I wanted to partake in the dungeon23 project as a way of keeping my creative engine working, but I’m not super into traditional dungeon fantasy tropes that much. So, I raked my brain to come up with something that I could be into, and develop as part of the trend
I was thinking of developing something akin to a massive 1920s mansion, with floors upon floors, going both up into unreal heights and down in to the veins of the earth. The mansion complex was started by the typical “eccentric rich occultist(TM)”. Eventually, he opened portals to other dimensions and times, and continued building his mansion there too. The complex now spans timelines, places, and dimensions.
But now he’s vanished—no one from the inner circle really knows where he is—and his cronies and cult initiates have taken over different wings of the complex and started adjusting and building it to their tastes. So, you can have a massive mansion in the classic 20s era, but that complex can be connected via a magic portal to a gothic castle in medieval Hungary, or to a derelict warehouse in the early 00s Detroit (where one of the initiates organizes a magic drug empire).
cue gonzo anachronisms
Post 2 - Logistics of the project
So how will I be doing this? I need to reduce my options so I don’t spend too much time on researching, tooling, inspirations sources. I’ll restrict myself to
- Silent Legions (and whatever other Sine Nomine book)
- Dungeon23 helper as a line of prompts to guide my creations
- random free stock photos to paint a visual mood
For each mansion, I will generally generate
- high concept
- period, place
- ruler and main cult
- key encounters
- key treasures (tomes, spells, artifacts)
- possible hooks (to attract PCs)
- connections to other mansions
System?
- I will not really care about the system.
- but it’s going to be something like Call of Cthulhu / Delta Green / Cthulhu Eternal
Inspirational material
Project Long Stair setting riff
In 1963- post test ban- a nuclear detonation under the Nevada desert knocked a hole in reality.
The bomb was something new- and still classified- but what it did was stab through the fragile skein of normal spacetime the whole visible universe occupies, and opened a hole into something stranger.
The Fed put a door and a lock onto the hole- ninety tons of steel and titanium strong enough to bounce nukes. They kept it secret too. The place the hole opened into was just to weird for people to know about or deal with. It’s variously called The Basement, Downstairs, and for those who hide behind terminology, the “Subterrestial Operational Theater”.
In the late 70’s, one of the young computer boffins working on the project called it “Gygaxland”.
It has a wiki too.