Downsizing: From Megadungeon to Kilodungeon

And in the first post there was a cover shot.

I am currently creating an "old school" fantasy adventure, and will use this blog to capture as much of the creation process as possible. I hope to include elements of the story as they are further refined as well as some "concept sketches" and finished art. I was (am) inspired by Jason Brubaker's Remind blog where he does a similar thing but on a much grander scale. If you are at all interested in what goes into creating a graphic novel, then you should click those "grayed out" words in the previous sentence!

In the Beginning

Back in 2011, after finishing our second One Page Dungeon Contest entry, I pitched a bunch of ideas to +Random Wizard for traditional adventure ideas. By pitched, mostly I threw a rough sketch of a cover image in the shared drop box folder. But one was different. One of them not only came with a crappy mock up for a cover, but also with a fleshed out premise. By fleshed out, I mean to say a colossal run-on sentence.

I cannot recall all of the specifics, but I imagine it looked something like this:

"Imagine a cult devoted to bringing an end to the game world through a series of rituals who instead of summoning a powerful demon somehow rip a star ship through a void into the atmosphere and it plummets to the earth and crashes into the mountain lair of the cultists and they are all killed and the locals think it was divine intervention because they somehow knew what the cultists were up to in the mountains and the players get sent in to investigate and discover the wreckage of the spaceship buried deep in the bowels of the mountain dungeon complex and the wreckage emanates evil and attracts subterranean humanoids and monsters and there are blasters and chainsaw swords and a bomb, yeah a bomb and some cultists are back in there trying to figure out how to detonate the thing but there is also a digital surveyor type thing so that even if the bomb gets detonated the world will exist in a digital simulation form and the characters will never know that they are actually dead and probably there will be a dragon in there and the players can fight it with an alien fighter jet and there can be like twenty levels of this thing alternating between space ship wreckage and ancient dungeons and catacombs so this will take a long time we should probably prioritize it and start working on it now."

Naturally, Mundi (RandomWizard) redirected our collective focus towards other things, but I only half-quit the whole idea.

I continued to think about the idea though. I worked on art assets, made sketchup models of star craft and futuristic weapons, and kicked the story itself around in my head.

I still felt that the best format to realize this idea was a megadungeon. Of course it would take an eternity to create this thing and the truth is I do not particularly like megadungeons. They trigger unhappy memories of being trapped in a game of Monopoly wherein my older brother owns everything and forces me to take loans from the bank so that I may continue paying him rent.

I "whole-quit" the half idea.

Recently I came across one of the old sketches and started thinking about it again. I devoted the forty five or so seconds of consciousness I have once my head hits the pillow each night to refining the idea. I whittled away fifteen or so levels and three alien races. I cut the dragon and the whole transhuman virtual reality space probe angle. I kept on trimming it down.

(The Past)
Cultists try to summon demon.
They summon a spaceship instead.
It crashes into their mountain lair and is buried among the collapsing dungeon levels.
A church takes the credit in the name of their patron Deity for smiting the wicked evil-doers.
(The Present)
Cultists have returned, hoping to summon demon again.
Characters sent to investigate strange occurrences near the smoldering mountain.
Characters discover cultists, aliens, and a planet-busting bomb.

This created a lot of questions. Why haven't the aliens left the wreckage, why don't they kill the cultists who want to detonate their bomb. How do the cultists even know how to detonate a bomb.
What negative effects would the wreckage of a star ship have on the local environment? Isn't there some way to cram that dragon back in?

I began working on the answers to these question, and the questions that those answers created.
I have nearly fifty pages in layout, and that is not accounting for room descriptions. I have managed to downsize my megadungeon into a kilodungeon.

-Aaron