Notes on a Desolate Mythic Underworld

Art by Wayne Reynolds

In my preparations for a megadungeon game I have among my list of Play-by-Post (or, hopefully, in real time whenever possible) campaigns I need to get out of the ground (heavily influenced by Lost Carcosa from my friend Tristyn), I gave consideration to what I want out of that, aesthetically and creatively. A game that doesn’t speak to my worldview and artistic interests is not one that I should be running.

So I set a few goals that would keep me busy and entertained both during preparation and the actual game. I gave consideration to megadungeon theory and referred back to Philotomy’s Musings, which still lays the ground of my approach to D&D as a game.

The Goals

To create a megadungeon campaign, defined as not just a campaign where there’s an infinite tentpole dungeon the players can go into when they aren’t sure which threads they want to pursue, but that is the bulk of the game.

Therefore, the campaign must be thought in a manner that other gameplay modes aren’t just kept rather aside, but that their benefits are brought as close as possible to the central exploration loop of the dungeon such that separate modes of play aren’t strictly necessary to be considered in long-term.

This also comes from my need to uphold the fundamental human virtue of laziness as my guiding principle, and therefore devise a structure of play that can seamlessly integrate the external faction play into the dungeon without forcing me to consider too much at once, nor to make the urban spaces an abstract thing without its own logic that exists merely to sell wares and rest.

To make it a Mythic Underworld which keeps being a threatening, alien environment of hate and abstraction, without making it an exceedingly gamey concept that seems at odds with verisimilitude.

While smaller dungeons can uphold those principles and just be places of strangeness without straining credibility, Mythic Underworld megadungeons can very clearly feel as spaces that exist only for the sake of the game, rather than part of the world where we are gaming. They are prone to feeling unlike a living, breathing space despite its aspects as a genius loci because they lack consistency with the external world. This is a feature, not a bug, in many tables. Those who lean in supernatural horror and aim for a basic sense of the tactile, like myself, must find a way around it somehow without integrating its concept of ecology to the macro-ecology of the campaign.

I’m uninterested in large naturalistic dungeons, nevermind a naturalistic center of long play. So the Mythic Underworld proposal as assault on rationality appeals, but it must be constructed in a framework of rationality for best impact.

To make such a dungeon functional with creatures existing as individual nightmares instead of organized factions, given that faction play inside the dungeon is fundamental so the whole game can work and this approach is nearly Quixotic. The internal faction play is the reason to have a megadungeon, and the lack of faction play is a surefire way of making it unplayably boring. Smaller dungeons already suffer without factions.

However, internal dungeon factions would both bring naturalism that isn’t my intention and make it so that the monsters are, on some level, less hazards, less forces of (un)nature, less like Dwellers.

The Proposal

This hypothetical megadungeon lacks internal factions. Monsters are unique creatures, acting as manifestations of this hateful place’s eldritch sorcery and supernatural terror, and aren’t interested in such concepts as politicking. In other circumstances, such a proposal would be doomed to immediate failure (and might as well be!), but my solution is rather simple: the bulk of the encounter tables are rival adventure parties from other town factions, all trying to explore the place under the command of patrons. The megadungeon factions are merely the factions of the external world, erasing distinction between modes of play and spaces.

This aims to make the elusive concept of the rival adventure party less of a gimmick. The active Referee has to manage the world with an eye towards the many factions in town, wilderness and every individual dungeon, the fluctuations of the economy, the passing of time and restocking of areas, the reasonable conclusions of how those processes came down in the fiction, and many dozens of other issues. Rival parties being the most active figures the players will face, since monsters are such a rarity during exploration, makes that particular concept more smoothly integrated into the concerns. After all, considering the number of potential PCs that exist in the game, plus the wild west and frontier aspects of D&D, and therefore how many adventurers there might be in the world, an absence of rival parties is more conspicuous than their inclusion in games.

While we have developed tools to deal with rival parties as an active part of the game, such as deploying Clocks and such, it is another exterior factor to track during prep between sessions and applying directly in the moment.

Rival parties are the faces of town and nearby factions, which solves three issues. The first one is the need of tracking faction play outside the dungeon as well as inside. Now the very act of exploring and encountering others inside the dungeon can bring immense and immediate consequences to external faction play without having to track a domino of influences. Restocking, too, can be interpreted either as the Mythical Underworld fucking around, or as the direct result of other adventure parties meddling, which can be a good hook for negotiations and receiving requests from patrons about lost rivals, missed objects and the like. 

The second issue is keeping one of the main draws of megadungeon play (faction rivalry and politicking) while keeping it a conceptual horror space. Indeed, its most disturbing qualities can very easily be displayed by the remains of other adventurers and rumors that the players get directly, perhaps from people they had seen just recently, as they rush deeper and deeper into the nightmare. Which is what my ideal of dungeon fantasy lately shifts towards: spelunking as tragedy. 

The third issue, related to that, is the megadungeon assuming characteristic of a thematic object that represents the larger political “game” patrons play with their servants and mercenaries lives, with ties nicely to the very game-y, “it’s here because we are playing D&D” nature of the Mythic Underworld megadungeon while granting it symbolic and literary qualities, which pleases me immensely. It is a game space, yes, because it’s the focus of the game of thrones at large. Having the megadungeon as the center of power acquisition for factions also means that it suddenly has a naturalistic context inside the game’s purposes without it being a naturalistic space in itself: it doesn’t matter that it is an absurd, wargame justifying space of unhinged dark magic that has little “macro-ecology” with the rest of the world (the famous “a mad wizard built it, now go down there”) if the players can lean into the web of relationships around it, and facing their own personal ambitions regarding it, as their firm human and realistic framework to comprehend the beast. The megadungeon is understood different without needing a realistic ecology.

While such thoughts predate my analysis of Campbell’s presence in Moldvay, it is amusing how much this proposal matches my prediction for the urban game in the speculated Campbellian campaign. The hostility of the urban space is represented as the slow but inevitable continuum between dungeon trauma and the social consequences outside.

While such a megadungeon model doesn’t deny the presence of demihumans and other character types in the campaign, it seems best inclined for a human-only condition both for its aspects of supernaturalism and the need for groundness.

A note on mechanics: reaction rolls inside of the dungeon are directly connected to the social standing with the factions outside, so we can quickly gather what bonuses are depending on the players’ standing with the factions in the outside world. Reaction rolls for monsters follow the LBBs principles outlined in my Demesne suggestion for their alienness.

If anyone has previous theory on this they could share with me, I’d be immensely grateful.

Tags: adventure gaming, horror, refereeing