I want to make a fun-house-ish megadungeon created by a Mad Wizard ™…. except that’s a bit cliche, so I kind of feel I need some extra detail or motivation for said mad wizard. Anybody got any suggestions? Twists? Turns? Observations on the madness of wizards?
I want to make a fun-house-ish megadungeon created by a Mad Wizard ™.
I want to make a fun-house-ish megadungeon created by a Mad Wizard ™.
You ever seen Howl’s Moving Castle? Wizard has a house with doors that connect to different places. What if a perfectly sensible wizard tried to make such doors in his tower, so he could be helpful to many different folks at once, but it all went awry. And now, because of magical bullshit, the tower is now bigger on the inside than the outside as all of the locations that the doors should have opened to have now been sucked inside — making for wildly divergent ecologies within said tower, full of monsters and displaced commoners who just want to find their way out.
And somewhere in the heights of the tower, a once good-natured wizard who is going mad with guilt over his mistakes and the damage they’ve caused, resorting to wilder and wilder magic to try and untangle his knotted tower.
Have you ever heard of the Winchester Mysery House? You could totally riff off of that legend.
The story is that the woman who inherited the Winchester fortune was told that when she completed her home, the ghosts of all the people gunned down by Winchester rifles would come for her. As a result, she had people working at all hours building and re-building the house until it became a crazy, mixed-up mansion with stairways going to nowhere and rooms sealed up within the walls. She had people building new sections and tearing them down but also had craftsmen working on intricate details that took a long time to complete.
You could have your wizard spooked out about something like that. The wizard could be making the place hard to navigate in an attempt to fool the ghosts!
I’ve been to the Winchester Mystery House – it’s super creepy. Great idea, Logan Howard.
Cool one Alfred Rudzki!
Maybe the wizard is being hunted by agents of Order – the chaos and nonsense is a necessary element to stop them.
I made an adventure where the Wizards brain is all messed up and he’s obsessed with finding the “rules” for the universe, but a chaos demon is making it so all the rules he figures out are classic AD&D or otherwise old school RPG Rules As Reality style stuff, made for a lot of fun twists on the Weird Tower thing!
Nothing wrong with the classic tropes! How about the dungeon as a “reality tv show” for a group of bored “Old Ones” Cthulhu monsters who won’t destroy the world as long as the Wizard can keep the adventurers coming (and dying) like the horror spoof film “The Cabin”.
Mark Tygart I love the Cabin, but I don’t want the campaign world imploding if the PCs actually manage to clear out the dungeon :p
Liam Ginty I was originally thinking the wizard just kept starting various Grand Magical Projects then getting bored/distracted and moving on, and so kept having to expand the dungeon space to fit these things… but that, in hindsight, looks a bit too much like a rather unflattering depiction of ADD, so I’m a bit leery of using that particular idea.
Alfred Rudzki and Logan Howard I really like your ideas, so now I’m torn between them, as they offer some rather different thematic options to each other…
Have you checked out the “Red Box Vancouver” stuff? Their take on wizards is particularly delightful, especially in the Monthly Monster material.
Check out “Valkolov the Mind-Wizard” to get a taste for what I’m talking about.