Playing the Game of Clue as a Deckbuilder

In TTRPGs like Dread and video games like Balatro, we can see how a simple and familiar game concept serves as a "chassis" for a more complex or customized game. When you start thinking about games like this, it can be hard to turn those thoughts off. Consequently an offhand comment about what the game of Clue (aka Cluedo) would be like as a deckbuilder turned into the following.

Assume “standard deckbuilder” rules, wherever a rule is not otherwise stated. Dominion is a good baseline, since the turn procedure is straightforward. This version of Clue would require making a new deck of cards, for various reasons that will be obvious. But it could use the existing Clue board.

First you would need multiple copies of each suspect, weapon, and room card (collectively, clue cards). The specific amount would be determined after playtesting. Shuffle the clue cards and then distribute them evenly in piles between the nine rooms, face down.

Each player starts with some mix of Shoe cards and Magnifying Glass cards (10 total, proportion would depend on playtesting). They draw a five-card hand per turn, ala Dominion. Playing a Shoe allows you to roll the dice to move. Playing a Magnifying Glass lets you search the room you’re in. You can’t search the same room two turns in a row (place a token at the end of your turn to mark your last-searched room). There is also an investigation deck that is available from all rooms.

Searching a room allows you to draft a card from either the clue deck in that room, or the universal investigation deck. Cards acquired this way go in your discard pile, and then you later draw them as you would in any other deckbuilder. The clue cards don’t typically do anything until the “solving the mystery” phase (see below), although some investigation cards might care about them and leverage them as resources before that time. 

The investigation deck includes cards that do typical deckbuilder-type things (see below). Three to five cards (again, determined via playtest) are always available face up in a “market” next to the investigation deck; searching allows you to take one of these and replace it with a new card from the deck.

Solving the mystery: On any turn in which you have each of a suspect, weapon, and room card in your hand; and you are in the room in question; and no other player has a card in their discard pile that matches any of those three cards: you may play those three cards and declare the combination to be the answer to the mystery. Do this in the typical Clue style (e.g., "Professor Plum, with the Wrench, in the Ballroom"). At this point, any player may reveal and discard one of these three cards from their hand to “disqualify” your solution. If they cannot, you win the game.

Most of the investigation cards would be familiar to deckbuilder afficionados (improved movement, more searching, card draw, trashing unwanted cards, etc.) A few ideas for special cards particular to Clue:

• Snoop: Privately look at one other player's hand. Then draw a card.
• Clever Reveal: When a player proposes a solution, you may reveal and trash this card to search any one room’s clue deck; if you find a clue that matches any part of their proposed solution, you can add it to your discard pile (thus invalidating their solution).
• Rule Out: Choose an opponent; they trash a clue card of their choice from their discard pile.
• You’ll Never Catch Me: When a player proposes a solution that names your character as the suspect, you may reveal and trash this card. If you do, they do not immediately win. Instead, you win if you can reach the “x” spot on the staircase on the Clue map. The accusing player can stop you by reaching that spot first. Play continues as normal for other players. During your turn, you may discard this card to draw a card.

Possible issues:

• It may be too easy to reach a fail state where no one can win? Possibly clue cards need to be retrievable in some way, even after they have been trashed. A straightforward solution would be for trashed clues to go to the bottom of the deck.
• Movement around the board may not be incentivized enough?
• Optimal play may obligate competitive players to try to track too much of what they see in their opponents discard piles, particularly clue cards.
• The “you’ll never catch me” minigame may be too cute by half.
• Random card acquisition versus more filtering (e.g., "look at the top three cards of the clue deck, choose one, then shuffle") may need to be evaluated.
• Getting lucky (e.g., finding a room card in the clue deck for the matching room) might allow a player to win too quickly.

Another Card-Based Method for Wrapping Up a Campaign

TTRPGs provide a lot of assistance for beginning a game and a lot less for ending one. I’ve written before about using cards to wrap up a game. Late last year, we wrapped another game with cards. The situation was as follows.

• We were wrapping a multi-year game, and the PCs had finished everything that we wanted to address through conventional, moment-to-moment play.
• We wanted to "zoom out" from a typical session's focus and resolve some big questions without rolling the dice. 
• The PCs had two goals that were in tension with each other.
• We wanted to break the action into separate stages to define gradients of success and failure.
• We wanted danger, risk, or conflict embedded both in the individual stages, but didn't want any particular resolution to be too time-consuming.

For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip the in-fiction details and focus just on the mechanics of the process.

The PCs needed to get through 14 “phases” to achieve their two goals. To ensure we could complete the finale in one session, I used a timer, with the PCs compelled to move forward to the next phase. Each phase began with two face-down playing cards, which the PCs revealed when they began the phase. I had the 14 phases laid out on the table, and the two cards were placed in columns on either side of each phase.

In addition to the face value of numbered cards, jacks were worth 11, queens 12, kings 13, and aces were wild cards, worth either 1 or 14, at the players’ discretion. The gap between the numbers on the two cards indicated the danger of the current phase. A difference of 0-2 indicated minimal danger; 3-5 signified moderate danger; and 6 or higher suggests extreme danger. I had concepts planned for how danger might manifest in each phase, as well as some general danger-escalation tools that could be used at any stage.

To determine how well their efforts to deal with a dangerous situation were going, they could draw a card from the top of the deck and add it to either side. So if a 3 and a 9 were revealed for either side of the phase, creating a danger score of 6, and a player drew an additional card and revealed a 5, they could add it to the side with the 3 to bring that side up to 8 and the stage's overall danger margin down to 1. The six characters in play had three chances each to add a card in this manner, for a total of 18 among the group. To use one of these draws, the PC had to “flash forward” to one of three epilogue moments – one day later, one month later, and one year later.

Here’s the catch. In addition to resolving the danger of the present stage, the running totals of each column will determine if they players achieved one, both, or neither of their overall goals (separate from the danger in each phase). 

So the players needed to balance the phase-by-phase spread against the running totals for their two goals. These two incentives could easily conflict, where they needed to "make up" a difference in the overall goal totals by leaning into danger in some of the stages. The players in my game were actually forced to make the last stage much more dangerous for themselves in order to get their goal numbers to where they wanted them to be.

We handled all of this narratively, using NPCs, abilities, resources, and the flash-forward epilogue moments to interpret the results of the revealed cards. No dice were rolled during this session. But there’s no reason (besides time) that something like this couldn’t be used as a “progress clock”-style overlay on regular game action.

Difficulty 

I decided that a final difference of 4 or less would indicate both goals has been completed successfully, while 5 or more would involve compromising or partially failing at least one of the two goals. I didn't go too deep into calculating the odds here, but I think I was lucky that the cards provided some tension that forced them to act, as there is a non-trivial chance that the numbers on the cards could balance themselves too easily and let the players move forward passively.

Fortunately, it is easier to make this harder in one of several ways:

• Decrease the margin for success on both goals; for example, say that a margin of 2 or less is required to succeed on both goals, with 3-5 succeeding on the higher-value goal only, and a difference of 6 or more indicating that both goals fail.
• Set Aces to 14 only, rather than allowing them to be wild cards. 
• Remove the 2s, 3s, and even the 4s from the deck. The game will become swingier without the low cards, with more phases showing high levels of danger. 
• Allow for fewer interventions to add cards to balance out danger.
• Instead of measuring the success of both goals by the final margin, give the two goals separate (and conflicting) success states. For example, one column could succeed on a high score, while the other could succeed on a low score. This would essentially force the players to choose one over the other, partially influenced by the randomness of the cards. 

But Why Tho?

To some degree this is just a different way of getting to what is really just a progress clock or skill challenge. Dice could simulate this in a way that is closer to the conventional game action. 

But I think there is something for switching systems entirely to frame an epilogue. After spending an entire campaign rolling dice to resolve moment-to-moment action, the cards signposted that the resolution system here was going to be different. 

The cards also provided a good visual centerpiece for the session. When I run games in person, I'm mostly happy to do it with few maps and props. But I have noticed that players benefit from having a shared visual thing to look at, particularly when the session has a very specific shared objective like this. 

The Prison Megadungeon: Doors as Exploration Complications

As we discussed in our first post on megadungeon influences, we want to place a heavy emphasis on complicating exploration. Doors are one of the best places to trigger complications. They provide a level of consistent friction; remind PCs of the danger as they move further from the safe center; and ensure that time and choices matter. One adventurer speaking to another might describe their delve not by how many feet they moved away from safety, but by how many doors they traversed (“I was 13 doors deep, I thought I would never make it back”).

For now, we’ll set aside exploration complications actively created by factions, NPCs, and monsters. We’ll return to those later, but we want to first focus on friction that is more endemic to the dungeon itself, as a place. 

We can escalate exploration complications gradually. This is not an exhaustive list, and we will add to it as we go, but it is enough to get us started. 

Stuck Doors

Using old-school logic, and assuming that doors are always potentially difficult to open (even if unlocked), and always in danger of shutting behind the PCs (even absent antagonist action) really changes the way they navigate the space. Many players (especially modern-style players, but even many old-school players) will start to move very confidently once they’ve decided that speed, stealth, or magic has permitted them to do this without consequence. Stuck doors that follow this logic call that confidence into doubt.

Stuck doors are the definition of a soft barrier. Players can always attempt to force them, and they can typically be destroyed as a last resort. But this is going to be noisy and time-consuming. So a stuck door is typically a choice: risk noise (and resulting random encounter/events rolls)? Or explore in a different direction and hope to find another way? 

We’ll want to ensure that the earliest parts of our dungeon present a lot of soft barriers like stuck doors near Jaquays loops, so that the players engage with this kind of choice early and often.

Secret doors. Secret doors are also a type of soft barrier. Whether adjudicated purely through investigating the fiction, or through the x-in-6 odds of some old-school games, or by ability checks in modern games... there is very little stopping PCs from finding secret doors early.

As with stuck doors, secret doors only make sense in tension with time. Absent time pressure, PCs can brute force the search for secret doors. But in tension with time, the PCs will have to choose where to search, and in a well-designed dungeon, that incentivizes engaging with the factions and history of the dungeon, and deducing the nature of the space.

Deployed intelligently, secret doors (like stuck doors adjacent to Jaquays loops) multiply the choices for exploration. They provide shortcuts to new, dangerous areas, and new routes to loop back to earlier areas. They are a risk, and an opportunity.

Thracia has important secret doors on the first and second dungeon levels. Whether or not the PCs find these doors can radically change their experience of the dungeon. Arden Vul supercharges this idea; listening to the 3d6 DtL actual play, and reading different play reports, it is clear that discovering (or failing to discover) certain secret doors at certain times creates a completely different dungeon feel. Any megadungeon can feature an arbitrarily large number of rooms, even in excess of Arden Vul’s massive total. But a megadungeon will feel huge not because of some arbitrarily high page count or an abstracted decision to include all the monsters, but instead through the depth of the verisimilitude created by the factions, history, and exploratory friction of the space.

Even moreso than stuck doors, we’ll want to advertise secret doors early. Old-school players may intuitively know to look out for them, but players new to megadungeon play may not realize this is something they should be looking out for. Fortunately, there are easy ways to telegraph this in the first series of spaces the PCs explore. 

So early on, the party should find some or all of the following:

• “The back side” of a secret door that is only hidden on its “front”
• A damaged or ajar secret door
• Tracks or other disturbances that provide a strong clue to a secret door
• An antagonist who “disappears” after fleeing into a space without any other obvious exits (this is a classic trope from fiction that is fine to deploy in games as well, as long as it happens organically, and isn’t a forced “despite your best efforts, the villain escapes!” cliche)

Locked Doors

A locked door is a hard barrier at the beginning of an adventure that gradually becomes softer as the PCs become more powerful or acquire more tools (literally or figuratively). It is interesting that for a party with a skilled thief, stuck doors will eventually become more of a barrier than locked doors, flipping the two in the hierarchy of barriers.

Locked doors should be liberally spread around the dungeon, but not all locked doors are created equal. We can use the following kind of classifications as a starting point and expand from there. As with landmark-hidden-secret and our three tiers of maps, we can use the rule of three here to make this easy to remember and systematically resonant.

Common lock. A common key could open each door with a common lock in the local dungeon area. Keys of this type may be found in all kinds of places. Easy to pick.

Uncommon lock. A unique key opens only this door, and there are probably three or fewer copies of that key. Typically they’re in the possession of a unique monster or named faction member, or stored in a secure location. Moderately difficult to pick.

Rare lock. A unique key opens only this door, and there is only one copy. Typically in the possession of a major monster or a faction leader. Highly difficult to pick. 

Of course, not all of our doors need to be generic dungeon “doors.” We can think of doors as all soft and hard barriers in the dungeon. I really like this kind of post for diversifying locked doors. The virtue of a d100 table is that after the writer burns through all the easy, obvious choices, they have to really work to keep going. It’s easy to get 30 or 40 entries, then a lot of work for the next 40 or 50, before a burst of its-almost-over energy takes them across the finish line to 100. I’ve written a couple d100 posts and found them to be quite productive.

One-Way Doors and Portcullises

Really anything that creates a barrier after passing through a previously traversable threshold. These operate like more extreme versions of an ordinary stuck door. They are much harder to force or destroy, so they strongly incentivize exploring in another direction. Some of the most exciting parts of the aforementioned 3d6 DtL Arden Vul podcasts were the episodes in which the PCs had to explore in an unexpected direction because something prevented them from backtracking. One-way doors, portcullises, and similar barriers are a good way of organically seeding such moments.

One-way portals present good opportunities for counterplay. Stuck doors can be leveraged with Hold Portal or iron spikes, and possessing a key can do the same for a locked door. But one-way portals typically present more an immediate opportunity for tactical exploitation by the PCs.

Teleportation

Eventually the physical constraints of the map – and the distance between points of interest to the PCs – can begin to complicate exploration. It is simply not realistic to traverse from one side of the megadungeon to the other, unless we abstract the time (and random events) involved in doing so; at which point the fundamental currency of the megadungeon has failed. Teleportation offers a more advanced, high-stakes version of the loops and switchbacks that the simpler barriers and obstructions presented earlier. 

Arden Vul again models this well. Early on, teleportation is experimental, risky, even potentially deadly. In 3D6 DtL’s Arden Vul campaign, the group’s earliest experiments with teleportation got them in over their heads, and led to PC deaths. By the end of the campaign, mastered teleportation features were critical to completing the party’s goals.

The more the dungeon’s logic and history is understood, the more teleportation becomes an essential way to return to safety and recover crucial resources.

Architectural Manipulation

I must admit that I am personally not a fan of these types of obstructions. Early D&D is awash with disorienting constructions. Building a spinning room or a maze of halls that lead nowhere, simply to confuse adventurers, is fine for a funhouse dungeon. And yes, it is interesting to frame such features as a kind of cultural flex of the dungeon-creators-as-retired-adventurers, hazing the next generation with their deceptively sloping hallway.  

But I’m fine leaving these kinds of features in the past. The DM has essentially limitless ability to obfuscate the nature of the physical space – and even without ill intent, it is easy for a lot of these manipulations of the physical space to become a game of “guess what the DM is thinking.” 

The shared fiction of an imagined space is always fragile, and my old-school hot take is that the ICI doctrine is a clear improvement on this aspect of traditional play, which was probably always best-suited for tournament play and one shots with a similarly adversarial spirit. In my experience, dungeon exploration sings when the problem is readily apparent, but the solution is not. 

Keys as Major Treasure

How valuable is a key as a form of treasure? It depends on how much friction there is in dungeon exploration. Consider the following common options when adventurers encounter a locked door.

	Time?	Noise?	Evidence?	Trap?
Pick the Lock	Y	N	Typically no, although a serious failure might leave a broken piece of a tool stuck in there	Probably yes
Force the Door	N	Y	Probably yes. Definitely yes on close inspection	Depends on the trap; a lockplate-based trap like a poisoned needle might be ignored, but anything in and around the frame and threshold of the door is probably going to go off
Destroy the Lock or Door	Y	Y	Obviously yes	As with forcing the door, it depends on the mechanism of the trap
Use Magic	N	A bit (verbal components of the spell)	Typically no	Typically no
Use a Key	N	N	N	N

Keys, like maps, are deeply undervalued treasures, if dungeon exploration is treated as genuinely difficult and dangerous. Possessing the right key is better than magic; no need to speak aloud, no spell slot required.

Backtracking and Level Connections

“One of the most important elements of megadungeon design is that players have direct access from the entrance to many different parts of the dungeon. Otherwise, every single session begins with the party moving through the exact same set of rooms, which can be difficult to prevent from becoming tedious. The elevator shaft means they have 6 choices for what their first room will be each session. In a more traditionally themed megadungeon a grand staircase would work just as well.”

I felt this when I ran Thracia. There are areas on the first and second dungeon levels in Thracia that my players had to traverse multiple times. Yes, you can and should repopulate previously explored areas with new monsters and threats, and reassess how faction activity has changed over time. But it was hard not to do this without creating friction, when both my players and I were really focused on getting the action to new, as-yet-unexplored rooms. In our discussion of barriers above, we already covered how we should reward exploration with shortcuts, new loops, and new paths for future outings.

But we can go bigger by providing a central and recognizable connection between levels that can be accessed from different places. Arden Vul has a chasm. The Papers and Pencils example quoted above uses an elevator shaft… and we already have a shaft in our dungeon, don’t we? So the most direct way of creating this kind of loop is to provide one-way doors accessible from the “upper” dungeon levels into the shaft (remember, our PCs generally want to go up, so our dungeon is inverted). In addition to providing shortcuts back to the starting point, these measurably and visibly bring the PCs closer to their goal of escape.

In summary, we want to ensure that all our exploration complications are doing at least one of the following things, and ideally more than one at once:  

• Creating friction
• Making time matter
• Forcing backtracking via a different route
• Rewarding investigation
• Spotlighting keys and maps as high-status treasure
• Providing shortcuts back to the “home base” 

The Prison Megadungeon: Designing an Escape Megafunnel

Safe at Home 

Prisoners are thrown into The Pit, but the fall does not harm them. In an earlier age, these dungeons were part of The Palace, and visitors would float down this shaft as a thrilling diversion. The same magic persists in the structure's current purpose, but it is merely a small mercy for the condemned.

The area at and around the bottom of The Pit is the sanctuary. Most of the prisoners stay very close to this location. The jailers provide food and water from above, but only enough to keep the prisoners alive. The only other provisions provided are candles. So many candles. The Sisterhood of Benevolent Abstraction receive favorable tax treatment for the production of the candles, so they send scads of them. All supplies are simply thrown into the slow-fall field of the shaft and float down to the waiting people below. The prisoners never even see their captors.

The sanctuary is safe. Just as the shaft is enchanted with Feather Fall, some ancient Sanctuary or Hallow spell shields this place from harm, and none of the monsters of the surrounding dungeon halls will enter this place. No threats from the dungeon can come here. Adventure does not happen here, experience cannot be gained here, and nothing new will be found here unless the PCs bring it there. The sanctuary follows the same principles as West Marches settlements; it is a place between adventures, not a place of adventures.

The sanctuary is a source of new PCs, hirelings, and henchmen. There are always some number of prisoners here. How many there are and who they are is a quantum aspect of the game. They only come into focus when the players need them. 

It is also a place for downtime to happen. Any downtime activity that could be done in a settlement can be done here – if the PCs can come up with a plausible plan for acquiring the necessary resources. Expertise might be available within the pool of prisoners, or might be something a shrine could offer. The people in this space are really more of a resource the PCs can leverage, rather than distinct NPCs the DM will personify (although the DM may adjudicate what these NPCs need in order to do what the players want, and what they will refuse to do, in the same way the DM would step in to control the actions of a hireling who was otherwise directed about by a PC). 

Up Above

Returning up the shaft is not a realistic option. At least, not at first. The walls of the cylinder are 200’ of smooth stone, and there is not remotely enough material at the bottom to build even makeshift platforms. The hole is set in the middle of the ceiling, not close to the walls, and covered by a heavy metal trapdoor that is winched open and closed by jailers overseeing four burly, ribbiting froxen. Beyond that aperture, several layers of protection within the prison itself stand between a would-be escapee and freedom.

All that said, it is not impossible to escape in this manner. If the PCs come up with an ingenious plan, going up the shaft and turning the tables on their jailers should be celebrated. But we presume that doing so will require at least some engagement with the megadungeon itself, to gather either the power or the resources to execute such a daring reversal.

The First Shrine

Near the sanctuary is the first shrine, the home of Carnyhollow. Carny is a “demon” in a technical sense, but lacks the willpower and can-do attitude required of an extraplanar entity to manifest a discernible moral position. It mostly just wants to accumulate wealth in exchange for junk.

At request, Carny can transform an object or objects into something else of one-tenth or less the value. For example, if 50’ of rope is valued at 10 silver coins, Jerry would require at least 100 silver coins worth of treasure to produce the rope. 

He is indifferent to the type of treasure, but absolutely will not haggle or discount his price. 

He will accept magical items, but can only produce nonmagical things in return, and will be conservative in guessing a value for a magical item without a clearly implied value. 

He can only produce generic items and cannot customize them. He can create blank paper, but not specific books. He can create a padlock and matching key, but cannot create a key for a specific door in the dungeon. 

The equipment list for the system in use is a good proxy for what Carny can create, and the DM can use common sense and liberally reject any requests that stray far from it.

Carny is most immediately useful as a supplier of basic equipment and an immediate use for treasure, but the party can consider more elaborate schemes as they acquire more riches.

Any dissatisfaction the PCs may express with Carny's terms should also motivate exploration. It is hardly the only such creature offering such services in the dungeon, and any friction the PCs experience with any particular NPC or antagonist should serve as a motivation to explore further.

Three Tiers of Maps (for the DM)

We’ll go through (at least) three tiers of planning out the dimensions of our megadungeon. 

• A diagram showing only hard and soft barriers or exploration complications; verticality and danger levels; and treasure targets.
• A very loose and sloppy map that converts this diagram into approximate rooms and overlays factions and major points of interest onto it. 
• A proper keyed map that fills in room-by-room contents. 

Three Tiers of Maps (for the PCs)

To create concordance between planning the game and executing it, we will aspire for symmetry. We’ll provide (at least) three kinds of maps that PCs can find.

We want maps to be a highly prized resource. Even the humblest map might at least indicate the position of a trap or threat. In a high lethality game, that could save a PC’s life. 

Recent and improvised. The PCs are not the first to explore these halls. Other prisoners have ventured out into the darkness, hoping to find treasure to trade at shrines, or even dreaming (foolishly) of escape. A map may be a crude series of lines on trash wedged under a door, or hurried chalk markings on a wall, or a self-applied tattoo on a corpse that didn’t make it out.

These maps are helpful for understanding recent and proximate threats and opportunities, but they won’t convey any deeper understanding of the dungeon.

Modern and carceral. Maps were required to turn this place from The Palace into The Pit. Perhaps the jailers were sloppy or indifferent to how this might aid prisoners. Perhaps they were in a hurry to leave this dangerous place and didn’t remove all signs of their work. Perhaps some of them were left behind here, buried with their plans. Perhaps that was intentional. These maps are helpful for understanding barriers and obstacles, and where the divergence between the structure's original purpose and its repurposing can create opportunities for the PCs.

Ancient and original. Beautiful blueprints made thousands of years ago. These maps are helpful for finding secrets and understanding magic, and locating particularly valuable treasures. None of these maps are perfect, because each is of its respective time and ignorant of what came before and after. But they are all useful, because they are foundational, and in many respects contain information not known anywhere else.

The Prison Megadungeon: Into the Pit

The Pit* was something else in the past, something important. But now it is a hole in the ground where The City sends those it does not want. They do not execute you because the dungeon is hungry and it must be fed. The Pit is a prison. It is a dungeon. You are here.

Funnel-First Design

Characters start as level 0 ordinary humans with no special abilities and no equipment. Lair of the Lamb does this well, and it is useful in a number of interrelated ways.

• Character creation and the rules are part of gameplay
• Problems must be solved diegetically (“the answer is not on your character sheet” is pretty obviously true if it is a blank piece of paper) 
• Adding “stuff” to your character increases complexity gradually

Diegetic Classes and Ancestries 

Most funnels work like this: The players each control several level 0 commoners. Many of those commoners die during the adventure, “funneling” the players toward a dwindling group of survivors. At some point the funnel adventure ends, and the survivors graduate into conventional level 1 PCs. 

Most of the funnels I have seen do not require that the events of the funnel relate in any way to the resulting choice. If your surviving commoner’s highest stat is intelligence, you can make them a level 1 wizard, whether or not they had any interaction with the arcane during the funnel. That’s fine, but it is an example of intrinsic growth. Our PCs are nobodies who start with nothing, so we want to feature extrinsic growth more prominently.

So we’ll make the level 0 to level 1 transition more literal. A PC who wants to become a wizard needs to find something in the world that makes them a wizard. And this is true of every step of character creation and advancement. It must be something within the dungeon, not within the character. 

Shrines

What makes our wizard a wizard? If we choose a classless system like Knave, this problem solves itself. Equipment functionally determines “class,” so we already have an extrinsic solution to this problem. 

What if we are running a system with dedicated classes? The aspiring wizard would simply need to do two things:

• Acquire at least one distinctly wizardly item
• Expend treasure at a shrine

Shrines can have different aesthetics and names, but mechanically, each shrine is a place where treasure can be exchanged for XP. And that includes the XP required to advance from level 0 to level 1.

Many systems do not specify how much XP is required to go from level 0 to level 1, but we can reverse engineer it from later level progression. For example, D&D 5E.2014 requires 300 XP to advance to level 2, and 900 XP to hit level 3. We could choose 100 XP as the threshold to hit level 1. 

For a game feature that we want to be readily available to players – like reaching level 1 in a basic class – we want the price in treasure to be low, and the shrine to be close to where the PCs begin. More niche or difficult goals can require either more treasure, or visiting a more distant shrine (or both). Or a very specific type of treasure. 

Hungry Gods

Pelor will not help you. Even if he was canon, his sunlight doesn’t reach down here. If you want divine aid, you’re going to have to ask a dungeon god.

If we’re using Knave, the Knave 2 rules for relics work well as-is for this kind of thing. But what about other systems?

Gods work a lot like the shrines described above. Valuables go in, rewards come out. But gods are picky about what you tithe to them. Or they may want you to do something for them instead. They have more agency than a shrine, which is typically going to be a reactive location, versus the personality we get with a god.

The gods in Lair of the Lamb are good dungeon gods. They’re all freaks, and the worshippers of one of those gods are directly responsible for the PCs’ predicament. But they nonetheless offer power, and the PCs are not in a position to refuse that offer of power without serious consideration.

For further examples, read this post and this one. This post really centers “gods” (really, any powerful entity willing to trade power for something worldly action) in a way we want to emulate. A lot of D&D treats deities as highly intrinsic to the characters who follow them. In many modern-style games, they are really an extension of character creation, moreso than a part of worldbuilding.

Magic

Extrinsic advancement is all well and good for our fighters and thieves. But what about wizards? 

First and foremost, no spells will be learned by virtue of leveling, so any magic a PC is wielding is coming from what they’ve found in the dungeon. That means even a humble first-level scroll is a  major treasure for a low-level PC.

Intelligent monsters may possess such items. What about non-intelligent monsters? Well, a great feature of The Monster Overhaul is the frequent sidebars explaining what monsters taste like, and what magical effect (if any) can be gained by eating them. We can build on that to give wizards a Dungeon Meshi experience, deriving magical power from monstrous meals. We can also give otherwise-ordinary monsters magical abilities, with the understanding that defeating or capturing (or eating) them could be the key to learning a new spell.

Meet the Neighbors

You may have noticed that I said at the top that players begin as level 0 humans. Not elves or dwarves or thrikeen or dire molefolk. Humans. If you want to play something else, you’re going to have to find it in the dungeon. And the most ready place to find non-human PCs is amongst the dungeon factions.

Factions can offer PCs various rewards, but we have an additional one to offer in this megadungeon. Establish friendly relations with a faction, and members of that faction are available to your PCs in the same way humans were. They are a quantum resource for character creation and NPC recruitment, just as the “starting pool” of humans was at the beginning.

That also means that “recruiting” a faction creature as a potential PC can earn the enmity of any factions that opposed the friendly faction. If the rock baboons hate the gecko-kobolds, do you still want to ally with them, gaining them as a resource, but losing the kobolds? It should be difficult to recruit creatures of opposed factions, unless the factions in question no longer produce interesting conflict for the PCs.

Non-faction creatures (i.e., unique creatures) can potentially be recruited too, but there is not a quantum supply of such creatures available as PCs. If a unique creature is recruited and then dies (because, say, a PC used them as an adventurer), it is gone for good.

*We're going to throw down a lot of proper names throughout this exercise. All of these, from The Pit itself down to the lowliest NPC, are placeholders that we can always change later. 

The Prison Megadungeon: Under the Influences

Writing the (ongoing) World’s Largest Rewrite series has been fun, but I ultimately think it is better as a source of monster ideas than something that should actually be finished. But where to put those monsters? A prison megadungeon without the cumbersome "world's largest" trappings. Let's make a megadungeon.

Caverns of Thracia is the megadungeon I have run the most. Arden Vul is the megadungeon I have spent the most time thinking about recently, thanks to the 3d6 Down the Line podcast. Megadungeon guidance in the greater world of blogs is too vast and diffuse to cite fully, but I will credit a few inspirations.

Arnold K’s Lair of the Lamb. It is not a megadungeon, but it is quite strong in treating the prison not first and foremost as a place that adventurers will delve into, but as a place ordinary people will try to escape from. The very idea of doing a prison megadungeon like the WLD and not making it a prison escape scenario is a little strange, after all. I don’t think I even mentioned that in my first World’s Largest Rewrite post. We'll get into this more in future posts, but the concept of this megadungeon is that the PCs begin as prisoners.

The Two Week Megadungeon. I will not be following the steps here precisely, but like LotL, the TWM process emphasizes lean efficiency over exhaustive completeness. That will be important for, you know, actually making discernable progress. 

Designing the Dungeon with Numbers. This post is specifically about the numbers one through five and how they imply different things when used in design. We’ll want to keep this in mind as a counterbalance against the sprawl of the megadungeon. That sprawl is, of course, part of the appeal; no adventuring party is going to explore all of Arden Vul, and no two parties are going to have the same experience there. But that sheer amount of content is overwhelming if we don’t carefully curate how choices are presented.

For example, we don’t want too many areas accessible to the players at first. If the PCs have more than five choices, it is probably more than they can really conceptualize meaningfully. More than five options becomes a list that has to be studied. And a list can easily become a chore.

But a choice between three to five options – with perhaps three to five decision points within each of those initial options – is much more digestible. The PCs will eventually have many more choice points, but these will be presented fractally, as the PCs engage with the dungeon; not all at once, and not too much, too soon.

Landmark, Hidden, Secret. This is one of those great blog posts that can inform all kinds of adjudication and design. We need to make sure that LHS design is baked into the megadungeon. You know how modern-style players are always talking about how the "exploration" pillar feels underrepresented, relative to the "combat" and "social/roleplay" pillars? LHS design, in conversation with strict time records, random encounters/events, and other procedures, helps deliver that exploration aspect of fantasy dungeon games.

The Lost Art of Getting Lost. It is fine to say the dungeon will be lethal, but players are smart and good at playing conservatively. They will probe carefully and back away from the unknown. Doors that slam shut and force the PCs to find a new way back to where they started really test those skills. The same is true of dungeon features like pits, portcullises, and sliding walls. The humble iron spike becomes a lifesaver when it can guarantee a path backward. But, of course, the noise from hammering in a spike triggers a wandering monster check. And when time passes, that faction you offended before starts removing your spikes… oh crap… 

Because our PCs are prisoners, we can also address some of the obstacles noted in the post. We can control the “economy” in a way that is not possible for “open-world” adventuring, so we don’t have to worry as much about torch supply trivializing light. Our PCs will begin with plenty of candles, and no other source of light. Imagine a simple torch as an exciting “treasure."

Metroidvanias and Megadungeons and Information Architecture in the Castle Automatic. Two posts from the excellent Rise Up Comus blog. The first post creates a taxonomic framework for understanding megadungeons, and why some fantasy adventure game features and character abilities do or do not work within that context. The second is on information design. We don’t strictly need to worry about information design, as we are designing this as an experiment, and maybe to run someday, not to publish (haha… unless?) But good information design is its own reward. Every DM can get by with their own chickenscratch notes and kludged together prep process, but it’s worth interrogating how we could do better and make things clearer, even if that just transmits a clearer picture to players.

The Monster Overhaul. I have cited this so many times during the WLD series. A good monster manual is much more than stat blocks; it is a worldbuilding and session-planning tool. And the Overhaul is not a good manual, it is a great manual.

Make RPG history and look insane while doing it. Blades of Gixa is one of the successful projects  that emerged from the Dungeon23 movement. Indexing location and history in the way this video demonstrates is an awfully interesting idea, and is something we can mess around with for bridging the ancient-lore-to-current-events gap, and avoiding the dreaded “this room used to be…” problem that plagues many dungeon products.

Various Cryptic Keyway posts and projects. Of course I can also take from things I’ve already done, whether iterating on a good idea or salvaging a half-finished thing for parts. Even before the WLD series, previous posts have suggested a similar concept to this one. This experiment will keep some of those ideas. And if it fails, it will be the fuel for something else in the future.

I’m not interested in turning the WLD posts into a dungeon itself. I ultimately think the “world’s largest” conceit is a mistake that undermines good dungeon design. But working through those posts has been useful for generating ideas, and I like (with credit and thanks to OSE and the Overhaul, of course).

I can also scrape content off of my aborted Dungeon23 project, as well as several other dungeons started and left unfinished over the years. Those could even still turn into their own things someday, but a currently active project (like this megadungeon) always gets to steal ideas from projects that are dormant.

We’ll add to this list of influences as we go.

Campaign Pitch: Dungeons Fall From the Sky, So We Delve Them

A historical account of events on Lillette A, a .85 PHI planet at 5.133 AU around Kelson 3 (stellar ref code 7833900). 

Timeline (local solar years prior to present)

• ~600,000Y: A Hivonium separatist seed-ship visits the Kelson 3 system, using illegal stochastic course-charting techniques to evade estimated pursuits. The seed-ship identifies Lillette A as the local biome most likely to support life, and distributes its payload, in direct violation of galactic propagation law.
• 110,127Y: The third in a series of sequential-path Persioxes probes passes within 16 lightyears of Kelson 3 and pings the system, calculating a 44% likelihood of an unauthorized biome. The results are relayed up the command chain for further action.
• 7088Y: Several Persioxes probes, traveling on altered courses in response to the first signal, provide triangulated scans estimating a 93% chance of an unauthorized biome. Kelson is listed for investigation, confirmation, analysis, and potential sterilization.
• 914Y: Crake, an Approxiare-class vessel, arrives at the system and establishes system perimeter control. 
• 897Y: Direct analysis across all seven Herber-Tavo categories confirms Lillette’s status as an illegal biome, with estimates suggesting over four million macroscopic species. The unusually fast evolutionary process is typical of Hivonium technology.
• 896Y: Given the speed of biome development, the crew of the Crake has no time to refer Lillette’s status back up the command chain for consensus. The crew, empowered to act on their own prerogative, vote 145.2-117.7 to sterilize the Kelson system of all life (fractions in the sum reflect the votes of clones that had not yet reached their majority, typical of ship votes from that period). The vote is unusually close, but a simple majority still prevails. System fabs are deployed and begin exponential production expansion.
• 781Y: The orbital shell is completed. The crew begins the three-stage process of recording extensive evidence of the biome, collecting samples of all unique life, and sterilizing the planet (informally, “flag, bag, and slag”).
• 531Y: The project timeline undergoes the first of dozens of extensions. Multiple proposals to either stop or delay sterilization are proposed. Revotes on the fundamental question are vetoed by Gecko, the ship AI, but disagreement among the crew inevitably slows work and spreads dissensus.
• 153Y: A severe GCR burst from outside the Kelson system hits the Crake, the orbital shell, and most of the system fabs; only a few inner-system fabs incidentally protected by Kelson’s magnetosphere are spared. Gecko institutes a red-3 alert (informally, a “Deep Ugly”) and takes priority on all systems it can still ping in the orbital belt. A deep-cover Hivonium virus, programmed to surface only in very high states of system distress, bootstraps itself into several of the most vulnerable fabs, then jumps to the orbital shell. Gecko, while attempting to quarantine the virus, descends into a runaway persona-splinter cascade. Soon over 2000 variations of Gecko are struggling for control of the orbital shell. Other Gecko splinters take control of individual fabs and quarantine them.
• 43Y: The crew aboard the Crake attempt to leave the system, but a combination of  internal dissensus, malfunctioning Geckos, and viral meddling cripples the ship in the outer reaches of the system.
• 28Y: Surviving crew aboard the orbital shell begin to abandon sections compromised by these events, desperately fleeing to Lillette’s surface.
• 0Y: A 263,000 m² chunk of the orbital shell in terminal orbital decay enters the atmosphere and streaks across the sky. Automated systems and the fragmented consciousness of the local Gecko splinter divert most remaining energy to easing the fragment’s descent, ensuring it is relatively intact as it gouges a deep ravine in a mostly unpopulated coastal region on the second-largest continent. Local feudal sapient populations immediately dispatch forces to investigate.

Dungeon is actually SPACESHIP and magic is sometimes TECHNOLOGY has a long and rich history in D&D, from Metamorphosis Alpha and Barrier Peaks all the way up to modern examples that I will not name, just so that I don't inadvertently spoil them here.

This scenario is obviously in the same vein. The principal changes are as follows:

• Instead of a long-ago secret, the arrival of space technology is a currently unfolding situation.
• Instead of something buried, hidden, and forgotten, the sci-fi aspects are obvious, unmistakable, and world-changing. 
• The arrival of sci-fi tech has direct geopolitical impacts on the world; factions and fronts care about these things.
• Humans are the aliens; the “elves,” “dwarves,” and so forth are mutations or random evolutions from human stock, but they are to their knowledge the "normal" residents of their world.

Up in space, we have a Deepness in the Sky / Children of Time / Children of Ruin situation. Down on the planet, the vibe is more like Troika or Anomalous Subsurface Environment.

Humans are aliens, but the natives of Lillette probably don’t find them naturally suspicious, once they are separated from their technology. The fantasy species on the planet may be intentionally designed, or the product of randomness, or some of both. An “elf” living on a particular part of Lillette will be accustomed to meeting sapient bipeds (“humanoids” or whatnot) who vary in relatively small ways. A “dwarf,” a “goblin,” and other such creatures are much more similar to an elf than they are different. A “human” would just seem like another variation on a common template. The now-stranded humans, on the other hand, are absolutely freaking out about all of this. But for the denizens of this fantasy world, this is a Tuesday. The humans are a bit like vault dwellers in Fallout; better tech, but lacking in survival skills.

The action of the game is driven by competition for the falling bits of tech. These are dungeons populated with weird tech, escaped experiments, hostile security systems, insane Gecko shards, the desperate surviving human crew members, and virus-corrupted robots. The local flora and fauna would also be weird and dangerous, and interact in unpredictable ways with the falling tech (add Scavenger’s Reign as an influence here too). 

There are a lot of threads for adventurers to pull on, in addition to delving dungeons and negotiating the factions:

1. Functioning Gecko shards that still want to raze the planet of all life.
2. Former crew now trapped on the planet who are aware of that plan and don’t want it to happen (at least, not until after they can escape).
3. Surviving crew still ensconced in functional sections of the orbital shell or the further-out system fabs, who are rotating through stasis, waiting for an opportunity to escape the system.
4. Maddended Gecko shards that have made contact with the planet and that natives perceive as “new gods” who have come to shake up the existing pantheon.
5. For advanced play, traveling to space is a possibility. It could be possible to explore the sections of the orbital shell still in orbit; the damaged Crake; and even the few fabs that remained functional.