[Gygax 75] Into the Mines

I'm doing a worldbuilding challenge. The story so far:

Gygax 75
Week 1 - The Setting
Week 2 - Carving out the Valley
Week 3 - draw your dungeon! in one week! Gary recommends starting with some overview planning to pick themes, monsters, and architectural oddities for each dungeon level, and then setting out to draw and key the first few levels.

DIY&Dragons argues the challenge is best stretched over 8 weeks, with weeks 3-6 devoted to fleshing out and keying the dungeon. I'm inclined to agree.

I started like this: The most important dungeon, i.e. the one most relevant to the story of Irontown, would most likely be a source of iron… a mine… which they got kicked out of by the forest folk… for unearthing… something…?

We're off to the races.

Entrance: Hungry mineshaft, hastily concealed, black drag marks.
Levels: Abandoned Mine, Toxic Caverns, Ancient Dig Site
Inhabitants: Ghost, haunting; Kobolds, digging; Philosopher's slime, seeping; Giant cave carp, lurking; Centipedes, hunting; Crab magician, cowering; Blood sorcerers, delving; Orefish, flickering; Rats, dancing; Language demon, scheming; _____.
Key Features: a crude iron circle, to ward faeries away; pit full of toxic, flammable gas; the half-assembled skeleton of a dragon; the stone tablets thru which she speaks; a magnetic iron spire, surrounded by anti-magic field
Treasures: Dropped faerie trinket; Arms of a dragon hunter; _____

Above is my crude attempt at following Ray Otus' method. I don't think his systematic approach fits 100% with the way I work, but it's been a really helpful set of guardrails for me thus far.

History: Miners from Irontown looking for iron deposits found the Scar. Excavating it and hauling it out 1) broke their treaty with the forest folk and 2) revealed a network of gas-filled tunnels. Mine collapse. Pitched battle. The Scar is lost.
Prehistory: The Loathsome Chernobog, Stormbringer, Lakedrinker, Devourer of Kings and Sheep, lies dying on a muddy shore. Her attempts at healing magics are unmitigably scrambled by the cross spear in her brain. She has hours, at most. Through a violent headache she sees snippets of the future, of her body scattered and preserved deep beneath the earth, of lowborn apes gawking at her bones. Maybe it's the 20 kilos of steel in her frontal lobe talking, but these apes seem like her best chance at survival. With a trembling claw, Chernobog scrawls a note to the future in the river mud, and the vision begins to change.

The kobolds and dragon skeleton are a bald-faced remix of this MapCrow video and this GoblinPunch post (<-- required reading, it's one of my favorites). The kobolds are gathering the bones of the dragon, but they need you to help them decipher her instructions. They also breathe blackdamp (toxic), firedamp (explosive), and stinkdamp (both). This makes fighting kobolds a time trial wherever they're encountered: do it quickly, or the room fills with deadly gas!

Mines are dangerous places! They can be too hot, too wet, too small, or too big. They can collapse. They can be full of toxic gas. They can explode. This dungeon should do all of that.

One corner will be flooded caverns full of acid mining runoff, trailing towards bona fide underground lakes. Another will be scorched hunting grounds of a mated pair of phoenix centipedes (fire-themed monsters can ignite the gas in lower chambers).

I have a precursory map with 3 axes written on it: up-down, hot-cold, wet-dry. I'll use these to flesh out the caverns and hopefully provide some sensory directions for any given fork in the road if I need to run this Theater of the Mind.

My first draft heavily featured a terracotta warrior silo on Level 3, but it never felt quite right. The new layout is a bit subtler, with the transition from caverns to ruins hopefully feeling less jarring. There's still going to be an exit at the bottom that leads to the youngest of the buried cities (that's what the blood sorcerers are here for), but I want the surface layer of dungeons to stand on their own before starting on any megadungeon-y ruins.

My eyes are crossing a bit as I write this, so I'll check myself with Arnold's Dungeon Checklist:

1. Something to Steal - Valuable geodes. A carbuncle? And something more guarded than the cross spear or faerie trinket... oh, oh, oh! Centipede eggs! Everyone loves eggs-as-treasure, right?
2. Something to Kill - Kobolds and centipedes. Blood sorcerers, like a rival adventuring party with cooler magic.
   
3. Something to Kill You - The Philosopher's Slime will be the dangerous-yet-dumb thing on Level 1. The gas caverns are a decent trap. I'm still wracking my brain for something REALLY dangerous on Level 3.
   
4. Different Paths - Hot, cold, wet, dry. You can swim thru the flooded caverns, or sneak thru the centipede grounds. Then there's the standard path thru the fungus farms, and then a claustrophobic crawl-shaft. Boom, 4 paths. I'll probably want some more surface entrances too.
   
5. Someone to Talk To - The hermit crab illusionist will be a sympathetic-yet-greedy merchant, maybe worth rescuing. The language demon is a Beelzebub type; say their name and they'll be able to hitch a ride on your tongue. And of course there's Chernobog, and the kobold/sorcerer factions. Some helpful rats. Somehow it doesn't feel crowded enough, but I'll leave it - surely a little gonzo will sneak in at the end.
   
6. Something to Experiment With - The gas is obviously gameable. The rest of the dungeon teaches the properties of iron-as-antimagic: the iron circle can be weaponized against the faeries, and the Scar can be used to pitch battles against the blood sorcerers. Let's add something weirder though... a brazier with different magical properties based on what kind of light you fill it with? And then there's a room with glowworms nearby... I'll circle back.
   
7. Something the Players Probably Won't Find - I need to flesh this one out. Some of Chernobog's bones, and a couple not-too-magic items referring to the B I G L O R E. Here's where we start dripfeeding the players Soulsborne shit.
   

Last thing I'm missing is a name. Something sinister but not too edgy. Blackroot Mine? Knockwood Mine? I'll work on it.

As for the monster on Level 3, I'm thinking one of these: 

See you next week.