Tag: lunacantium

#Dungeon23 weeks 21 and 22 — The Forsaken Parish and the Garden of the Reverend Elect

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

I gave up on #Dungeon23 mid-June. It was an interesting activity, and I generated a lot of stuff. I don’t think I’ll use that stuff, however:

  1. After half-a-dozen sessions, I stopped running Lunacantium. It just felt… too cumbersome. I want to run and create things that are much tighter – more The Bone Place of Dreib than this. As Bryce Lynch is fond of pointing out, ruined city adventures are hard, and Lunacantium suffered from that. [1]
  2. The core Dungeon23 idea — keep making content, bit by bit — is at odds with how I create… pretty much anything. I write flash fiction start-to-end, but just about anything else I iterate, sketch, accumulate ideas (characters, locations, possibilities) without order or relationship. Only once I have a stable sketch and refined ideas do I put them together concretely, or flesh them out very much. I iterate; I don’t accumulate.

The upside here is that I’ve got enough rough content to fuel months of full-time work on Lunacantium, should I ever come back to it.

Thanks to Sean McCoy for starting the whole #Dungeon23 thing — it was, and remains, a good idea.

[1] I also think there was a tonal problem — something about Lunacantium never felt right to me. I think I was trying to do too much, create too big a thing, and that made control of tone, theme, and feel just too hard. My use of the Dungeon23 accumulative model, and that I was developing the two outer areas under pressure of play, probably exacerbated that.

#Dungeon23 week 4 — The Wintergate

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Standard request to anyone who plays in my games, or who might play in my games — please don’t read this. It will ruin the joy and horror of encountering it the first time through your character’s eyes. Granted, it may shift and change before you ever see it, but why take the risk? Why risk the joy? The very joy?

The final location within the Pain Maze. More of a collection of ideas than anything coherent. Longer term, it’s maybe better to abstract movement through this one, rather than really map it – it’s not important enough for PCs to spend a long time in.

Next three days, I’ll do encounters or isolated features or npcs or something, then on the 1st of the new month I’ll move on to the Inner City district, which is much more important than the Pain Maze is. Not least because multiple city factions are or at least were there.

#Dungeon23 week 3 — The Desolate Cathedral

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

Standard request to anyone who plays in my games, or who might play in my games — please don’t read this. It might ruin the thrill of discovery. And that’s a high-grade thrill, hard to get in the open market.

Third week – another featured location within the Pain Maze. I like this one a bit more than the Winter Palace – it feel more concrete and interesting. Might be because it’s smaller, and thus the locations within it tend to be of more manageable size.

Lunacantium — players overview

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

This is the blog post where I will keep an overview of Lunacantium, my current adventure design project. Lunacantium features briefly in A Broken Candle, as the late and lamented capital of Rocaine, but I’ve never developed it in detail until now.

Lunacantium will also be my project for #Dungeon23, which I intend to do for at least a single day. I’ll put a warning at the top of every post so that current or potential players don’t see the secrets and thus ruin their joy and horror of discovery in-game.

Lunacantium, in play, is an OSR-style city-megadungeon. For three hundred years it was the glory of the nation, perhaps of the world, and then a century ago it collapsed. What remains is a dangerous ruin surrounded by mile upon mile of unlivable wasteland.

For rules I’m using Architrave, my lightly-reworked version of Knave 1e. I’ll probably put it up here at some point. Some assumptions (e.g. the very particular spell list) will set it apart from other OSR games.

What kind of game do I run with it?

  • There is a pool of active players, there are game sessions as and when (GM availability is probably the main constraint), and there is a (ruined) city waiting to be explored.
  • There is no plot. The story is about some people who went into Lunacantium and things happened there..
  • By all means roleplay your character as you see them. But I’m not going to target your character’s stories by e.g. setting up events that challenge their beliefs — you’ll have to make your own stories using the world as you find it.
  • I won’t scale encounters to the party, and I won’t fudge die rolls to save you. You’ll need to learn about the city and its dangers, and make sound judgements.
    • NB there is no at-all-straightforward resurrection magic
  • I will, however, strive to make it possible to read situations, to learn the nature (and risk level) of different areas, and to know when you’re getting into real trouble.
  • I may fudge rules for speed of play, particularly near the end of a game session.
  • I’ll probably run this intermingled with other things for a good while, but at any time it could disappear or be replaced by something else.

Finally, a promotional flyer: