Design Notes

Design Notes

My favorite experiences in running and playing dungeons always seemed to be in surreal environments, and White Plume Mountain still remains one of the best times I’ve ever had playing TTRPGs. It felt like a twisted game show where the PCs were dealing with a Jigsaw-like host, and I was constantly laughing at the absurdity of it all. I knew I wanted to make my own funhouse puzzle dungeon, but the inspiration for the situation just didn’t hit until like early 2024. I had a dream, and the only thing I could recall was seeing the scene depicted on the cover: two towers twisted around each other, one black and one white. The black tower had this eerie grimace and a witch hat, and the white tower was aflame with stained glass. I woke up and sketched the towers out, then commissioned the piece from Alexey Gorboot. From there, I just decided to do the thing every dungeon designer should be doing: make problems. Don’t worry about how something is going to be solved, just make problems the PCs need to figure out. Nine times out of ten, they’ll have some Spell or unconventional thought process that subverts any obstacle you can throw their way. Solving things is their job, not yours. My mess of problems was then thrown at a local crew of Tulsa Vagabond fans to playtest, and Jack Weighill and Pablo Dapena for editing. The feedback that kept coming back from everyone was that it needed something to tell players what had actually happened. This felt so counter-intuitive to me and hit a real irk of mine. It’s a PUZZLE dungeon, they’re supposed to figure that out! Plus, I absolutely despise “diaries/journals/notes” in adventures that serve as nothing other than to drop an obvious hint. It’s just a pet peeve of mine. Well, it turns out that even groups who did figure it out said it would have been more satisfying to have figured it out sooner and enjoyed the reward of thwarting Stolas some other way. It was that, and the editors’ feedback that ultimately lead to solidifying clues about the identities, and including the Orb of Parallel Reality and Sending Parchment. At its core, the mystery isn’t spelled out for them, and the PCs will discover the Knage Ashright being dropped in all of these hints is actually two of the same person from different realities, which felt like a cool subversion of the “note drop” clue trope. This dungeon is my biggest problem yet. It was specifically designed to allow the PCs to enter from anywhere without breaking. Cartographer players will discover their own puzzle to unravel. Combat-heavy players will have tons of enemies to beat down. Tinkerers will get environments and items to experiment with. Investigators will find a double-murder mystery at the heart of this that thwarted the evil-doers and created the chaos presented within.