Monday, November 30, 2020

Huge Ruined Piles


Men & Magic, Volume I of original Dungeons & Dragons, in a section entitled "Preparation for the Campaign," rather famously describes a dungeon as a
"huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses".

The quote is a popular one in the OSR and for good reason: it's incredibly evocative. Reading it, I find myself thinking of an immense, crumbling Gothic structure, perched precariously on some mountaintop and sprawling across its slopes. In this, I've likely been influenced by the cover illustration to OD&D's Supplement II: Blackmoor.

What's interesting is that both the Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns were centered around – and indeed named after – a castle (as was Rob Kuntz's El Raja Key). Despite that, it was the levels beneath those two castles that served as the focus of player character action rather than the castles proper. Castle Greyhawk did have an "upper works" (as did Castle Zagyg), but they did not occupy much of the player's attention, at least according to one account by James M. Ward. For Castle Blackmoor, we have a map of the surface levels of the castle, presented in Judges Guild's The First Fantasy Campaign, but they're sadly not very interesting – hardly a "huge ruined pile."
Speaking of Judges Guild, the 1977 module, Tegel Manor, is in some ways closer to this ideal, though, at only 250-ish rooms, it's probably too small to be called truly "sprawling" (though moreso than either Castle Amber or my own The Cursed Chateau). 

I've written before about "above ground" dungeons, but, in that case, I was thinking mostly of ruined cities on the model of Glorantha's Big Rubble, which is itself worthy of further discussion. However, my present musings are occasioned more by today's Pulp Fantasy Library entry. I now find myself thinking about immense, haunted castles – an unholy amalgam of Castle Dracula, Neuschwanstein, and the Winchester Mystery House, peopled with all manner of monsters and perhaps even the degenerate descendants of the original inhabitants á la H.P. Lovecraft's The Lurking Fear
It's funny really that "the dungeon," meaning an improbable warren of subterranean tunnels should become the default environment for adventuring in RPGs. On one level, it makes perfect sense, since dungeons, as conceived by roleplaying games, have no real world analog, thus freeing the referee to map them according to his own fancies. Mapping a castle, even an absurdly large and rambling one, might demand at least a little knowledge of the layout of such buildings and that can impede one's creativity. I've experienced a little of this myself, in detailing the surface ruins of Urheim, since it's meant to be a "real" fortified monastery where all of its buildings have a clear and logical purpose. 

That aside, I don't see any reason why a would-be designer of a massive castle "dungeon" need be limited by real world considerations. My references above to Neuschwanstein and the Winchester Mystery House were chosen specifically to highlight the legitimacy of whimsical, irrational, and downright deranged design choices. After all, if your huge ruled piles is the result of "generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses," why should its floorplan be bound by normal logic? 

I remain quite taken with Jason "Philotomy Jurament" Cone's notion of "the dungeon as mythic underworld," which I believe comports almost perfectly with OD&D's presentation of the game's play environment. But we need not be too literal when it comes to adopting this perspective. Properly presented, a sprawling, crumbling castle can be every bit an example of an underworld as any series of monster-infested tunnels. Indeed, if one looks at Gothic fiction from the late 18th through 19th centuries and beyond – fiction that has had a clear influence on fantasy roleplaying – cursed and haunted castles abound and entering them is often metaphorically akin to descending into Hades (consider Jonathan Harker's trip to Transylvania in Dracula, for instance).

Obviously, creating a dungeon of this sort will require some re-thinking of the traditional structure of levels and the difficulty associated thereto. Off the top of my head, I might suggest dividing the castle into wings, with certain certain wings being "low level" and others "high." Alternately – or even in conjunction with wings – one might instead opt for a vertical approach: as one ascends the castle's spires, it becomes more difficult. Another possibility is simply to dispense with such artificial notions and opt for a more "organic" one, where the challenge is independent of location and characters exploring the place must learn to be clever to avoid running into dangers beyond their present abilities. The possibilities are quite large and, were I a better cartographer, I might start work on my own huge ruined pile. Alas, my skills in this area are negligible, so it won't be happening anytime soon. One day ...

13 comments:

  1. The answer I came up with for the problem of "dungeon levels" within a castle for my Chateau des Faussesflammes campaign was to have different versions of the same castle appear at different times during the day/month/year. Inside was an observatory that showed positions of planets, the sun, etc. so players in the know could "dial in" the version of the chateau they wanted to explore.

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  2. Gygax wrote that the upper levels of Castle Greyhawk/Zagyg increase in difficulty as one ascends. In actual play, that worked out poorly for me. There was no motivation for a group of mid-level characters to slog through the lower levels in order to get to the spires. So what I'm doing now is closer to the Caverns of Chaos model, i.e. the Hobgoblins control one tower, the goblins another, the pOrcs a third, and so on.

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  3. I love the mega dungeon concept, but I rarely want to Put in the work. I also found in the past my players only had so much taste for delving. A few games of it and they seemed to have their fill and wanted city and outdoor stuff or whatever.

    I’ve been doing a small dungeon for my roll 20 campaign. It’s not mega by any means, maybe 6 rooms per level. But it has all the vibe of the classic mythic underworld Philotomy talked about. I may never design a huge dungeon, but they’ll have to pry my old school dungeon philosophies out of my cold dead hands :)

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  4. I want to put in a word for Melan's (Gabor Lux) Castle Xyntillian (emdt.bigcartel.com/product/castle-xyntillan). It certainly feels like a sprawling ruined heap (in a good way).

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    1. Second that! Castle Xyntillan is the ideal Huge Ruined Pile. It is Tegel Manor taken to 11.

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    2. I am currently running CX and can only agree. This post and the one on the Gormenghast novels have strong affinities with it.

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  5. There's a brief description of HM Deathoak Prison in Call of Cthulhu, "the insides can be maze-like, for the successive gentleman architects were uninterested in maintaining consitent floor levels." Always struck me as a good conception of how large structures get modified over time. Major portions are constructed individually, then bodged together. I've even seen it happen in ships that were constructed in halves.

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  6. IIRC, The Black Tower is a reverse dungeon in that the higher level dangers are in the upper levels.

    Ut is free on their website: http://www.midkemia.com/HomePage/FreeStuff.html

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  7. One thing that makes castle structures harder to design is that we are all very much used to dungeons, which are spaces without an "exterior" facade. There are entrance points (ideally, several of them), but otherwise the "underworld" dungeon exists as an interior space inside a rock or earth mass.
    The castle (or any other building), however, has windows, roofs, an exterior, which all have to be taken into account. Nothing hard about this, but it still takes some thinking and a restructuring of one's dungeon-wired brain!! :)

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  8. All of my daughter's dungeons are towers (with names like the "Tower of Death," the "Tower of Doom," the "Tower of the Deadly Monkey," etc.) with harder levels as one rises through the tower. They are very psychedelic and strange affairs, each with its own backstory ("legend" she calls it) explaining how it became a site of adventure...but, then, she is only six and a half.

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    1. I'd love to adventure in a psychedelic Tower of the deadly monkey!

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  9. Are you familiar with watabou's procedurally generated mansion tool? It can generate the floorplans of various styles of "mansion". It's free and definitely worth a look for GMs. As are watabou's other procedural tools (region, city, village, dungeon). See here:
    https://watabou.itch.io/procgen-mansion

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