Themes, Thesauruses, Mysteries, and Megadungeons

Last Week: Premises, Themes, Genre Hacking, and Shower Thoughts

Last week I wrote about turning a premise into tangible themes. This week, let’s get into a crunchy, digestible example.

The premise of our Knave game involves a mystery train that stops at various locations for the players to explore. But neither the premise itself nor the ensuing session zero discussion really defined what kind of locations the PCs would explore. It was an open question. 

So I made a list of words that either came directly out of conversations with the players, or were a step or two removed from those conversations. 

1. Brutalist
2. Cyclopean 
3. Alien
4. Oracular 
5. Innervative
6. Biomechanical
7. Hypnagogic 
8. Demoniacal 
9. Entropic
10. Stellar 
11. Temporal 
12. Apocalyptic
13. Resurrectionist 

I decided to go with all adjectives for a feeling of internal consistency. It’s OK to flex the dictionary and thesaurus a bit here, as long as the words are evocative and interesting.

Because Strangers on a Train is a mystery game, information is revealed gradually. The words at the top of the list are close to the surface, things that might come through within the first few sessions. The second location the PCs visited had very literal brutalist and cyclopean design characteristics.

The terms further down the list may only be perceptible after many sessions. Many megadungeons essentially contain a mystery in the same manner. The first level might be full of sundry bandits and cultists, but the lowest level is the hollow earth / portal to hell / crashed spaceship part of the dungeon, secret from all but the most accomplished adventurers.

Remember that in the last post, we talked about the value of compounded our terms. Words on their own might not get us very far in developing something unusual. They are instead more valuable when we combine them to create something really novel. So oracular-stellar becomes “a structure for studying the stars to predict the future.” Brutalist-hypnogogic becomes “a vast dreaming amphitheater for sleeping explorers.” And so on.