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! 

On Logistics, and Organic Development

    So far, so good. We have a theme, several thematic monsters of the initial area, and even a hook into the end stage of the dungeon itself (the Amalgams fascination with the Eye of Oroboros). 

    The plan is to proceed day by day, room by room, and fill out the first 19 days of January. Day 19 and 20 will be the Temple of Janus so really there are only about 15 more "rooms" to fill out. There are three things I need to keep in mind: 

1. Shard Collection. The mechanic of collecting shards to fill out each character needs to be both urgent and rewarding. Giving away too many shards too fast devalues this first, ultra-weird level of the dungeon. On the flip side, though, there needs to be a pressure for the party to press on, so I'm thinking of imposing a 3-day (3 long rest) time limit. Each time the party takes a LR, they feel a little bit more detached from that urge to reassemble themselves. Balancing urgency vs risk is key to this portion of level one. Given that a party of four will need 24+ shards (undetermined yet but probably 6 to 8), that's a lot of farming! And that doesn't include potential losses from penumbrae or glass goblins.  
2. Room Logistics. Each room-day will be connected to one another sequentially (making it possible to travel through all 365 rooms or regions), but also laterally through the day of the week (Monday to Monday, etc). With a few exceptions (where months connect, and the future "gap rooms"), this means that there should be at least 3 different directions of travel for players to move through (4 for most mid-month days). 
3. Overcomplicating things. I've already introduced multiple groups or factions and it's only day 3. Penumbrae (the undead shadows of the mirror realm), the glass goblins and the Amalgams form the main three threats of the Capricorn section. I plan to include more on the goblins. The Amalgams and penumbrae are non-directed threats, wandering monsters that endanger all. I will probably add a few more random encounters - other beings trapped here, perhaps another party of NPCs. 

    I plan to include more geophysical threats in this section - yawning gulfs, teetering piles of loose glass shards, quickglass, other navigable hazards as they occur to me. I am considering making the environment itself more dangerous as the PCs collect their shards, indicating they have become less the stuff of the mirrorverse and more tactile. I haven't decided on how to manifest that mechanically yet. Difficult terrain everywhere? Spike Stones-like damage for moving at full speed? I do know that they will become more "delicious" to the locals as they grow. 

    In addition, the glass goblin faction needs some develoment. I have an idea of what the Goblin Boss will be like, but will need more time to reflect (chortle) on that. 

    Eventually I will introduce the Janussaries. While they are not interested in collecting shards, they actively recruit (aka kidnap) new members for their master - another existential threat. However, once a character has a full set of shards, the Janussaries lose interest. At that point they may pass freely through the Gate at the Janus temple. 

    As far as the characters themselves go, they will enter the game as bland ciphers - a 10 in each ability score, a +2 proficiency bonus but no race or class (thus no skill modifiers), an average amount of hit points for their level but with monster rather than class hit points (I'm thinking 3rd level so ~14hp). This can be a mini-game in its own right; picking and choosing which elements of your character to fill out with your precious shards. Maybe I'll wait to fill out my low scores last? 

    More anon, but I'm pretty happy with how things are developing! 

Dungeon Year 2026 - Orologium of the Omenians

    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...