dungeon23 - weeks 10 to 12
See the archive of all Dungeon23 pages here
Yeah, had a bit of an accident with this one.
A beer can leaked in my bag and I didn't notice until I got home from the supermarket. However, given that I only use at least water-resistant ink and usually entirely waterproof, all I've ended up with here is some ink titration and paper buckling, and it's good paper so that's not an issue.
Oh the dungeon? um, well, I'm thinking this one is going to be a temple complex now used by locals who don't understand the original setup at all, but take their elderly and dying there to feed an ancient spirit that brings them some benefit. Obvious ethical conundrum there: ok so sacrificing sick people to a weird life draining spirit sounds bad to outsiders, but you're in a village somewhere, you're going to die anyway, and this way your death will actively help the living. It's absolutely believable that people would say "right, take me down to the giant heart then". On the other hand it's also believable that they might sometimes be taken down when they might have survived. The implication of the cells is that the original purpose was more malign - people had to be trapped in them.
I like this one, definitely a top rank week so far. The bureaucracy and the tearoom and the ravens and St Pinnius, the patron saint of uninterrupted reading. Also I would assume that the party wouldn't be aware that most of the archive had fallen into a massive underground hole before visiting.
I'll be honest, I wasn't very inspired this week, but mummies with bandages on which there are esoteric records is good. Note that these mummies don't reanimate or anything - they're just dead people with bandages round them, you know, like actual mummies.
I also smeared the ink here horribly. I decided to use fountain pens as the 0.7mm pigment liner wasn't doing it for me for walls, and the chisel markers that I had were too hard to use in practice. But fountain pen ink is a lot slower drying and more easily smeared. I have learned my lesson here.