The Story So Far

It  never fails - no plan survives first contact with the enemy adulting. 

I was doing fairly well keeping up with the Dungeon Year first month until last week. Layoffs at work, rush jobs and a whole lot of unplanned work made a ruin of my schedule and left me no energy for this project. 

But that is okay! Because I knew things like this happen in life and I had allotted some slack in the design for "blank space". In addition, the design of the Capricorn half of January was meant to be more of a sandbox. 

The game is meant to open with the PCs 'awakening' to a strange twilight realm of tinkling glass and gloaming, directionless light. There they quickly discover themselves to be silvery, glass-like simulacra with incomplete memories. They will immediately get a brief lore dump from an NPC, setting the stage for them and setting a few imperative goals: 

1. Collect something called "living shards" (hereafter just "shards"), which they will use to reassemble themselves. 
2. The longer it takes to collect the shards, the more likely your shards will be taken from you by monsters. 
3. Also, after some time the PC will start to transform into one of the local monsters of this quasi-world, forever. 
4. Once each person has "enough" shards, they may transit through the Gates of Janus (1-19) to exit the dungeon, a complete person. 

The party will have three days (or Long Rests) to collect all the shards they can, usually by harvesting them from local monsters, all of whom need these shards to survive. In the meantime, the monsters will also be attempting to take THEIR shards, and after each period of rest the PC will begin to feel "less attached". 

In order to keep the players moving and seeking out shards, they will have to roam throughout this twilit realm and collect shards (I'm thinking 6-8 per character; this is a minigame which I will detail below). Thus many areas are simply open, and the players will be sweeping each area for shards. As far as unique locations, I have front-loaded them into the early days (except for 1-19: The Temple of Janus). The Lens of Oroboros(1-1), the goblin hunting den (1-3), the Onion Fort (1-11), the Silver Lake (1-6), the New Moon area (1-18) and the Shrine to Hecate. 

I will probably redistribute these features to other areas. I don't want to have set-piece areas clustered too closely together.... but maybe I'll add another goblin hunting den. I haven't decided yet. But the empty spaces between them will be key for random encounters which will provide those precious shards. 

Anyway, I will need to get a wiggle on to catch up with January. Fingers crossed - things seem to be normalizing at work!