Roleplaying, planning labyrinth campaign
Mar. 5th, 2019 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackAfter getting back into roleplaying, with a combination of one-shots I quite wanted to try running a more traditional campaign. I found a swirl of world-building ideas filling my head.
The premise is, centred around a sprawling underground labyrinth, partially colonised by underground animals and races, partially full of left over "tests created by the gods for heroes", etc. It lets me go wild with all the spooky maze stuff in my head. Does the maze move around sometimes? Yes! Do you get windows onto spooky landscapes? Why not! Do you get weird geography, inexplicable statues, unusual variants of classic dnd races? Definitely.
I'm testing out a mechanic that's a variant of dungeon/hex/other crawls I've seen, where the plot happens back at the castle, but the adventure is mostly navigating the labyrinth and surviving what you find. Where there's a grid of "locations", and you assume they're all connected by plenty of twisty passages, but you don't map out all the maze, you just say, you can usually find your way from one location to an adjacent one, but sometimes a passage moves or it tricks you into going the wrong way.
On the one hand, I'm quite excited to run it, on the other hand, I feel like maybe I'm sinking too much invention into something that will probably only ever be really interesting to six people (although I was lucky to find interesting people).
The premise is, centred around a sprawling underground labyrinth, partially colonised by underground animals and races, partially full of left over "tests created by the gods for heroes", etc. It lets me go wild with all the spooky maze stuff in my head. Does the maze move around sometimes? Yes! Do you get windows onto spooky landscapes? Why not! Do you get weird geography, inexplicable statues, unusual variants of classic dnd races? Definitely.
I'm testing out a mechanic that's a variant of dungeon/hex/other crawls I've seen, where the plot happens back at the castle, but the adventure is mostly navigating the labyrinth and surviving what you find. Where there's a grid of "locations", and you assume they're all connected by plenty of twisty passages, but you don't map out all the maze, you just say, you can usually find your way from one location to an adjacent one, but sometimes a passage moves or it tricks you into going the wrong way.
On the one hand, I'm quite excited to run it, on the other hand, I feel like maybe I'm sinking too much invention into something that will probably only ever be really interesting to six people (although I was lucky to find interesting people).
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 11:31 pm (UTC)I think the 'only interesting to 6 people' is part of the joy of role-play (though obviously I still wish I could tell everyone about the best sessions..!). It's a shared story of most interest to those who created, and I suspect about six is probably close to the maximum number of people who can really do co-creation and still all genuinely feel a real stake in the whole thing. (OK, I know there are exceptions to that, but as a general point I still think there's some truth in it).