So, I’m going to create a mega-dungeon as part of the Dungeon Challenge! Great! So… what kind of dungeon? What has prompted the adventurers to delve into it?
I don’t want to create a weirdly disjointed dungeon for the sake of having a hundred rooms. I want to create a story. It needs a backbone; a consistency that carries throughout the adventure. There are a lot of ways to approach this including theme and motif, but when creating a singular complex on such a massive scale, it can be a challenge to make the experience believable.
There can only be so many cult members, or goblins, or kobold minions serving some dragon denizen. Repetitive encounters room-after-room grow old—quickly. Yet, on the other end of that scale, sheer random nonsense would seem unbound from any reasonable narrative. How does one have a group of bandits in one room, a council of mages in another, and a rampaging wild boar in yet another? Finding a thread of consistency that still allows for variety will be central to this challenge.
I’ve decided to make this dungeon full of ghosts. After all, anything that has a soul can become a ghost, right?
By creating a creature template that I can overlay onto any living being, I unlock an endless range of ghostly encounters. For this design, I’m calling that template the Soulbound. The mechanics will be fully defined later during the game design pass, but for storytelling purposes, here are the fundamentals:
- Soulbound creatures are incorporeal undead—ghosts who retain all the traits of such beings, including the ability to fly.
- They are bound to the dungeon itself, trapped in its confines and unable to pass through its walls. This restriction will serve as the core “why and how” behind the mega-dungeon.
- They retain fractured memories of their past lives, which may color their interactions with adventurers in unpredictable ways.
- They are driven by a relentless hunger for the living. Intelligent Soulbound might resist this urge briefly, but in time, even they will succumb.
With this foundation, the dungeon’s theme reveals itself: life, death, and rebirth. Its guiding motif will be trapped souls.
Why are all of these ghosts trapped in the dungeon?
All stories need a villain, and I find the most enjoyable antagonists are those one can feel a sense of empathy towards. The ghosts trapped here are not inherently evil, but those who bound them here are. This raises a interesting, and potentially engaging, philosophical and ethical debate that questions if destroying the ethereal inhabitants of the dungeon is an act of aggression or a realization of compassion.
Whether an adventurer’s goals focus on ambition, wealth, or duty… the theme provides ample opportunities to make the story their own. All that really remains needed is an identity for the true opposition… Who created the dungeon and to what ends have they bound hapless souls within?
Focusing on the motif—in particular death, I’ve decided to lean into the concept of ages past. The dungeon was constructed by a long lost ancient race of builders, ones whose perspectives and motives have been forgotten to history. In this adventure story I shall call them the Gidasham. The name is a derivative of combining the Sumerian word “gidim”, meaning shadow of the dead, with the Sumerian word “gasham”, meaning artisan or craftsman. The Gidasham were those who built their civilization using the souls of the dead.
This dungeon, built eons past by the Gidasham, is a surviving example of their “soulbound” technology. The entire dungeon is a mechanism, the ghosts within the eternal power source for the engine of an ancient relic found deep within the complex.
This provides the identity for this mega-dungeon adventure! I shall title it, “Engine of Souls”, perhaps with a subtitle, “Relics from the Gidasham“.
The adventure will require a prologue to prompt the adventurers to delve into the Engine of Souls, and writing one will be a step taken once I complete the Dungeon Challenge. However, some premise of what that prologue will be could prove to be helpful during the dungeon design process, so with brevity:
Someone important to one of the adventurers (or perhaps the entire party) has died. Maybe a former party member, a past ally, a family member, or a lost lover. The soul of this significant individual has somehow has become entangled in the Engine of Souls, and as the phantasmal fabric of their spiritual essence is pulled into its mechanism bit-by-bit, their ghost has come to haunt the dreams of the adventurers, seeking aid and lending hints to the whereabouts of the dungeon’s locale as their memories begin to fade and unravel. It will be up to the adventurers to seek out this ancient complex, delve its ancient depths, and free this newly trapped ghost from the Gidasham relic.
This provides enough context to frame the adventure so that the dungeon design process can begin.