Dungeon 23 week 3 - Mistfall

Welcome back to week 3 of the Dungeon23 challenge. This week, we have a look at the area to the north of the False Priory, where we answer the question "wait there's a whole town living in this dungeon? Where do they get their water?"

From a giant, mysterious waterfall of course! When I first thought up this level of the dungeon, I knew that I wanted to have a fair bit of it be marshy, fungus-filled terrain (for aesthetics), and that I wanted part of it to center around a mysterious ancient magi-tech mill (see Week 6, when we get there). Both of these would require a source of running water somewhere in the dungeon to permeate a bunch of the place, so I decided early on that there would need to be a waterfall somewhere in there.

What we have here is a pretty standard water-dungeon set of encounters, for two reasons. The first is purely practical - that this week has been pretty rough for non-RPG reasons, so I didn't have as much time to dedicate to this project as I'd have liked. So when it came time to do the water dungeon, I was thinking "tentacle water monster near the entrance, sunken chest with danger, cult of fish-people, treasure behind the waterfall, great."

Second, however, I want the dungeon to get weirder as the characters delve deeper into it, which means that it has to start relatively normal and expected. This is not to say mundane - I don't just want a labyrinth of bugbear-filled 20x20 chambers - but I'm just not enough of a genius designer (and probably no-one is) to make each five-room dungeon in the place a zany off-the-wall burst of creativity without it feeling overwhelming and incongruous. So especially for the first few levels, I'm going to try and sparsely add the weird, scattered among the understandable.

There's not much more to say about this part of the dungeon - in the coming weeks, we'll have a look at the rest of the "watery" parts of this dungeon (the marshes, the mill, the mallow-fields, etc), and then turn our attention more toward those basalt soldiers and what they've been up to.