dungeon23 week 24 - the rise of the sewers
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At this point I decided that I wanted to work on a larger dungeon rather than the seven-room individual ones I'd been doing more recently. Small dungeons are arguably more likely to be useful - having a number with varied micro themes means I'm more likely to be able to look through the list when prepping a game and say "oh yeah that would fit here with a few changes". On the other hand, the goal of Dungeon23 is not to produce a useful body of work any more than the goal of NaNoWriMo is to produce a proper novel - it's to do 365 dungeon rooms in a year.
Really the only correct answer to "should I write small or big dungeons?" is "which do you want to write? pick that" and I felt like creating a multi-level one so I did.
It's sewers - a very standard dungeon trope, but in this case, I rolled that they were elegant and/or decadent. Built as a showpiece by a culture long ago who didn't even want to be able to smell the sewage. I envisaged a sewer built by someone with a big phobia of contamination and filth, though some parts are still a bit too close to raw sewage for comfort (this is where you have the plebs doing the work, you don't take the upper echelons there).
Also, for good measure, said sewer-working plebs were artifically-created beings who have kept working there over centuries or longer and have changed. Some develop violent tendencies and are exiled to live in the outskirts of the sewers where they can indulge those tendencies on intruders without disturbing the efficient running of the sewer.
Also frogs. Not too many frogs this week - though the sewer workers are described as froglike - but more frogs to come.