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.