Week Three was the closest I got to goodbye but I don't have to say it anymore

Week 3. The week we almost quit but decide to stick around.

Just some notes to myself before diving down into the week: on a round two of the map, thou shalt include

• monster locations,
• area of prowl,
• area of listening <- topographically graded,
• action-oriented encounters ,
• the various damages and so forth, items, etc.
• 2d6 random encounter charts (not all combat and at least one expansion in the event something is rolled twice on the same level

That out of the way, Week Three of Dungeon23 is one week when I considered walking away. This project is impressively obsessive. I am spending as much time watching others work as work myself and that, in the right light, induces guilt. It shouldn’t but it does. I am not quite at front-line speed—I believe I’m writing two rooms a day, and around two days behind step. Nothing wrong with that so long as I don’t try to play catch-up all at once. But at least a day or two has been me falling behind in the creative aspect without falling behind in the communicative / spectator engagement. Nonono.

This week I’ve been inspired by the colors others are using, as well as some of GM_Odinson’s isomorphic dungeon drawing. As such, I bought some watercolors and have again proven that wherever one last left off with an art is where one starts. Thus, my watercoloring is elementary. But color brings a certain magic that regardless of its application, still excites the eye and draws it close, so I’ll include my little rudimentary sketches.

•••

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs

1/16 A STAIRWELL WITHOUT ANY RAILINGS ANYMORE — Down the hall from the great doors and chutes are the stairs, or a set of stairs. 

White painted stone, absolutely flawless edges (were they cut by machines or men?)—& holes every fourth step where a circular metal bannister has been cut free, removed, and taken down, such that looking down half-turn stairs, the foot-and-some gap shows they repeat further and further down, like they continue to the base of the world. 

It comes as some surprise likely then to realize that light is coming up from far below.

If the Milk Queen’s Tread was freed from the elevator, then its inky, mosslike mark is visible taking each step slowly down.

 

Notes from the Day: I miss my old pen. If you’re looking for a fantastic thin writing pen, I bought a box of Jetstream .38mm in South Korea and can’t find the box after moving around a bit. I will buy more but, damnit, back to a thicker rollerball with twice the inertia.

Too, what’s strange about the clanking in 1/18 is that it was distinctly audible in the hallway of 1/3, which is far from this part of the building and through several walls. While I could foreseeably manufacture some magical sound dispersal (perhaps there is a dump portal fixed between the walls there, and whatever is shifting stone and all is, like The Great Escape, sending it through a sister portal, away from here)—but I don’t want that. 

All I want to do is relocate the origin sound to the hallways south of 1/5 and I’ll be fine.

•

1/15 A GEOMETRIC ART EXHIBIT IN WHAT WAS ONCE QUITE A LOOKOUT — South of the 12^th Floor CTV9 Conference Room (1/6), the hallway curves around the central funnel of the lounge hall (1/5) and opens into two separate hallways running into the dark. 

A few of the fishering’s tendrils from 1/5 hang like forgotten streamers of a child’s birthday and a crescent rat has taken an easy home at the bridge of the wall before either halls head south. Unknowingly it secreted a whole bag full of zip-ties for use in its nest, equally useful outside of the nest if some heartless scavenger starts digging around thinking there’s treasure where anything lives.

Distant, the glimmer of the elevator room’s crashed chandelier—great glass bulbs and wooden cones— reflects light back.

We take the first hallway because it’s first. The western hall. Any hope that the two would meet up is quickly lost as the hallway veers west following a similar curve, before opening up into a tremendous open space. What might’ve been a vaulting observatory with polyhedral 20’ ceilings, a view of blue cloudless skies, maybe a spot for birds to be ddown and have their young, (there are perfect nesting creases to the bubbling, curved overhead windows) is alas, like everything else, covered in sand and darkness.

However it is still a good place to bed down and have children as the silk-shaped ursin has found. Her ability to pass through hard surfaces at will has made this glassy set of domes and boxes, its many built-in nooks (some of which still hold ancient decorative pottery), and its 270 degree vision of the surrounding sandy underground both a perfect place to lay her glassy eggs and a perfect place to lay easy trap for creatures burrowing in the sands about. 

Normally her kind would find deep-layer homes nearer bedrock where their capacities to move through solid matter make them a nasty surprise for underground dwellers, but CTV9’s 12^th floor overlook has proven a happy surprise for this old gal.

PC’s may take note of her resting body which resolves to tatters of a strange flesh, almost like a pile of egg-white drawn from a pot of water, left to sop high on a cabinet or in one of the CMYK box panes built into the rooms geometric glassy design, but if her two jaws hinge together and her ethereal frorm reconstitutes back into its columnal shape, she won’t seem so much like wet eggs.

Which, speaking of treasures, those would be worth a fortunte, her eggs, but any PC capable of getting them and keeping them nourished in mucus and shade long enough to survive any time in actual sunlight deserves to afford a small house by the ocean afterwards. The rarity of finding living sperm whales babies on a beach, I’ll offer in comparative analogy.

The room shares access to the downward facing chute with room 1/6 & similar concerns should probably be brought to bear regarding drawing the four-armed slave from his post. Though an encounter between he and the mother ursin would undoubtedly be…impressive.

 •

5/17 MENS AND WOMENS LOCKER ROOMS BUT NICE ONES — Two doors on either right and left have been treated in familiar fashion, stripped of metal and fallen inwards to lay like unmade coffins at the feet of a row of tall metal casements that face the opposite wall. Both sides have been done up near exactly and a symbol of a human man and human woman in fading black paint has been etched into each.

The casements face a similar mirrored pair, though in the northern room an additional bank of them face, alone, the wall, and the wooden bench in front of them, which is bolted to the ground. Enough lacquer on that wood that the bugs have kept to other rooms; in fact, the silence is the most notable denizen here, at first. 

The lockers are numbered in small neat printed ways, almost done mechanically in an old way that’s been lost.

Inside one is a full suit, that powders to dust and ghost moth ash at a touch. A simple ring, band of gold, clinks into the pile of dust at base, and the moths will be something to contend with briefly. More ominous is the tap-tapping from one of the locker interiors nearby, one of two with a padlock on it. Does it really seem right to open?

Should PCs get the thing open (bolt cutters? Lock picks?—the combo is 12-22-6, which would be wild to intuit but the numbers only go to 30 so maybe, maybe, you know?). No, it’s no skeletal kid wishing he was free, nor a menagerie of metal crabs shoed in there by duergar for sport—though I considered both)—it’s an incredible watch, set beside a pack of defunct smokes, cigarettes, which can be had for a delicious dry heave of a pull. The edge of the watch has TELENUÑOS inscribed on it and the ticking sound is the swing of the platinum band which is dangling off the shelf-edge. It’s moving because the prayman sprits Bo & Len have tried their grapple rope, struck it, and missed the hook—they’ve come up from the prayman sprit haunts on 5/14 via the pipes and have just started after this treasure. Engine’s people pay in many ways, to scavengers small and large.

These two are small, just a finger tall with wet, lousy hair and soaked garments stitched of unknown mammal rubbers. PCs are an identifiable threat and unless something really sneaky is done, the two will bolt even before the door’s halfway open, back through a gap they’ve made at rear of the locker, bottom right. They have one of the metal-cutting knives found in 1/9, which it takes both sprits to wield and cut the passage that they have.

In fact, two of their party, Selen and Hita are on the opposite side, carving their way into the secondary bathrooms; they’ve taken a number of copper hoops, three aluminum fittings, the name-tag that was in the door of 1/9 (a “R. METHODICAL” whose steel plate is cut in half for ease of carrying), and loaded all that in a rope-assisted canvas drop crate that is set and can be lowered down the hollow between the walls; down to 2/17, their current camp.

Obviously, the metal of the lockers themselves is incredible valuable in overland scenarios, but I’ve stopped enumerating that in favor of, in the future, checking the furniture of a room, admitting salvageable pounds, and identifying general prices vs. hours of difficulty vs. the likelihood of drawing attention. I’m just assuming right now we’d rather explore for treasure treasure and not salvage & value.

Oh and there’s petrus fungal carpets in each shower! That nasty creep…

• 

5/18 A THOROUGHLY RE-DESIGNED WEIGHT ROOM AND WORKOUT AREA — Now weights are made of metal and quite heavy and while we’re familiar with the principal of circles of metal wrapped around bars in increasing quantities, 20,000 years can make a significant difference in comprehensibility. 

Larger, eagle-crest doors span this room’s wide entrance and make for a thrilling open as a gust of air floods outward like a cup has just been lifted of its position of suction. Three red lights blare from beyond and the screech and clank of shifting metal has likely been audible for forty or fifty feet. 

In the back depths of the room, the red lights move across multiple walls simultaneously. MEX II has got quite a bit of sand and rubble to deal with, and unfortunately, much of it has got in the thin cracks of its joints and made for slow burial of the metal treasure. The robotic laborer, enormous as it is, has a healthy mausoleum dug out at the rear of the room, and has made delightfully orderly work of burying all of the heaviest weights in neat rows like backgammon bits; is only struggling with a process it probably shouldn’t have been assigned at all: to lock, of ‘hide, lock, and bury all metal in this room :: store location access and return via the chute with what can be carried’. 

It’s destination is 11/11.

So this is one of the ways Engine’s crew is gathering material! Unfortunate MEX II is one of 20 drafted servitors designed for forestry work (more to come on that later) and the spike and axe on each of its arms are serviceable digging tools, but knot-tying—well. It could be here awhile. 

Graceful for its quarter tons, copper hued and no problems in the dark. Most of the polished wood in this old upper-floor gymnasium has been stripped and lifted to make a secondary structure inside MEX II’s hand-dug treasure room. Well-built, though it will be re-covered in rubble when MEX II finishes up. 

Notes from the Day: Oh bumbling wonderful MEX II. I do hope no one fucks with him and dies. It would make me as sad as The Green Mile made me, or Of Mice and Men. I wonder how much info could be gleaned from the big guy. Oh and ‘all the red lights’ are the many mirrors of the former workout space, reflecting his back lights.

•

1/19 A BREAKOUT MEETING ROOM PRETTY TRAPPED TO HELL — Feeling somewhat peachy cute with a deep-wood robot laborer nearby so I’m desiring something ghoulish to counter.

There’s a cleft in the wall here on the back wall, facing the way we’ve just come, and while it isn’t the easiest way in, it’s actually the safest, because it’s the back door for the wichitaw crane that will periodically step its long-legged way to the entrance that it has bored here to reach in the bathroom walls of 1/17 to sup on them there toilet waters there. 

How lucky the plumbing in this place remains, eh? Plastic, after all these years. Still holding up.

Anyway, catching a glimpse of the predator would be quite a feat—limbs like knitting needles that fold open and closed at multiple—too many—junctures, a glandular mouth puckered in a forever kiss that anyone with skin and nerves doesn’t want to offend. It was an experiment to reduce bloating and exercise requirements in plastic surgery patients that, a long time ago, didn’t work, got trashed, survived, and evolved among the syringes and chemicals. 

A mild intelligence, it won’t parlay and as a result of diminished meals, it has taken to tool manipulation and trap-laying in its lair—once a breakout room whose whiteboard is coated in acidic resin. Three red cherries have been laid out at the table like a trap. Satisfied? They are. Who eats a bright red marachino cherry off an ancient table. 

The shelves of the built-in cabinets have been located in tiny prickly icicles that provide the creature a bizarre comfort—it will straighten itself out fully as if it were laying its splendid body to tan, and lock its many limbs ridged among the sherotin crystals, looking like a Nordic rune, slender and peaceful. One could scrape up the crystals for easy reward or open the cabinets above to find a set of books none had ever found—travel texts that with a good few hours might provide a good maphound some knowledge of how wide this part of the continent has become, and maybe as a result & combined with some geological know-how, actually how old this building is.

This little guy feels weird and deadly. I imagine he eats guess wraiths, or occasionally smaller prey. When desperate, a stilted saunter to the patterbug hoard to pick among the runts of their herd, likely.

 •

1/20 A BIG BRANDED CARPET ON A DAIS — is quite simple actually. 

Ahead through the darkness are the stair’s railings that lead down. You pass—since we’re coming only the one way this time—a pair of contained wall cubicles detailed in 1/21, aiming instead for a raised dais perhaps only a stair and a half off the ground, accessible on all sides. The actual stairs are on the eastern edge of the wide pedestal or pop-up—its not so high and easily leapt onto (though would you want to with that horrible sound?)—the huge carpet in the shape of CTV9’s logo runs perhaps twelve feet by eight feet, colors dismal and faded in the what light there is. The deflated sacks that were pillows have been devoured to the stitches and the thick shag carpeting is absolutely crawling with the horrible patterbugs. 

At the rug’s undulating center are three of their horrible broodlets, small furnaces forever locked in the three-part act of copulation, giving birth, and being fed digested mash through their smokestack openings. 

But why so many? They almost aren’t digesting the carpet—no signs of food sources in any direction—so—below? 1/20 is right above 3/12, or rather,—there is a way for the carnivorous horde to pass down between the floor boards, between the walls, down to the charnel house there, to grub at the tremendous meat scrap, and to bring it back up for their imprisoned matriarchs. Should a PC be able to get their noses anywhere near the floor by the carpet, visible tunnels bored through by the more ancient and now-extinct whimsy elm peer down into darkness and bring up the scent of rust, crisped oil, and cooked meat.

Nothing to find but a bit of body horror unfortunately; might be a clearing worth avoiding. But it is the access point to quite a bit and is visible from many entrances. 

Notes on the Day: This level will be the only level that doesn’t begin to cross the line into contemporary magic and a little more high fantasy element—I want the sensation that something here has been preserved. Perhaps there is furniture stacked against the door of the stairwell at 1/12. It is the main way down to level two.

 

1/21 TWO PERFECTLY SAFE SOLITUDE CHAMBER STUDY CUBES —Last room of the week! Though the chittering, quivering mass at the open room’s center is certain to draw eye and attention, pressed against the southern wall, adjacent the crane’s lair, are a pair of simple solitude chambers, structures of glass and wood, ventilated enough that one could enter and breathe easy, and soundproof enough that one could actually feel quite safe, even peaceful for the moment. 

Though it might seem they were built by some beneficent carpenter keenly aware of the horrid bug infestation nearby, an array of buttons labeled 1 to 5 run a panel along the desk edges and have yet to be ripped free. Miraculously, the dregs of battery life still swimming in the guts of these sound rooms still offer a range of studious musical ambience from 'the chirp of birds in foliage' to a persistent looped 'thunderstorm that will never reach us and make us wet'. 

So how is this all playable and anything but a gimmick of forgotten history? Well, 

1. the obvious safety of the booths will present a haven should the bugs be raised to a devouring swarm. Also, 
2. the sound emitted by the interior speakers has a lulling effect on guess wraiths, which might float close in a cloud of drifting biology (likely if both were pressed with the same tone at the same time so as to coordinate the effect). And 
3. something has been slipped under one of the desk’s back edge (there are both a comfortable chair and a built-in-desk in each study arrangement)—a key held up by flagging piece of black laminated tape and a piece of paper with directions on how to open the safe in 1/9. The note says ‘Lo robé—no—recuperó el collar hayer y lo reemplazó con el que fabricaste. Gracias. —R’. The key has a logo on it, a brand.
4.  

Thoughts on the Day: Cool. I’d imagine the key is for the remains of a car piled up somewhere at the parking level (3^rd to last? Perhaps a lift level? Certainly not an adjacent structure). And an old story to follow in R. Methodical’s peculiar past enlivens the game in a way I hadn’t thought to do as of yet.

•••

Week behind, week ahead. I think a whole lot of new entities makes me feel a little wobbly inside. Obviously I revel in creating them but it is also like opening Pandora's Box. They start flitting about, and my need to tie them down to story and ecology begins to be troubled by the sudden increase in task difficulty. 

I don't want a goblin encampment but I want a goblin encampment, right?

Weird thin-limbed assassin monster, big robot labourer, tiny between-wall scavengers, phasing mother-killer, and some bugs. I think I'll try to move back to discoverables, traps, and room engagement next week, if there's any of it left to do so. Only three days, but I think I'm a step behind, as mentioned so I can do some adjustment based on what I've seen here. It'll be the last days on this level.

I have been having reservations about 'theming' months or levels as it feels aholistic. (Ha). It just feels as though I'd be doing it to do it, and I think there must be some salt in the fresh-water and some fresh in the salt, it's never a clear line. A river runs through.

Stories to check in on: The Mid-Wall Scavenges of the Prayman Sprits; The Charnel House and What's Cookin There; Aw, MAX II Getting His Job Done and Heading Home; MAX I - MAX XX, Robotic Forest Labourers Used for Dirt Work How Come; and R. METHODICAL, That Spanish(-Speaking) Thief..