Bubble Dungeon

I'm working on an idea inspired by the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and I'd love your thoughts.

The concept is called a "Bubble Dungeon."
The dungeon is split into 4 quadrants: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.
Each quadrant is interconnected — actions in one can affect the others.
(Example: Defeating the Water Boss floods part of the Earth Temple but also drains a flooded tunnel in the Fire Quadrant, opening new paths.)

Each quadrant is locked behind a puzzle.
Once a puzzle is solved, that quadrant becomes "open," and characters from it can then help with other quadrants.

Magic items found in one area might make another quadrant's challenges easier!

I'm planning to run this PbP (Play-by-Post) style.
I’m debating between two options:

16 players (4 in each quadrant)

4 players (each controlling 4 characters — one per quadrant)


Players can communicate across quadrants but can’t physically interact until their quadrant's puzzle is solved.

Would love to hear what you think!

Would you prefer a bigger group (16 players) or a smaller group (4 players controlling more characters)?

Any thoughts on the setup?

First thought is that a 16 player game will be to big and the communication will drown in clutter. Better stick to 4 players

This was my worry also. My plan for it was a single shared Thread where everyone could chat in. Maybe give each Group an item like a Sending Stone where they can only Send 1 Message a Day to the other Quadrants.


All 4 Quadrants would have separate Threads. Once a Quadrant is Solved they can move to another Quadrants Thread to help out.

Sounds like fun, but how would you keep player moving/playing at the same pace?

Either option seems intense and tough to sustain.

I agree with rune that 16 players would be a lot to manage. Maybe you can get away with 8?

Maybe have a separate thread for chats between quadrants in order to prevent cross-thread clutter.

The idea sounds pretty cool though.

Just curious, is the reason there would be 16 PCs (16 each with 1 or 4 with 4 each) because of combat that would occur in each quadrant?

Also, I imagine you are already planning on doing so, but i'd recommend having all gameplay in subforums of your game and restricting access so a player can only see the subforum for the quadrant they are in. If there is a way to communicate, I'd let that be in the main forum. If players direct message each other, you can't really stop that.

My coworkers and I love Dungeon Crawler Carl. What system are you using?
Might want to limit character build options, that's a lot of builds to review, or have a co-GM to help.
It would take away from the theme though, in the book there where more classes and sub-classes than you can count.

Not that you mentioned it I wonder if it were possible to run it with 1 person per quadrant but make them higher, level 10. A person would get their own solo adventure, and once they solve their quadrant's problem, they can join with someone else.
Everything would still be kept in separate subforums besides the one group chat.
I just finished the 4th book and I am working on the 5th book now. They are amazing.
I would most likely use 5e because that is what I have the most experience with. I wouldn't deal with the Whole Bunch of Classes and Subclasses. Just Stealing the idea.

I’d be all-in for running a singular higher-level PC in this. Cheers. :)

To allow cross flow of information you could have each player with 2 PC in separate threads.
Ex Player(letter)/teams(goups) 8 players = ABCD CDEF EFGH GHAB or 4 players AB BC CD DA
Then state that not only does cooperation get rewards so does the winning team gets a bigger reward. Thus each player would try to leverage both characters for 1 thread but not all players would agree on which one.
And/Or
To make it more like DCC and indirectly PvP you can even make it a bit like the dungeons from the book where if a team succeeds it imposes some challenge on the others. This would drive those that have the extra challenge to cooperate against the winning team. This could get messy if the players can not handle the challenge though so you might want to be careful. Games like this can be fun if everyone takes it as a contest and can handle competition. Otherwise forget it. DCC always has some nasty twist like this just to keep the players fighting each other.