Scampir

So quick clarification: I have so far only made Dungeons that players arrive in after it re-opens, being sealed beforehand. The idea is to catch everyone else in the vignette of a “gold rush.” Also struggling and looting and doing their own thing. ICON is great for this because it gives you combat encounters with like, shop owners. My ICON game is an oil boom story. The empire is showing up to put a fucking oil rig in the dungeon to suck up all the Dust (magical spell residue).

So how do you balance this in like, Halo? I don’t have to explain shit about the Forerunners (or Arken) if you’re going through the facility. I just need to know what the Forerunners were trying to achieve with the buildings architecture, with the basic information of some kind of architectural strategy to solving certain problems.

With Forerunners I’d love to do a light bridge gimmick, but the facility would have to be something interesting like maybe a Sentinel Factory. Maybe some light bridges are on or off depending if the production line is active. How do you toggle those game states? That’s very Zelda dungeon, but zooming out to the concept of a sentinel factory, who else in Halo’s wider setting would be interested in that? Covenant zealots? Human Scavengers? Is there a Spartan Team roaming around with a tactical nuke? And what could these characters be doing that would make it an interesting moment of play to engage with them?

So short version: I don’t do the “many layers” approach unless I’m explicitly doing different floors or like, floors being a patchwork of rooms that operate on distinct or perhaps contradictory logics (signalled by their presentation). Next, I don’t have players walk into clues or signs. I have players encounter the new uses as people are doing them. I am throwing out the archaeology. You find people doing stuff as they do it.