GLOGtober Day 4: Domain-Level Locks and Keys

overgrown railroads are just cool in general

Thinking a lot about Hollow Knight recently, and the way its world unfolds as you play. It’s that Metroidvania thing where you worm your way into a new area and unlock the door from the other side, and now every time you walk through you remember all the work you went thru to open up that pathway and it feels special.

I want to do that, but for a whole campaign world. And I’m not talking about a mega dungeon (although Hollow Knight is probably definitely one of those). I’m talking about a domain level metroidvania.

The gameplay loop I’m after is this:

Lock → Key → Reward

Normally, on the dungeoncrawl level, you’re opening new pathways, doors, etc., things that let you maneuver the dungeon. On the domain level, you’re discovering new ways to maneuver thru a MUCH larger space.

Instead of overthinking the theory, I’m just gonna slap down examples to get the gears turning:

The Railroad

Lock: Train tracks tracing the countryside, train stations in a great number of towns, yet no trains running. In fact, there are no trains, period.
Key: Journey to the Trainyard. You’ll need to best the scrapper gang before you can ride their “iron rhinos” (not a euphemism). You also need to clear each track connection—removing barriers, killing tunnel-beasts, relocating communities—before these lines can run reliably.
Reward: Trains! Limited fast travel for yourself and your communities, provided you can keep the lines open. (The druids will be pissed to see trains running again; they are ancient enemies.)

[sidebar: I think you could run a whole campaign around becoming trainlords. I’m sure the glittering city over the mountain will have their own trains, and you could do industrial espionage to learn the secrets of their trains, or discover novel fuel sources (can an internal combustion engine burn ectoplasm?), and now all of a sudden you’re playing Railroad Tycoon.]

[sidebar 2: Also, trains are rad as fuck; they’re super customizable and powerful transportation options without being overwhelming because they’re on tracks. Consider putting more trains in your campaign.]

The River

Lock: A canyon, a dry riverbed served by a tiny stream. At the mouth, a desiccated township, the husk of a once bustling trade city.
Key: Up in the Lich King’s aqueducts, the river has been dammed and diminished to a trickle. You’ll need to delve down and release it somehow. Could involve a series of pipes and valves, could be as simple as blowing up the dam.
Reward: Trade becomes possible up and down the renewed river. Some communities will flourish, some will be wiped away by the flood. Sea raiders travel further inland along this new route, pillaging with impunity.

The Waterfall

Lock: A mountain pass or cave entrance, blocked by a torrential waterfall. The waterfall is obvious; the path is not, but rumors abound.
Key: At the top of a mountain, a dragon weeps for his shattered pride. It’s tears form the waterfall. Stop his crying somehow, and the waterfall will cease. Note that you’ll probably have to climb the whole damn mountain to figure this out, let alone solve the problem.
Reward: A new area is accessible! New hexes beyond the mountain pass, or a new dungeon behind the cave entrance.

The Ocean

Lock: The East Wind was captured and bottled. Until she is rescued, no easterly wind blows, making westward travel impossible on the high seas. The same is not true in the opposite direction, which is why empires of the Western Continent banish their criminals by setting them adrift in our direction. They land in Worstport, a town with a self-explanatory name.
Key: Find the East Wind. She’s deep deep deep in the earth (underdark?), trapped in a tiny blue cloth bag. You have a choice: keep her contained, and only your ships will sail west (so long as you are on board). Release her, and everyone can explore the Western Continent. Careful, she holds a grudge. Alternatively, convince one of the other winds to blow from the East, perhaps for a specific amount of time, in exchange for some favor.
Reward: Literally a whole new continent to explore. A lordship is promised to whoever brings back the most samarine, the rare “blue gold” worn by exiles in Worstport. Also, if the West figures out people can sail back from the East, they’ll a) send conquistadores and b) put bounties on all the criminals they abandoned over here (that’ll be a fun international incident).

Long-Range Communication

Lock: The trollstones are basically an open channel magic HAM radio. They’re unusable because some jag off has been screaming into it nonstop for the last three million years, like the worst discord voice chat ever.
Key: Track their fantasy IP number, find their fantasy house, and fantasy beat their brains in. Alternatively, use your brain. They’re probably in someplace obvious, like the Hall of Screaming Stone. Alternatively, recruit an orpheme.
Reward: Actual instantaneous long-range communication, for everyone who can afford it. No private frequencies, so secret missives can’t be sent without careful encryption. Consider hiring a team of codebreakers. Consider destroying everyone else’s trollstones.

Teleportation

Lock: A long long time ago, a monster set up shop in the space-between-space, eating whoever passes through. It isn’t omnipotent, so you could theoretically sneak past, but it’s lethal enough that no one uses the teleport spell unless absolutely necessary (1-in-20 chance of success, +1 for each good idea for distracting/pacifying the beast).
Key: Use the teleport spell, survive the beast, and then STAY in the space-between-space (extra dimensional dungeon!!!!) until you find a way to get rid of the beast for good. A fools errand, naturally. Alternatively, teleport other monsters in until something kills it. Careful: the beast might poke its head out to see who’s dumping trash into their home.
Reward: Teleportation of all kinds works again, although the remaining spells are still sort of shitty versions of the original teleport. The beast’s progeny disseminate across the world; the Hounds of Tindalos hunt once more. Some sort of ancient evil is unleashed, for sure.

Space

Lock: Someone put a ceiling on the sky (to keep humanity from reaching the moon). It’s like a forcefield made of stained glass. It’s really pretty at sunset.
Key: It’s held up by six pillars of glass (BIG ass dungeons). If you climb one and punch a hole in it, it’ll splinter like ice on your driver’s side window and fall all at once, which is about as bad as it sounds.
Reward: You can be certain all the wizards in their towers will immediately try to colonize the moon once the ceiling comes down (space race!!!!!!). And of course, when you open the ceiling, things are going to start coming in; outsiders who have been fogging up the glass for aeons, looking for a crack.

Essential principles:
Interhex relationships. A lock in one hex should yield rewards in another hex.
No single path. Hopefully, the keys are open-ended enough to not feel constraining.
Two-way streets. With each reward comes new and unexpected complications.

The scale is important. The locks are huge, known features of the world, visible from a mile off. Ideally, you remember them from level 1. The keys are their own dungeons; you’ll have to crawl them to unlock the new content. The rewards are entirely new hexes, new lands to conquer, new tools with which to assert your despotic(?) reign.

Tramways, breached borders, actual fucking infrastructure; these are the carrots that keep the game running thru domain level.

are you looking for the 8th key ⚿