People like it when I chost about dungeons so I'm just going to start blogging about my next ICON dungeon. I have a lot of time until the players hit this one so I have enough runway to think things through piece by piece.
The Well
This Dungeon will be an Arkenruin named The Well. It is located in the Southron Sea, where the Thousand Islands of Arden Eld face horrible sea monsters emerging from blighted waters. I envision the prow of the Well emerging from the sea like the Tower of the Gods in Wind Waker, but red brick and sea-bitten, covered in slowly dying coral. The Southron Sea was once a great valley, wherein lied the Capital of the Arken Empire. After the Northern Glaciers were melted by the Black Sun of Iz, the valley flooded and the peaks became islands.
So that's where the Dungeon is. Now what is the Dungeon?
Conversational Games
Now, here's the thing about roleplaying games. It's "conversational play". If you want to cover a topic, you have to be prepared to talk about it. I want to talk about the following topics:
- Which of the foe factions in this Arkenruin should be supported?
- How did the Arken Empire support it's growth?
- What happened to the people of the Arken Empire after it fell?
To give players something to hold on to while exploring these topics, I have two tools: Theory and Metaphor. My first tool is theory, and for this Dungeon I am going to be using Biopolitics (in a simple version, where we consider how a state can nourish and proliferate life. Foucault describes Biopower as non-disciplinary, which I'm also really interested in). My second tool is Metaphor, the interactable game artifact of the dungeon that becomes it's symbolic motif. Here the metaphor will be water, the magically infused liquid Aqua Magica.
I need two invitations to this central theme, because it means that there's room for people to engage with one or the other then explain their end to the rest of the party. That's conversation.
The fun is in the fantastic, which is mostly addressed with the Aqua Magica. It can be sent through sluices, water wheels, rotating water bridges a la Twilight Princess. It goes to rooms where it delivers life, creating oases in the architectural badlands, swamps in the cisterns, and opportunities for the thirsty. I'm thinking of:
- How much water dungeons rule actually
- 3 and 5 L jugs puzzle
- Dungeon State-changing puzzle (routes only traversable when the Aqua Magica is flowing to a certain place)
The intrigue is in the lore. How do all of these fantastic mechanisms work? How did the Arken Empire assure that their ideology of who the Aqua Magica is determined for gets it? How is that made true through the design of the mechanism or the process by which they are operated or engaged with? I'm thinking of:
- Who held the Biopower in the Arken Empire? (Archaeology)
- What criteria or decision making process lead to the distribution of Aqua Magica (how can it be subverted or resisted?)
- How was this Arken Ruin a state institution for Imperial Biopolitics at large ?
These are my big picture ideas, and while I have some wacky reveals in store that I won't share (to keep my own little secrets!) I will be posting 01 in the future. It will be about the Cast of Characters that the Players encounter in The Well.
