Dungeon Creation Thread

boring in a non-original, cliche kind of way

What's your suggestion?

>Todd/10

>gnomes!
Go on...

man eating GNOMES! o~

see

This is simple and basic.

But not necessarily boring.

And nothing is original and avoiding cliche is an exercise in futility.

dangerous little fuckers :o

>Man-eating gnomes that....
We'll get that tooth pulled yet.

Man-eating gnomes _where_, though?

HERRE :O

...

:c

Had the idea in the other thread if having the lure be legends of god-killing magical weapons once owned by the original owner of the castle.
So I'm thinking, mysterious expedition into danger as an approach.
But why was the castle there in the first place, and does anyone live there now?

The castle could have been the vamp's in life, couldn't it?

Wouldn't a well-to-do vampire with a castle have servants?

True, but if we keep the idea of the dungeon being forgotten, his original servants would be long dead.
Maybe their ignorant and superstitious descendants, awaiting the return of "the family"?

Now there's something.

What if the servants pledged themselves and their descendants to service of the lord and his family so that when the Vampire needs to collect reagents for his dark rituals he has people to rely on. If said dark rituals took something in the neighborhood of 5 - 10 decades to complete it would make sense that few in the castle would ever be keenly aware of their lord's presence.

From a servant's perspective no one would have seen the lord or his family for almost a century and then suddenly a grandchild or cousin surfaces, stays for a decade or two and then meets a tragic end on the road.

Could have the head butler also be a vampire who manages the house and ensures that any loose ends and/or problems with the current story get tied up nice and tidy.

Awesome, love it.

>head butler
make him a renfield that gets prolonged life from drinking his masters blood :o

What if the magic binding the Gods in the dungeon has been leaking up and slowly mutating and corrupting the vampire's servants? Some of them have become ghoulish, some can move unnaturally fast, etc.

>Could have the head butler also be a vampire who manages the house and ensures that any loose ends and/or problems with the current story get tied up nice and tidy.
I like this. It provides a nice "false BBEG" too.

I agree.
A vampire would have too many issues during daylight.
A revenant is the term that comes to mind, but I can't find anything to confirm that.

>:o
Please stop that.

Good stuff too.
Fits in with every thing.

Rolled 10, 19, 23, 4, 7, 9, 13, 11, 6, 11, 13, 16, 7, 17, 21, 21 = 208 (16d25)

We still need to flesh out the surrounding land.
Rolling for seed ideas.
I will likely not be totally adhering to these.

Rolled 18, 14, 9, 11, 2, 2, 2, 9 = 67 (8d25)

Rolling a couple more civs

Long ago, a noble built a farm or plantation on the edge of a jungle inhabited by Mammalian Beastmen who worshipped ancient gods. The noble pursued trade with the beastmen, suspecting they were naïve and could be taken advantage of.
They were not.
The noble offended the beastmen and they attacked his settlement. He returned violence with violence, enlisting superior warfare to push further and further into the beastmen’s land.
When his forces came to their sacred temple, feeling the power of the place, none of his men would enter. The noble alone entered, defiled, and toppled the temple of their gods.

His campaign ended that night as the gods cursed him with an undying bloodlust. He killed his own men and retreated into the wild, slaking his untamed thirst. He did not return for many, many years.
Not until he had mastered his curse, his power, and his thirst.
He had already gained wealth and influence and returned to finish his war. He devastated the beastmen, nearly slaughtering them all. He forced the shaman witch doctors to reveal their secrets, and using the darkest magics, he was able to forcibly summon the gods into physical forms, which he slew.
Trapping their last breaths, he was able to keep their souls from reincarnating, passing on, or even resting. He trapped the gods in a state of non-existence and held them there with an evil pact, using each gods high priest as an unloving, undead lynchpin in his dungeon of dead gods.
Above the dungeon, he built a seemingly normal castle, and reestablished the farm. His initial servants are long dead, but he has given the old caretaker the gift of long lifespan by virtue of the cursed power in his blood. The caretaker runs the castle while the Vampire spends decades at a time in the dungeon, working his revenge, resurfacing as a returning member of the noble family every so often.

He held the dead gods prisoner there long enough for the dark energies working to hold them corrupted the land, the plants, and even the people themselves. And yet he holds them, for the ceremony is not yet complete.
He must continue the rites until no trace of hope for their freedom remains and they will exist impotently in permanent unending death forever. Recently, he has gotten closer to finishing his task, but the chaotic energies of the dark magic have grown increasingly hard to control and hide.
They’ve attracted attention that might spell trouble for his plans of vengeance.

Beastmen Society: (Perhaps we can avoid the trope of each caste being based on a different animal)
Master caste of traders, craftsmen, and leaders
Slave caste that devoutly believe they are serving penance for past lives.
Religious acolytes and witch doctors, supporting different gods and wielding ancient alchemy
Scraps of the beastmen society may still exist in the jungle, with rare lore passed down through generations. To the villagers, they are likely a scapegoat for any strange events that occur.

Village:
The village surrounding the massively wealthy farm is steadfastly loyal to the Family, but is worried the family suffers from some curse as each young noble that appears to run the castle disappears after a while, a strange “disease” with no cure drains the life from villagers, and dark, twisted abominations are becoming increasingly more common.

Servants:
Only the Caretaker knows the full truth, but many servants know the Caretaker has lived unnaturally long and is far more powerful than his frail frame appears.
The servants have developed superstitions and beliefs about the castle, which they believe is the source for the strange happenings. They dismiss talk of curses as nonsense and believe the castle itself is simply a powerful spirit, looking after the unfortunate family. They even believe that servants fortunate enough to conceive and give birth on the property may bear children blessed with spiritual powers that attune them to the will of the castle and grant them great power. They happily display such miracles to any who demonstrate an understanding that the castle is a blessed home, not a cursed one.

perhaps a twist on the stereotypical beastman?

Instead of having a veritable zoo of a civilization, each animal is a separate civilization which are collectively called beastmen by humans because they are man and beast. Like, a Satyr civilization, a Kerran (lion people) civilization, and a Arakoan (bird people) civilization would all be unique and may not even know of each others' existence, but to humans they are all beastmen because they are both beast and man.

Well since most of the Beastmen were wiped out during the noble's slaughterfest, it seems to me like they were grouped together during the purge. Perhaps they've since split off, after growing more animalistic and formed into packs.

I like this idea.
Beastmen often are presented with a hodge-podge variety of anatomy that seems to defy anything resembling genetics.
I like one animal, or maybe a hybrid of two, but with consistent features.
But, I'm stuck for ideas.

The next major thing to flesh out should be, imo, the dead gods, since the dungeon was built to keep them.
How many?
The dice roll inspired not!greek gods, only from a more primitive society.
What type of gods would be worshipped by these beastmen, or vice versa, why did these gods choose these beastmen?
Originally, I was thinking various beastmen with corresponding beast gods.
What appearances and domains should they have?

I thought of four gods originally, for no specific reason. Maybe because the classic PC party has 4players.
But which of the classic domain: sun-moon, war-fertility, life-death, summer-winter, fate-justice, etc.

More primitive not!greek gods I guess would be
Reproduction
War
Insight
Death
Weather

This is actually quite hard.

It could be as simple as ripping off the Greek gods wholesale with different names and just having them be served in a more primitive fashion. Gods of war demand that their followers spill blood, fertility gods demand sacrifices (not necessarily people; but animal sacrifices can work), that sort of thing.

4 is a good number, but I would tie the domains together like this:
Sun, Life, Spring, Light, Fertility
Fire, Summer, War, Blood, Anger
Fate, Justice, Peace, Autumn
Moon, Winter, Night, Death

Additionally, instead of using our notion of 4 seasons, it might be better to use the old Indian notion of three: the hot time, the cold time, and the rainy time.

Flesh Dungeon

Every adventurer that has gone inside the Dungeon has yet since come out. Nobody knows at first that the dungeon is actually one big giant living monsters, but eventually they all do once they hit the digestive system and get burned away with digestive acids. The entire Dungeon is one big living organism that wants you and your party dead. It will try to crush you, eat you, kill you with antibodies, or drown you in bile. There is no big boss to fight at the end of the dungeon, just a giant brain you have to lobotomize

Also, Church Dungeon

There's a cult that lives on an island in the middle of nowhere that worship a God that has never been heard of before. More importantly, the cult has been kidnapping innocent people and forcing them to join their religion. As it turns out, the God they pray to is also the cult's leader. He's bound his own life to the lives of every other member and gains power from their faith in him. But you can't kill him or else you kill everyone in the cult

These are interesting and relatively novel.

The Flesh Dungeon needs a strong reason for the PCs to not flee and either bomb/magic it from outside or seal it up.
A needed, indigestible mcguffin inside could keep them from sealing it up, but not from trying to kill from outside.
> yfw one player "just happens" to roll up pic related.

The Church is good, but would either be a small dungeon, or need explanation for why it's large enough to be a Dungeon.
Great lair boss though.

I think I can combine these into four gods using the three seasons.I'll write it up later.

Ive been partial to the idea of a game like dungeon
Just slapdash in the middle of a field, with the dungeon master someone who treats it like its gameshow, narrating and broadcasting to fucknoswhereland,
And the host actually being an actual villain who is using the tower as a place to disguise his villainly,
Or as a meeting place for other villains

>Or as a meeting place for other villains
This could totally work as well.
It'd be good beer and pretzels fun.
I like the idea of several villains lounging around, idly betting on the horrific outcome.

Digging a dungeon is slow work and hard to get the labor and there and harder to hide its construction the larger it is. So build it in several locations and connect it magically.

You can have the laborers all work on one dig. You can have huge piles of debris outside the small dungeons.

Wizard did it

I've always had this idea for a game where Dungeons pop up out of nowhere and cause trouble for the people they spawn near and the only way to get rid of them is to complete it. So people start putting up money for whoever can get rid of it so that life can go back to normal. Kinda like a mix between a bounty hunter, an exterminator and a ghostbuster. People band together and go about solving these highly specific dungeons to reap the rewards people put up for them. And whatever they can get along the way, of course

But for something in a more traditional game, I could see the Flesh Dungeon being a pretty big problem. The exterior of the dungeon would be apart of a mountain and the only way to enter it would be through a cave. It catches unsuspecting people who enter it and forces them down its many traps and pitfalls as they become digested. What starts out as maybe a search for a missing person turns into this struggle to survive

The death of the flesh dungeon leaves such a huge amount of organic matter underground that the ecology of the region is forever altered. the PCs are hounded by the townspeople for ruining their lives.

Years later the PCs return and find the town is now an oil/diamond mining town and incredibly rich.

>What starts out as maybe a search for a missing person turns into this struggle to survive
What I anticipate being an issue is that struggle for survival.
In order for the PCs to kill the dungeon, they need a motivation large enough to make them not just try to escape.
Trapping them in until they kill it is a delicate balance. It's already a rewardless scenario, adding any railroading might be too much.