestly I wan’t sure how people felt about it, and I’m glad there’s some positive feedback from outside the development team. I’m a dungeony guy, but there’s too much “sameyness” in a lot of dungeons, and, at the risk of being redundant, I want to add some freshness the the genre.
I should have a third blog post about this big rock coming next week, talking about the interaction that Loaerth’s citizens, it’s scholars and its airships have with the black boulder in the distance.
Not a lot of ways to say it. It’s a really big, evil looking rock. It floats.
JSRS
“Not a lot of ways to say it. It’s a really big, evil looking rock. It floats.”
Yeah, but if it works, why worry?
And I love the idea of the shifting pathways – that will certainly make it not only loads of fun the first time but also give it a high replayability threshold and reason to revisit it from time to time.
I’m intrigued. I especially like the fact that stuff gets out of the Prison every now and then. Having this “really big, evil looking rock” orbit all the way around a continent every five years is a nice touch as well. Is its orbit consistent? I mean, does it always stay x number of miles from the coast and x thousand feet in the air, or do those parameters vary some as it wanders around the continent?
I also like that it’s basically Magritte’s “Castle in the Pyrenees” on Evil.
Seriously cool. There’s a lot of things to like here.
My personal fave is that the Prison has bits falling off it. It would explain why the thing is so feared, rocks falling from about 1000 feet would cause dramatic damage to buildings (or people) underneath. This would discourage most civilisations building under any known routes but the path may not always be the same of course.
And of course, there’s the improbable survival of a criminal.