In two days, I will start my Dungeon Year '26 project, and that is exciting! For the last five years or so I've been focused on my Angard campaign, which is nearing its climax, probably within the next four of five sessions. While it is not winding up at that point, probably, I can't take that campaign development farther until the players decide what they want to do after.
I missed out on #Dungeon23 somehow, but I'm captivated by the idea. Slowly, day by day, working your way through a custom megadungeon, dredging up ideas and inspiration. The excellent Blades of Gixa (backed and bought) is exactly the sort of thing I would love to make, even though I don't have nearly the artistic skill of Paradiso...
Even though the intent of Dungeon23 was to improvise daily on a dungeon, I wanted to have a theme for this project. As this will be my first run on such a project, I settled on the (not terribly exciting) idea of a calendar dungeon; a dungeon whose structure emulates that of the calendar year. Each floor would have as its theme the nature of the deity or myth surrounding its name.
Thus January would reflect the nature of Janus, March - Mars, May - Maia and so on.
And everything was going swimmingly until I hit July. The months of July and August were inserted in honor of two Roman Caesars. Hmmm. My difficulties only increased moving into September, as the last four months of the year are based on numbers rather than mythical persona.
To break up the potential monotony of THIRTY DAYS OF <GOD NAME HERE> I decided that I would incorporate aspects of the zodiac into the dungeon design. Thus, Janus' realm would be divided in two; a Capricorn half and an Aquarius half.
note: I'm sticking with the January to December calendar, even though I'm told the zodiac calendar starts at midsummer. F that. I already have a notebook planner.
This addition gave me the inspirational kick I needed. All of a sudden, instead of a dungeon level populated by ettins, death dogs and other two-headed things, there was a metaphysical schism within the realm of Janus (apropo, no?) which could be expanded on and exploited by players.
On top of this, Aquarius domain would spread to the second level! Hmmm, how would that work? I guess I'll figure it out in February!
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January
I've had an idea for an adventure for ten years or more, a one-shot that involves the players' final goal to be to... complete their characters. Essentially, the party awakens to consciousness with only a dim knowledge of who they are, inchoate and confused by disjointed half-memories of a time before now.
Furthermore, their bodies are but ciphers of their original selves. They discover themselves to be assembled of small pieces of reflective glass pressed into a humanoid mosaic. All their ability scores are tens, they have an average number of hit points and lack even basic class features. And the world around them is much the same; they seem to have appeared in an enormous, dimly lit chasm or landscape made entirely of broken, mirrored glass.
The goal of this adventure would be to rebuild their characters to their original state. A narrative NPC will describe what they must do; find special shards of glass with which to complete themselves so that they may escape through one of a number of special mirror portals.
Well, I have decided to make this the first half of level one. The party arrives, and must negotiate a meandering hallways and chambers walled by huge, teetering mountains of broken glass, seeking enough fragments of self to grant them passage through... what? AH, the mirror at the heart of the level, within the Temple of Janus.
This setting suggests things about the occupants - there are the discarded souls of those who fell through magic mirrors (mirrors of life trapping, for example) or arrived by other means like sticking a rod of absorption into a sphere of annihilation or sundering a Staff of the Magi.
Given that all dungeons are clocks irrespective of the calendarial theme here, there should be danger. Hazards. What happens to those who never escape? Do they disintegrate? Devolve into monsters?
I have several ideas. First I would say there is a time limit that drives the party forward. Say, on your third long rest in this area (since we are using 5E), you become part of the local fauna. The PC can feel what vestiges of identity that remain fading away, worsening after sleep.
The party will realize quickly that they need to get as many shards as they can, as fast as they can. But surely they can't be the only inhabitants of this strange non-space who seek out shards. No. There are in fact several varieties of strange creatures occupying this region.
First, there are the shard thieves, the glass goblins. These creatures collect shards to bring back to their lairs. The goblins are individually weak but hoard shards for the power they possess. Leaders of the goblins accrue power through the shards and use them to - you guessed it! - bully the other goblins to collect more shards! The goblins have the ability to pluck shards from your body, whereupon they flee back to their lairs as quickly as possible!
Next are the penumbrae, the shadows. Some prisoners of this place lose their sense of self before escaping and become the drifting penumbrae. They also covet shards, but for a different reason - it is food for them. Absent of their old identities but containing enough shard material for them to persist in a sort of half-alive state, these tragic creatures hunger for the temporary comfort of shard material. These creatures have a touch attack that destroys shards within a victim. Yow!
Finally there are the amalgams. Occasionally, two shards land against one another, fusing, and creating an amalgam. These are simple, crab like creatures who scuttle about searching for shard material. Composed of collected glass shards, they are well-camouflaged and able to disappear into the scenery. They are not strong, nor brave, about the size of a mid-sized dog or a small child, and they will flee at the first sign of danger, fading into the walls, floor and hummocks of the maze.
If an amalgam is successful in its hunting, it will eventually grow in size. When they are the size of a human being, they become more directed in their actions. They continue to seek shards and gravitate towards an odd feature of the dungeon, a huge lens in room 1, through which the very largest amalgams may pass to... somewhere else! Some of these creatures are immense, and very intelligent and dangerous. The largest are best avoided.
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So, what about Janus? As a two-faced god who faces both the future and the past, I've placed his temple in the center of the level, at the "cusp" of Capricorn and Aquarius. The temple is tended by the high priest of Janus, a former mortal once named Divultuus. Divultuus sits atop a throne-like bench, staring simultaneously northward into the mirrored lands (representing the past, reflection) and southward into the Aquarian zone
The old temples of Janus were neat structures, built like rectangular gatehouses and clad in bronze, with two sets of doors, one at each end, which had a ritual significance - when Rome went to war, the doors were kept open, but during peace time they were closed.
Somehow I like the idea of a gatehouse separating these two halves of the dungeon, with Divultuus and his minions overseeing the passageway. The passageway itself ending at a mirror of self-realization or what-not, through which only complete souls can pass. And what lies on the other side? ... I don't have to figure that out until January 20th.
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Wow, all of a sudden I have all this content...
