Scampir

Had a great chat after ending the campaign when Coffee decided to pop in and award us each with one question. The conversation of course drifted beyond the questions but we had a great discussion on like, Dungeons and how even though the NSR have moved out of an affinity for the TSR-compatable and taken it's referee mediated, rich world approach to other settings.

But has the dungeon moved on from an enclosed space to engage an other? An other to be encountered, titillated by, and then conqeured? The incentive of treasure has shifted to the disciplinary power of debt, but you are on the lookout for objects of wealth to steal all the same. A Dungeon is a container, and more prolific authors have analyzed what it can contain in a broader scope, but I want to downscale this to simple concepts.

What are we doing here?

So the question is, can a dungeon be designed that can be explored in a way that is not imperial. To beat semantics out of the gate, I want to say that the Dungeon is a game artifact (toy) of an unknown place broken up into serial, self-contained rooms (though exceptions are made to subvert expectations). For Imperial, as an adverb, I want to throw out a definition from Tom Nairn and Paul James' Globalization and Violence: where Empire can

"extend relations of power across territorial spaces over which they have no prior or given legal sovereignty, and where, in one or more of the domains of economics, politics, and culture, they gain some measure of extensive hegemony over those spaces to extract or accrue value"

I'm using this definition because I think it aligns well with critiques of the use of "dungeons" as this kind of toy framework in ttrpgs.

Maybe i'm wasting my breath here, but there's a trifecta of verbs that's tied to the og dungeon crawl that I argue fulfills this definition, where we can say that we're playing at imperial relations. It's to Explore (which is not obligated to be but can be read as creating an encounter with an imperial "other"), loot (which is to say, to take regardless of who it belongs to), and to fight, which is to say to use physical violence to overcome obstacles.

Empire can seem too big an organization to apply to a band of haggard thieves who could die to a stiff breeze. With the backdrop of AD&D's lore being tied to a civilization v savagery conflict of law vs chaos it's a lot clearer, but even if you ignore the lore things are happening at the table that make a game out of the imperial relation. So, consider this shitpost allegory:

Dungeon Wildcatting

Let's say that instead of gold for xp it was Oil for xp. By the barrel. That's right. The more barrels of sweet elven crude you get on your character sheet the faster you get your next hit die. Here we are, trying to follow a rumour to where an untapped well of oil might be located. What happens when people are already there who disagree with your goal of setting up a derrick?

What if this is an NSR game where the pcs are in debt? Does that make it interesting? I'm all for compromised characters but I think it's a touch too charitable to forgive violence for economic gain because someone was in debt. It reads very pretty but spoils under scrutiny.

You know the A to B from here. It's been in the discourse for like, 6 years now. This is the dungeon as we know it, as some of us enjoy it, and as some of us critique it.

And now, the Dungeon as Prison

Dungeon is such a misnomer for what the toy is used for. Dungeons are prisons. They lock people away and control them. It's a different kind of game when you go into a prison, because your freedom is what's at stake. This is what I tried to achieve when I ran The Bureau in Robins as The Brut. A new kind of dungeon politic.

Is it an imperialist politic when the "dungeon" is a prison complex for a government that persecutes you, but would happily divide your community into group that could be bent into useful purposes and those that were too dangerous to even see the light of day? Can you even sell ritual knives that grow stronger the more blood it drinks? When making sure the best-made boot to put on your neck is their 9-5, are you actually encountering the other, or is this someone in your society that you understand very well actually? When you trespass around a government blacksite, is this actually replicating the colonial adventure? Is there enough substance to connect walking through shared office space or well-funded research labs to connect the two?

I wanted to ask that question and I have been asking it for the past 7 months. What I found was that the players never went in with the plan to make money; only to find out how to stop the place from harming them further. It was all very para-brechtian, and in this moment before I open myself to the critique that I hope I have been cultivating on cohost, I am going to say that I'm very happy with myself. For three design choices I made for this dungeon:

1. The reason that the game revolved around exploring the dungeon and mapping it was because a state organ built to persecute, assimilate, or exploit Robins built it (or rather, dreamed it) to resist infiltration.

2. The reason that you have to use violence is because the dungeon, as a centralized hub of information used to persecute Robins.

3. The reason that there are objects of wealth in the dungeon is because there is profit to be made by the state and it's collaborators in rendering the Robins into an underclass.

It's still violence. I didn't let the players forget that the people working in the facility were people too, but at the same time, I am not satisfied playing devil's advocate for fascists. Does this mean that the Dungeon is a container for the dehumanized? That's something I've tried to develop while running ICON 😜. For Robins (playtest version) It was more about reflecting on that dungeon artifact. Toy.