Modern day setting that's based on dungeon crawling

>Modern day setting that's based on dungeon crawling.
>Dungeon crawling exist as a job because magic doors started to show up one day that lead to pocket dimension dungeons.
>These dungeons can contain anything from enchanted weapons to just useful metals. Some of these metals not even native to our very universe. Some good, some bad.
>Some governments wants to reverse engineer the items gained from these dungeons, others just want the resources and materials that can be gained.
>The problem is that the doors will vanish sooner or later and it is very possible to end up trapped in that dimension for a very long time. Heck even time dilation might be messed up in that dimension.

What can be some good plot hooks that can come from this setting and it's mechanics? Pic not related.

......
I'm going to assume we are talking about Dungeon meshi and post elf ears and chubby orc girls.

But first to address the question.
By 5 years time from people understanding how valuable dungeons are the entirety of known dungeons should already be owned by private corporations naming themselves stupid stuff like :
Adventure inc. or High-road

Dungeons popping up in 3rd world countries might not even rely on "Brave-adventurers" voluntarily exploring it, but a population of slaves and prisoners sent to mine or dig up treasures in the worst of conditions.

And those are the EASY Dungeons.
The fucked up dungeons apear out of nowhere, manifesting as bus stops and subway tunnels only to transport poor shmocks into the depths of an insane semi-reality.
And now for the primary point

By the way OP,

Any special reason the dungeons are opening now (as opposed to whenever)?

so basically S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but without the slavs?

>S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but without the slavs
When I really think about it if you take the slavs out of S.T.A.L.K.E.R, it suddenly just becomes a mute and sad cavalcade of unfair deaths and bad shooting mechanincs.

Nobody knows for certain. The only hint is glimpses of small creatures wearing hood and mask seeming to restock the place before the door closes. There are even rumors that very powerful creatures inside of these dungeons used to be adventurers, but have spent so long in them that they completely forgot their own name.

I swear I read this thread like 2 years ago.

Perhaps loose 'danger ratings' have come to be associated with different types of doors. And the world's greatest delver has yet to come back from a new type of door that no one has seen before. People are worried that he and his team will disappear and the PCs are hired as disposables to just peek inside and get back out again to report on the situation.What could possibly go wrong?

i would love a setting like this.

Personalyl i would look at fantasy settings that already have modern trappings as a start point.

Such as Eberron, Final Fantasys Ivalice Alliance and Guild Wars aswell as lore Elderscrolls.

Note that it couldnt just be Dungeon crawling based.
In a fantasy universe, the wilds could be so dangerous that they still arent tamed like they are in real life, thus making adventuring a required job simmilar to hunters and rangers, ever reclaiming parts of civilization that are "Overgrown" by the savage parts of the world.

Something id also like to point you towards is Walther Moers novel The City of Dreaming books, the setting is based on a city built on top of a giant thousands of years old Library that goes down miles upon miles below ground.

The Adventurers of that setting are book hunters, essentialy Librarians with a martial adventuring and cutthroat schtick looking for ancient books down there killing each other and the many terrible creatures in the process

.....
What kind of fantasy are we talking about here OP?
Are we talking full on Wizards and fey creatures or sci-fi mutants and other dimensions?

Cause I like both but really a gritty sci-fi could make a S.T.A.L.K.E.R type economy and mutant population work better in my opinion.

The main world the door appears is set in regular modern day, but the actual door dimensions are themed based on where they spawn.
A high difficulty door in a volcano will more or less be like fighting Ragnoros from WoW while a high difficulty door that spawned in a robotics facility will go full "SEND IN THE DROIDEKAS".
Because of this, the world is modern, but slowly becoming more and more sci-fi like.

Can I play a psyker?!
Or is humanity barren to all forms of Psychic power?

You did.

Thumbnail looks like classic Mucha - if that's intentional author did a good job.

You'd need certain items from the doors.
Nobody's figured out how magic itself works, but you can get runes to be a discount mage that has to rely on artifacts.
Hell slap a rune on your gun and you can technically be a mage, because runes in this setting can act either as enchantments or work like how spell stones do in Path of Exile where you put the gems into your equipment to unlock and use certain spells.
So imagine a pistol that lets you cast lightning or cure.

If I was gonna do something like that -excuse the game journalist tier expression- but I'd combine the following pieces of media:
-Stalker, Magi The Labrynth, Dungeon Meshi, 'Gate', and maybe Hyper Police a little?
-Like a reverse Iseki if you will, but without the masturbation.

The point I'm trying to get across is I'd like the idea that these Dungeons aren't exactly 'discreet', that literal entire chunks of other worlds are being teleported, phased in, and being dropped into our world like little temporal two-way parks with all the toppings. Some of them are literal Dungeon Crawls: ancient ruins, temples, procedurally generated buildings that lodge themselves into odd places and begin spitting out monsters while themselves having fantastic items. Though, some places would literally be entire 'chunks' of forests, lakes, one quarter of a volcano, etc..

And they're full of weird n' exotic items, treasures, resources, and cultural pieces from different dimensions and even genres (science fiction worlds, high fantasy worlds, low fantasy worlds, CHILDRENS CARTOON WORLDS), but they're also full of cling-ons: monsters, displaced peoples, creatures, plants, cross-contamination from numerous realms and worlds. Sometimes these chunks or 'shards' would eventually disappear and the problem solves itself, but most stay and nobody (ideally) knows entirely what triggers such an event. Some people think you need to 'clear' the dungeon of it's treasure or 'boss', but some zones have been so throughly looted and pillaged that that can't possible be true.

I'd imagine it'd be pretty neat, but would also be an incredibly destabilizing, destructive force, that would completely ruin our modern society due to too.. I wana say "over stimulation": every dungeon crawled could potentially have something that changes everything about our in one way or another.. Or it could just be a monster care package.

No you see, That is bad!
Because if there are runes that can actually affect the reality around you and may make or break a delve into a dungeon then you KNOW that there's gonna be a shit load of tattoo-artists, gypsies and common crooks hanging around dungeon cities peddling false runes to any idiot whose buying.

Also if you can actually replicate runes then that means the most hardcore dungeon delvers are gonna be walking around looking like freakin' Yakuzas.


...also
Starting to run out of orc pics

I actually like that idea, the Yakuza thing. You could see different"factions" develop with their own style of rune painting. Maybe tie that into the corporation or crime syndicate ownership of the dungeons?

Theres an Anime called Magi that has a useful way of dungeons working. Dungeons appear, and always contain treasure, magical artefacts etc. At the "highest" level of the dungeon (be it actually high or deep underground) is a genie, who will serve the person who can reach them, and prvoe themselves worthy. The tresure and monsters are created by the genie to weed out the weak and unworthy. The treasure is similarly made to ensure the most adventurous people attempt to seize the dungeons. The most powerful person in the setting, is a guy who conquered 7 dungeons, then gave out 6 of the main magical relics to trusted advisors, since commanding 7 genies at once to a compentant level is stupidly hard.

Sounds like trash.
>being so unimaginative that you have to shoehorn dungeon crawling into a modern setting because you can't conceive of a role-playing experience that isn't COMBAT COMBAT COMBAT mindnumbing bullshit.

>Some of these metals not even native to our very universe.
Sort of a tangent, but if these metals maintain their properties when returned to what I am assuming is/was mostly a low magic, sort of real modern world, how are they a thing? The periodic table is what it is because of elemental stability in our universe, Are you just planning to hand wave physics being altered when magic doors show up? Or are you planning to explain foreign elements remaining stable in different universes? Just curious since you seem to be putting the idea front and center.

I could imagine pocket dimensions each having odd combinations of physical properties being a neat way to explain why you are sending small irregular units to explore instead of sending a nuke.

Thank you for your imput.

Science discovered magic in the large hadron collider and now doors are opening.

Similar to a weird dream I had once where these weird spiral stair-case-towers (though the staircase mostly goes down deep in spooky places) started sprouting up all over the place in cities and monsters and ghosts come out of them, and after one is cleared it'll disappear after a while and another will appear somewhere else.

And cities and civilisation basically treats it as a environmental hazard and mainly wall them off and let professionals dive into them to clear them out.

Youngsters get OUT!

Are we talking special towers or are people's fire-escapes look the same but are suddenly going all the way to floor (-666)?

forgot pic

Personally I wouldn't have these shards be a common occurance. Because if they are then that would make it very difficult to create a tangible main world for the party to rest in.

These metals would have to maintain their properties, otherwise you have metals from our world that wouldn't work in certain doors and make the system needlessly more complicated.

Just have them sign up to work with one of the major corporations and give them a comfy main office to spend their down time in before being flown to the mission sites a la spy flicks

I fucking love this idea so I'll throw some garbage brainstorming ideas at you
>The dungeons are more of a force of nature than just magic hallways. They aren't sentient, but can pick and choose who will and won't be "worthy" of actually delving into the dungeons and "playing them" like they're meant to.
>If local governments try to find a way to exploit it and just flood the dungeons with soldiers, slaves, robots, or some other workaround, it rejects them and pretty much guarantees a horrible death to everyone inside. Time and space can move differently, horrible eldritch monsters will track them down, etc. Making the dungeon completely unwinnable
>The only way to successfully traverse the dungeons is by hiring teams of specialized mercenaries who have no trouble getting in. Even though just being able to set foot in the door doesn't guarantee survival.

LIke they sort extrude out of the ground in the middle of an alleyway or an abadoned lot or carparks.

should clarify also for full disclosure that this WAS a dream, and columbo was fighting giant angry spectral skulls that were coming out of the towers with logical arguments.

>should clarify also for full disclosure that this WAS a dream, and columbo was fighting giant angry spectral skulls that were coming out of the towers with logical arguments.
That's one weird dream.
I mean, that can be done allot more easily if you just say that only 4 people can be in a dungeon at once. That way you don't have players dying to cheap deaths.

The problem with that is that some players will want to visit Disneyland or something once and a while.
Come to think of it, what would a door dimension be like if it spawned in Disneyworld? Or Sega HQ?

He could "shadowrun-fy" the modern dungeons. When I was younger I used d20 Modern for a Resident Evil game set in a mansion. Was a dungeon, but "modern"

What does that even mean user?