Dungeon 23 week 5 - Mallow Grove

Against all my expectations, here we are, over a month since the start of Dungeon 23, and I'm still having a blast making these interconnected five-room dungeons. This week, it's the Mallow Grove.

I'm not sure where the idea for this place came from - some combination of Morrowind, Naussica of the Valley of the Wind, the Magic Schoolbus, an insatiable sweet tooth, and living near the birthplace of Fluff spread? But when I was coming up with a list of locations for this dungeon, I knew I wanted a weird marshmallow swamp. I'm picturing fifteen-foot mushrooms topped with a giant "jet-puffed" head, pools of liquified white goop draped over cattail-like logs, smaller "hot-cocoa" brown patches with white nubby fruiting bodies, and all the while a sticky-sweet smell on the air. And of course, sticky marshmallow oozes to ruin an adventuring party's day!

I also wanted to introduce a bit more agriculture into this upper dungeon level, since there are at least two civilizations here (The Market and The Fane), and while we know the Marketfolk subsist largely on lentils, the chance at sweet marshmallow sauce to add sugars to their diet is probably enough to entice a few adventurers to their deaths. In this area, the party meets Temo Pak, one such adventurer, who presents a bit of a moral qualm as well: she wants to destroy the Basalt Amalgam that is guarding the prize marshmallows, but recognizes that the amalgam is itself tending and cultivating the grove. This sets up a roleplaying moment where the party needs to decide if immediate food security is worth longer-term tending troubles. This theme returns in the "twist" part of the adventure, where they find the mallow-ooze spawning pool and (hopefully) realize that destroying it will make the region safer from the oozes, but will wreck the ecosystem of this place.

Finally, this room sees another glimpse at Yama Kii, a bog witch introduced in last week's dungeon. I'm not sure yet if she's going to be a more major recurring character, of if she's just going to pop up in a few places for a chance to make the place feel a bit more connected and like it has a shared history. One of my design goals here is to avoid making this place feel like a bunch of disconnected five-room dungeons (5RDs), which is a risk since that's how I'm designing them. Hopefully, the fact that the rooms are pretty interconnected across the different 5RDs should do a lot to obscure the structure in play, but having these little moments of connection across areas will also help.

Next week sees the rapids, the last part of the "build out the environment" phase of this dungeon, and then we move on to the two "focus" pieces where we start to really dive into the story of this place.

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The Wight's Barrow

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