The Iron Keep Part One- planning
In the Border Baronies stands an old keep, abandoned for nearly 600 years. It was one of the fortresses constructed by the Good King Atrius, used to secure His lands against the forces of the Demonic Lords, and later against incursions from the Wildlands. The Iron Keep, it was called. After the Fall of the Kingdom, the fortress was abandoned, however, left to degrade over the ages. Its once gleaming iron walls are now brown with rust. The halls that once hosted the proud Steel Legions now infested with goblins and other monsters. However, stories keep being told on dark nights about the place. Stories of the once great Keep, and the treasures still contained within.
Where I explain my intentions
A friend of mine called my attention to the Dungeon23 project fairly early on, and I had made a mental note and it was soon forgotten. In the last month or so however it's been impossible to ignore. Several discords I'm in are buzzing with it, my youtube feed is full of videos about it and it's all the rage on every blog. Therefore it was hard for me to ignore the niggling voice in the back of my head telling me to try it out.
Unlike most serious bloggers however I cannot find the time or energy to really post once a day. Furthermore, in stark contrast with Sean McCoy's initial advice, I will overthink it a bit, especially in the early stages. This post will hopefully contain most of that. That way I can afterwards focus on the actual challenging part; creating the megadungeon.
I'd already hoped to have done all of this work before the year started, so I could do about 7 to 10 dungeon rooms per day (giving me a slight amount of leeway for the weeks where I'll inevitably fail to make deadlines, holidays, etc). However, I spent that week actively not doing that, so that just means more work for this week.
Overcomplicating things from the start
Because KISS and YAGNI are for suckers
One thing that's been in my mind for a time is having a dungeon where a mechanical system has been put in place to power parts of the dungeon in ancient times. To me, this might be the right time to put that idea into practice. The Iron Keep is situated in the foothills of a mountain range in order to control the plains beyond. I'm taking inspiration here of the keep at Mycenae, because A: it's a really cool archaeological site, and B: it has some features I really enjoy. It's a walled keep, but there's tombs outside of those walls, it has a large cistern, some internal temples. In short: it has everything you need to make a megadungeon that's both cohesive, but at the same time is varied enough that it's actually interesting to explore for multiple sessions. It's in my experience way too easy to fall into the 'trap' of things like Barrowmaze; too little variety.
Besides that, however, they'll need a source of power. Having machinery is all nice and good, but unless you have something to make 'em run they're kind of just there. Since we're in the foothills, let's make a lake with a dam. The dam can be used to generate power using waterwheels, and we'll have some rotating shaft delivering the power generated to the areas of the keep as they need it; some kind of medieval PTO (power take-off). Furthermore, the dam can also be used to supply the keep with water via an Aqueduct. The gives us some good vertical integration between the two vertical 'stacks' of dungeon.
This already gives us a lot of layers to work with. Potentially too many, but we'll see. I might cut out or consolidate some layers so that I can add more elsewhere because I'm already second-guessing myself on it. For now, however, it will do. I've also drawn in some obvious entrance points. A keep has them, the dam can be accessed from the bottom and the top, and the Aqueduct got an entrance too, since I'm imagining the one in the first Dark Souls game. This is just some general indications of obvious entrance points though. We'll see if they survive the year.
Tools for a tool
Unlike Stephen over at Purple Druid who did all of his prep up front, like you'd expect with preparation, I did not. So for now I'll abstain from trying to create a rich history using stuff like How To Host A Dungeon or similar stuff. I have a decent idea of the kind of stuff I want to place in the first few weeks, but if I ever stop having those I will probably switch it up and use those tools.
What I do know I will use however is both the B/X and ADnD dungeon filling methods. In particular, I will use B/X for lairs, or parts of the dungeon that are otherwise more densely occupied, while I use ADnD's rules for the liminal parts. BX's rules, while way simpler, do create dungeons which are, in my opinion at least, dense. Given that only 1/3rd of the rooms will be empty, on average you can expect to never be further than a room away from something that might try to kill you. For lairs inside the dungeon, that sounds grand to me, and we can use it there. However, for those border zones, or even simply the parts that I want to feel empty, I'll use ADnD's rules. As per LungFungus' calculations that will give me about 60% empty rooms. This will create some differences between different zones which I hope might create some nice contrast.
Furthermore I'll probably use the tables in both ADnD and BX for deciding lairs, numbers appearing and encounters, depending on how I feel that day. Treasure, however, will be done purely using BX. If I'm ever to run the Iron Keep for players that's most likely what I'll use, so for now that will be my go-to. I'll use my D30 companions whenever I can, as well as other random tables I'll link whenever I do use them. If I use ADnD dungeon generation, dungeon tiles or whatever, I'll link to it.
What's next
As soon as I've uploaded this post I will start working on a rough sketch of the ground floor of the castle and start adding rooms to it. As I mentioned, I'm hoping to do 7-10 rooms per week and see how/if that's gonna go. I'll start out with the F0 of the keep itself, and see how that pans out. I hope to have a post up each Sunday roughly, explaining what I did, how and why I did it and why it was a horrible mistake.
So until then, count your torches and keep mapping!