My favourite parts of Umberto Eco's fantastic novel The Name of the Rose were a description of a church door, and the slowly-unfolding architectural specificities of a building called the Aedificium - a scriptorium, library, labyrinth, and abstracted cartographic miniature.
This as lightly torturous introduction to the real point of this post, which is that there are two dungeons that I have been writing around and towards for a long time, and which I one day hope the realise by properly committing them to paper: the optical dungeon, and the process dungeon. The write up of Magda's Needle has elements of both, but they continue to elude me in their pure state, so I thought that I would get down some thoughts as a guide to myself, and also maybe as a thorn at my side, to spur me towards their inclusion with the completed first version of Barony.
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The Optical Dungeon
The optical dungeon is an architectural volume that is at least partially defined and contingent on the operations of light: projection, diffusion, focusing, reflection, refraction. It also functions with reference to different colours and specificities of light, and to the projection of images-as-light.
An important component of the optical dungeon is the use and misuse of various portable machines that variously generate and manipulate light. Their uses should be broadly intuitive, even if their mechanical function is abstracted (even abstracted to the point of 'it's just magic, don't worry about it, although I would like to avoid this'). Projectors, directional and point lighting, mirrors, lenses - also frames and screens, since the framing of light (especially of a projected image) is an important part of its function. A logistical sub-system of powering and otherwise manipulating these machines.
And then the architecture of the dungeon, fixed and immobile (without player chicanery ofc). Walls and architectural surfaces and features that are themselves mirrored, transparent, opaque, framing, powering. A non-negotiable substrate within which the players must use machines and other tools.
Other motifs of interest: light with different properties; a monster whose vision/capacity for apprehension is synonymous with a particular light and its spread through the dungeon; an allied entity with the same gimmick; optical illusions and tricks; the intrusion of the sun, the perfected projector, into all of this.
An illusion dungeon without magic that cuts through the logistics of producing illusionary spaces.
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| Onibaba, 1964 |
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The Process Dungeon
Similar to the above but focused around the manipulation and propagation of various materials - in my mind these are mostly liquids, pumped and drained through the volume of the rooms. As with the Optical Dungeon, the players would have access to different portable machines with different functions, and would need to navigate a fixed architectural space built from surfaces that interact with liquid in various ways: grilles, sluices, piping, pumps, drains, etc.
Potential liquid mediums: water, petroleum, acid, mercury. Also possible: named liquids with varying degrees of flammability, toxicity, acidity.
One potentially interesting hook with the Process Dungeon would be to have elements of it be 'customer facing,' as in a bath house or similar - to have the dungeon split into public and off-limits areas, which would also be relatively safe and relatively dangerous. These public areas could be functional or abandoned.
Another ongoing fixation is a dungeon whose main threat is a disease that is contained inside it, and the main player problematics being how to inoculate and protect themselves from infection. Venturing into a dungeon like this without researching it beforehand is basically certain death, and bringing a virulent and dangerous disease OUT from beneath the earth and into the world is itself interesting.
The 'worst' of the liquids would be the one that acts as a medium for infection, and that saturates the lowest levels. Maybe it's rotten blood. You would need to drain/pump/dilute/disinfect it.
Other possibly interesting things: with the correct setup, the dungeon can be turned into a refinery for useful products; there are vast quantities of rare and valuable raw materials here; a table of reactions between processes.
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| Parsifal, opera film, 1982 |
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I also realised that there is now quite a lot of content in Magda's Needle! I'm particularly fond of how the Reverse Needle, Mimic Hell and CHAOS ITSELF sections turned out. Maybe it will be of interest to someone collected like this:
- Part One, The Surface
- Set Piece: The Mimic Hell
- The Dungeon: Levels 1 + 2
- Bestiary: The Underworld
- The Dungeon: Level 3
- Set Piece: Ape Monastery
- The Underworld: 3 Locations
- The Tombs of the Maze Builders
- CHAOS ITSELF
- Set Piece: The Reverse Needle
- Bestiary: The Deep, Hot Biosphere
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| Marebito, 2004 |
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