Theme

Alright, I'm just gonna brainstorm some theme ideas for a dungeon.

In no particular order:

Arboreal village (giant interconnected treehouse)
Bullywug swamp temple
Ghost town
Pirate treasure island

Haunted Swamp (clues lead to different options as you move from one area to the next. You get what you follow -- i,e: "To the west you hear the sounds of children playing, to the north you see a bright light shining through thick fog")

Roots of the world-tree (go kill the serpents eating the roots)

Delve into the Shattered Mind of a Genius (what kind of genius? Goal is to recover a piece of information?)

A town where an annual tribute keeps the Avatar of Delirium asleep. This year something threatens to interfere/prevent the tribute.

I'm down with all things frog people.

I like the third option Jesse has. A psyche fueled dungeon would be system neutral and could explore things like basic psychological ideas. Could have Freudian or Jungian based enemies/allies. It may be a bit difficult to visualize an A>B>C type dungeon though . . .

What about an blood island stronghold of a samurai vampire?

A reversal. Save a Dragon from a Princess.

Could revamp the Frost Giant Palace/White Dragon Lair?

Floating Fortress of a storm Giant Diviner who can predict the PCs actions?

An ancient library forgotten to time. Full of possessed books?

Something featuring a chariot race?

Something featuring this dude: http://img01.deviantart.net/735e/i/2014/050/8/5/angel_knight_by_kekse0719-d775l16.jpg Maybe he's been possessed byt the bad guys? Maybe he's fallen. Maybe if you defeat him, PCs gain the ability to use his special weapon.

Underground nothic hanging from the ceiling style dungeon.

The grand sepulchre?

Something based around the Titan's Goblet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Titan%27s_Goblet

Winter of the Minotaur: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/19/8c/0f/198c0fa93ce8effce0f9acd19c14194f.jpg

Haunted Bullywug swamp with a crocodile chariot race.

"In the heart of Skull Swamp, the frogmen keep their sanity only through deadly crocodile charioteering. Will your PCs survive the course?"

I find this acceptable.

Other thoughts? If we can decide on a theme then we can move forward with actual design.

That's pretty amazing.

If there is something threatening their sanity, then the race would likely be a religious ritual to appease whatever-it-is. Perhaps a dungeon-on-rails? The race maybe involving travel through various dreamscapes, the next of which would depend upon how you resolve the current one? So it would vary by playthrough, but there'd be no backtracking to a previous "room".

"Your chariot careens through the temple, your crocodiles' legs windmilling furiously under the lash, untold piles of loot flashing by as you hone in on the scepter standing on the distant altar. But the temptation proves too much for your warrior and he leans over, sword outstretched to snag a glittering gemstone necklace as it goes past. At the moment of contact you feel the world around you lurch, and an instant of dislocation ends with your chariot stuck and sinking into the waters of a bog. The world is dark around you. Ahead through the trees is the glitter of a fire and the twisted silhouettes of a cabal of Id Wizards as they gibber and dance around it."

If we can all agree on this theme then we can start building up the dungeon with their iterations. It would be like an "instance" from MMORPGs. I'm wondering how we graphically and textually represent a dungeon with different dreamscapes on a single page.

Hmm. Simplest form would be a flowchart: each instance would be a picture of something relevant and a blob of descriptive text, including possible outcomes A, B, etc. Arrows/paths from one instance to the other possible ones would also be labeled A, B, etc. 'S a bit boring, but it works.

A>B or C
B>D or E
C>E or F
D>G or H
E>H or I
F>I or J
G, H, I, or J>Finish Line.

To reduce the amount of options needed (i.e. not creating exponential options) I had some options double up.

Formatting was being stupid so I printscreened it and put it here:

Are we set on the Haunted Bullywug Chariot Race?

I'd be cool with The Fantastic Psyche Voyage.

We could utilize unused themes as node options as well.

I like the bullywug race idea, but how would players be involved in that? I feel like the chariot race is one scene within a swamp-dungeon?

I think Jon was saying that it's the entirety of the dungeon, like the players are riding their chariot through the dugeon, interacting with varous pieces that lead them through different paths to the end.

Pretty much; I was thinking that the haunted Bullywug swamp would be the start and/or end. Like, the race is through the haunted part of the swamp, maybe a half-sunken temple or something, and even though the track looks really short the middle of it dumps you through a series of dreamscapes ala Jaeger's flowchart above. So main goal would be survival through the end of the race, with maybe a secondary goal hidden in there somewhere? Players would either be frog-men themselves, or captured prisoners, or adventurers who volunteered for the thrill, etc.

I guess the overarching book-end scenario could be something else, but I like the idea of players needing to look after a pair(?) of cantankerous harnessed crocodiles in addition to the various other perils =D

(We could build in a small loop into the scenarios, b>c>a>b etc., and have a lost Paladin npc who's stuck forever because they absolutely refuse to resolve those three scenarios "incorrectly". Heh; Paladins)

I was thinking about a back loop too.

Maybe there should be some sort of horrible failure condition as well, beyond losing the race. One end leads to Bad Stuff rather than the exit? Would need to be a pretty terrible trigger condition, or possibly a series of them.

In my head, I had this idea that all leftward paths are the "good" options and all the rightward paths are the "evil" option since they lead to unique nodes (G and J). These could be those endings.

Sounds good. I count ~12 usable scenarios at the top of this thread, so we should have enough for a decently complex chart, space permitting, and if we're all agreed.

I just started thinking of this dungeon like an "amazing race" scenario, and now it suddenly clicks in my head (don't know why "chariot race" wasn't triggering it for me). Alright, I'm onboard. Also the Haunted-ness of the swamp makes the shifting landscape fit nicely thematically too.

Lol, sorry, this post hasn't added anything.

Maybe the PCs are charged with, like, transporting something (the crocodiles), and are in competition with other contestants in that way? Or have just been tasked with racing across the haunted death-swamp by an eccentric madman?

Oh yes! One of the scenes is totally a run-in with another croc-charioteering crew who plays dirty!!

Going back to the earlier posts, I'm still loving this tagline:

"In the heart of Skull Swamp, the frogmen keep their sanity only through deadly crocodile charioteering. Will your PCs survive the course?"

And Harden's comment:

If there is something threatening their sanity, then the race would likely be a religious ritual to appease whatever-it-is. Perhaps a dungeon-on-rails? The race maybe involving travel through various dreamscapes, the next of which would depend upon how you resolve the current one? So it would vary by playthrough, but there'd be no backtracking to a previous "room".


Like, maybe, all the race-contestants were captured by the insane bullywugs, who make sport of their prisoners by offering them a means of escape (competitive croc-charioteering!). But there can be only one winner! (everyone else totally gets eaten by psychopathic amphibians)

Compiled quotes pertaining to story and dungeon structure.
I would add that the item grab also makes sense. If we frame each node around a choice of two items that represent the choices made by the players, we can have some easy to frame and understand choices. Also, I would add that each location's write up should have some vague uniformity in how we present certain elements. I am a big fan of the d6 charts ala Lasers and Feelings and think having a few of those will bring an element of randomness to the nodes that we build. Not every node necessarily needs one, but we want both variety and continuity between nodes. Gravity works (or does it in all of them?), travel between them is by an effect that is consistent, other racers behave as expected. Maybe there are other groups of good or bad racers and that can be a chart. We can bold things like "Players face a trap from the *Racer from Chart 1*"


Also, I am beginning to consider layout. I like a bold title, an easy tagline, a scroll of flavor, a paragraph of exposition that can exceed the normal node length for the beginning node, and then clear node direction travel.
I like both of these for Flavor Text options.

The first could be near the title, the second could be flavor text on a scroll or torn sheet of paper.

Which means we made need an Id Wizard node. Maybe that's Node A. Utilitarian vs Hedonic is a good third axis.