Scampir

My Megadungeon is played with Robins by Coffee and I have built it off of The Bureau by Goblin Archives. (The image above was made by Coffee btw).

Follow that hyperlink to Robins for Coffee's explanation of their work. The Bureau is basically a ttrpg version of the video game Control. The Bureau itself is the oldest house and you're tromping around as regular people being corrupted and empowered by the weird extradimensional invasion that has gotten loose.

"The Brut" itself is the Megadungeon. There is an enemy in Robins called The Brut, one of the dead god Albion's mightiest soldiers. When in danger they can summon concrete buildings around them. I took this and messed around with it a bit. If Bruts can summon empty buildings from nothing, what would it be used for? I had been meaning to try and run The Bureau for a while and the titular building has some interesting contents including:

• Office Space
• Government Agency
• Prison

---

So, here's where my interest lies in this project. Control, SCP, X-files, all that kind of government agency meets paranormal stuff is something I really enjoy. The New Weird Institution has some fun themes that I enjoy having revealed to me. Bureaucracy is difficulty to navigate. Nobody knows who made the decisions for these things to be this way. Why is every encounter with it so alienating? In the New Weird, the Institution is itself an eldritch entity made by human hands. It's something you can step back from and see as a god in its own right because the people who animate it are obscured, held at arm’s length, or siloed into one part of a grander whole.

Like, move over Cthulu, here treadeth the Leviathan.

My issue with the depictions so far is that they turn too inward, focusing on how the institutions harm the people inside of them instead of recognizing that the kind of institution the New Weird Bureaucracy is standing in for quite often harm people. They are authorized to harm people. Think of Ministries and Departments of states who have the power to deny or withhold support, or can choose to regulate or not regulate. Sometimes that is for good reason, but we know that people still slip through the cracks.

In Robins, the player characters are the people who are not only slipping through cracks (hearing the last frequency is one very important crack to slip through), but find themselves at risk of being crowbarred and jackhammered open so that the corpse-god Albion can, in death, find another resource to manage and another parameter to govern in his name. You are presented with the goal: radical freedom, and a threat: fascist control.

What is Control (and to this extent The Bureau) as the New Weird Institution? Remedy’s Control has a panopticon, an imprisoned brother, and a subtle irony to the main character being ensnared by a place at the top of the pyramid. A one employee model where they are at both the top and the bottom of a hierarchy. How long until that hourglass runs out and must be turned over?. Many SCP pages play with the context of imprisonment. Can the researchers leave without Amnesiacs? Are the torturers just as tortured? How many prisoners can we feed to the monster under the stairs? While not institutional, labyrinthine buildings in fiction such as House of Leaves is about a house so powerful in its possessive potential even reading about it can ruin your life. There is no leaving. Piranesi is about a prisoner coming to terms with realizing that there is more world beyond their prison.

There’s this recurring fascination with an inverted sense of the indoor space. An indoors so large that it’s limitless, infinite, and a landscape in its own right to the point of a firmament. An indoors that you cannot understand how it was built. And this wondrous incalculability is a prison to the human mind. What if the inside was as big as the outside? It would still be hell. Beyond shelter square footage cannot be a habitat. These houses are haunted because they have a power for themself, a power we can only negotiate with at best, and must escape at their worst.

Enter the Brut

And so we have. Robins have scoured the floors, had parasitic hunting rifles fasten to their hands, died, tried to intimidate flirty AI saved on tapedecks, been rescued, made friends with a man-sized cat doll made of Pipecleaner (named Pipecleaner) then lost him, liberated other robins imprisoned in the Brut, and witnessed a divide in which of the 10 robins the Brut thinks can be exploited by incorporating them into the Albion regime and which are too dangerous and thus must be locked away. Right now I would say we are at the lowest point of the story. A great success (liberating a prison full of robins within the brut) has been made bittersweet (Pipecleaner has merged with a doppelganger and turned into a massive spidery beast). The players are now entering the final act, with the goal of reaching a climactic confrontation with whatever is at the bottom of floor 10.