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#Campaign23 (#Dungeon23) 1/8/23 and Some Thoughts

Illustration for #Campaign23 (#Dungeon23) 1/8/23 and Some Thoughts

Sanguis Mori Adventure

Since the start of the year, I’ve been participating in #Dungeon23, or more appropriately as I’m writing it, #Campaign23. I essentially mashed together two separate adventure ideas I had:

  • A old dying volcano god gets a second life as a parasite breaths new life into its host
  • A spreading madness causes issues within a society of sentient, parasitic, vampire-ish silkworms

These two both had implications of parasites and decay so they meshed well thematically, so I was quite happy to go forward on the challenge with these two plot threads in tow.

What is Dungeon23?

The challenge was originally posed by Sean McCoy on twitter. The idea is to design a megadungeon with 365 rooms, over 12 levels, making one room per day. I saw the idea through osmosis and other designers and writes online and I thought I would give it a shot. The problem is, while I wouldn’t mind designing larger dungeons at times, my playstyle and therefore adventure writing style, doesn’t lean towards constantly being in a dungeon. Delving is fine, being down there every session is a bit grating. There are tons of other challenges that spun off of dungeon23. Some stick to the “small things everyday” format but change the thing you’re making, others change the format to be weekly or monthly. The best one that matches what I’m doing is #Campaign23, since I’m designing a small sandbox area for players to explore, so that is what I will be using.

Throughout this post I will be limiting myself to speaking of things that I have done, not what I intend. Why? Because I have issues with motivation at times and I was recently told that talking about plans activates the same parts of the brain as actually finishing the plans. So if you see bits in handwriting in the notebook I don’t mention, its me protecting myself from talking about stuff before its finished.

What Have I Been Doing?

I’m been designing bits and pieces of the adventure everyday. I’m trying to limit myself to designing locations and encounters within those locations, to keep with my idea of a sandbox. Before the new year started though, I did a few pages of brainstorming, like I would for any other adventure.

Silkworm Vampires

  • I would later find a name for these “silkworm vampires”: Sanguis Mori, a combo of latin for blood, the scientific name for silkworms, and the phrase “to die” in latin
  • These guys are sentient parasites with three life stages
    • larva that drink blood, produce silk, have a hive mind and live for a long time
    • latched that happens when the parasite finds a host and takes over the body that are very long lived
    • moths that are short lived and exist exclusively to reproduce
  • Most larva will remain larva, with a few becoming latched and even fewer becoming moths when a new brood is needed
    • new latched are made in some sort of ceremony
  • Everyone here, except the moths, subsists on blood, with a enriched mixture of blood and honey used to promote a larva to molt into a moth
  • The latched are the stage that players will see most often and the only one that will be able to confront them in combat
  • The latched create silks from the raw strands the larva make and general act as the protectors and providers for the other lifestages
  • Sentient hosts are prefered for latched, but they can host in most any living body
  • These creatures serve a god said to give them sentience, a god of song, art, and learning
  • Ash fall coming from the newly active volcano (because of our newly rejuvenated volcano god) has caused some toxicity in the silkworms leading to madness and slow downfall
  • From there I made a list of possible locations that I can pull form later when I’m designing the actual complex based on this brainstorming

Parasite Volcano God

  • A rogue sanguis mori has latched onto a fledgling god from within the volcano
    • I’ve gone back and forth on old or new god, still not settled
    • The god and newly latched worm are burning, another host is needed
    • This host needs to be appropriately strong, and be conquered before the god fully comes to power
  • The sanguis mori is trying to carve more space for the mori’s—they are tired of being feared and shunned from the encroaching societies
    • He intends to cut the area off using the volcano god’s powers, and use worshipers of the god as fresh hosts for the mori when needed
  • The worshipers (or cultists) have been kidnapping people to act as possible hosts for the god and labor to build the god’s temple
    • The worshipers are aware the god is different from their previous volcano entity, but are not aware that the god is currently being controlled
    • Most host are inferior and are turned to ash in the process
  • This again ends with a big list of possible locations within the temple complex to this god
  • This is further away, and less in stone than the sanguis mori complex

Regular Human Settlement

  • This is the first settlement the players will enter and where the adventure begins
  • Its a relatively new settlement in the area
  • The area used to have many cities and towns inhabited by worshipers of the old volcano god
    • These cities and tows were wiped out by the last eruption
    • These new settlers are members of the same group, who broke ranks from the worshipers to avoid the eruption
      • I’ve gone back and forth on this, going with this to avoid imperialism
  • This settlement is an experimental and exploratory one, seeing if its possible to return to the volcanic forest safely and find what resources they can
    • The settlement has been around long enough to be mostly self-sustaining for food
    • The town is exploring and mapping the surrounding forest, with the explorers working out of the explorer’s guild
  • The town has been evacuated due to the volcano that has been belching smoke and ash (thanks to our volcano god)
  • A group of bandits—The Black Tigers—are looting the town before they leave the area as well
  • This again ends with a list of locations in town, though most of them have little adventuring value and would primarily be empty and useless

I have a few other brainstorming pages, but these feature my core ideas and what I’ve been working on during this first week.

1/1/23 — Eastfork Settlement — Overall

Here we get my meager adventure hook: the players have been sent back into the forest to locate a missing person, the daughter of a local, who everyone assumes was taken by the sanguis mori. The mori are known as sort of boogymen in the area that few rarely see, but are used to keep people indoors and safe at night. This hook needs work, primarily details, but it has enough meat and weight that I’m willing to run with the central idea. I did know that I needed to give the players a direction, and thus the explorer’s guild will have a vague location of the sanguis mori complex for the players to find.

The settlement has been evacuated of the residents, but isn’t empty. Instead a group of bandits—The Black Tigers—have moved in to try and find what valuables the locals left. This bandit clan isn’t particularly dangerous or well organized, but serve as an obstacle to tangle with.

The town is organized in a vaguely circular fashion with palisade walls encircling the buildings. The town’s water wheel turns away in the north, to make flour from the crops in fields surrounding the town. The rest of the buildings surround a fountain in the center of town. Buildings include The Last Leg Tavern, The Sleeping Dog Inn, Smyth’s General Goods, a blacksmith’s workshop, Gem’s and Arcanum, the Civic Hall, the Explorer’s Guild, and a small Guard Barracks.

I decided there would probably only be a handful of bandits, so only perhaps a few fights, with many condensing down to one large fight if the players aren’t careful. The only other thing of note, is that the buildings and ground here are covered in ash, including the crops. The crops are also growing an odd mottled gray mold underneath the ash.

1/2/23 — Eastfork Settlement — Explorer’s Guild

On day 2 I worked on the most important place in the town, the explorer’s guild. This is the location that the players know they can find a general location for the sanguis mori in. The guild is a catchall for the survivalists, hikers, and cartographers working to remap the forest. The guild is a relatively small building with the main space simply being a meeting area and map table. The rest of the space is taken up with storage areas for gear, lockboxes for members to keep valuables, and mail cubbies to keep members in touch with their loved ones elsewhere. Members stay with the inn while in town, so there’s no need for beds or places to rest.

Bandits have tossed the place and taken any valuables. This tossing has made finding the map the players need a bit more difficult but it is still there. The map points the players towards the sanguis mori complex, a few days travel away from town.

Depending on what happens with the characters in town, there may or may not still be bandits poking around in here. No valuables remain, but the characters maybe interested in some survival gear and older maps.

1/3/23 — Eastfork Settlement — Civic Hall

Day 3 I covered the only other interesting building in town to me, the civic hall. I described it as small, but its the largest building in town. Mayor Vaugh Shackley and his wife Ruth live upstairs while the bottom floor holds the town’s meeting hall, a kitchen, library, and the town’s records. This space is a multipurpose meeting area for both town discussions and religious services. The mayor and town took the valuables, but the bandits have still broken in through a window and went about tossing the place.

The highlight for players here are some of the records and books left in the library and records. The books give information on the history of the area and the records give some information of past disappearances and rumors about the sanguis mori. This is all information from the brainstorming sessions, just reworked to be found by the players in the world. I’m trying to focus on environmental storytelling and giving the players information in organic ways.

Also don’t get attached to the coherent maps, they die pretty fast. But they’re pretty.

1/4/23 — Road Away From Eastfork

The fourth was my game night, so I had less time and I was also transitioning outside of Eastfork. I had written the interesting buildings out to me, and the rest would likely be empty shells anyway. I can always go back, but for now I’m done.

This series of travel encounters takes bits of information that I know from brainstorming and puts them in front of the players. This includes information from both major plot lines and is a mix of combat and non-combat encounters.

  • Players spot a cultists hunting party who are looking for wild game and harvesting plants
  • Players find a dead predator, it was killed with fire by a cultist
  • Players find a large group of footprints heading towards the cultist city
  • Players get ambushed by a desperate carnivore looking for a meal
  • Players see mold growing on plants covered in ash again
  • The volcano belches more ash and smoke
  • A group of sanguis mori are working together to capture an animal, intending to use it as a host
  • Players stumble into a empty sanguis mori animal trap
  • Players find a collapsed sanguis mori watch tower, fallen from its tree

1/5/23 — Sanguis Mori Complex — Gardens

Day 5 I made the first room for the sanguis mori compound, a set of gardens. All sanguis mori construction is made of a combination of silk, wood, and stone (in order of decreasing frequency). Silk is the primary building material, with most structural pieces reinforce with some sort of resin substance painted and dried on the fabric to strengthen it. The sanguis mori keep rabbits for their supply of blood and grow several different plants to make dyes from here. Because this platform is attached to the ground, it was designed to be cut off from the rest of the complex if needed, and this was indeed flipped at some point as the floor connecting this area with the rest of the rooms is missing.

The plants have a vast array of colors but are now wilting nd covered in ash and mold. This mold the players have been seeing is causing the madness and there is evidence in this garden that they tried to curb the spread. Hastily constructed rooves and new planters. Fresh dug soils for the new planters. A burned pile of molded greens. Notes on silk about a ban of entry from this area and cots placed in odd areas. These all lend an eerie feeling to the area.

Because this area was cut off from the rest to prevent the spread of madness, there are a handful of latched that worked as farmhands left out here. They have gone mad from the mold and hunger. I also came up with a short list of things to tie the sanguis mori together ability wise. Because they can take many different forms by latching onto different hosts, its important to have a core set of abilities to tie them together. I settled on choosing some way to make them tough mechanically, some sort of charm magic, perhaps some type of sunlight weakness (though I’m on the fence), and the ability to control the silks they’ve made.

1/6/23 — Sanguis Mori Complex — Dye Processing

Here sanguis mori press and grind the plants from their gardens and combine them in vats to produce dyes for their silks. Unlike the previous area, this space wasn’t cut off due to the madness, and very few changes were made to prevent its spread, so this dye processing area is much more orderly than the gardens. Dye vats and presses sit unused and dusty. One has overturned and a latched mad mori is muching on the contents. This mori is beast hosted (to introduce that to the players). While the mori muches he uses the strands of silk in his wraps to play a eerie song throughout the space.

The vats are embedded into the floor, with their circular lids resting on top. Players can walk on them, but some maybe loose or precariously placed.

The dye making process uses many chemicals, housed in the vats and barrels strewn about. If any liquids in this area mix, its possible they may react creating dangerous fumes and smoke.

When I wrote this I said red flowers and red dye, but its obvious that they would use red for their blood dye right?

1/7/23 — Sanguis Mori Complex — Silk Dyeing

On my last day of the week I designed the silk dyeing area. This is where the woven silks are dyed both solid colors in larger vats of dye, and pattered silks, painted and dyed in a special workshop area. There is an area to heat irons and boil water to steam the silks and in general get them ready for use in sewing. This area is virtually untouched by the decay due to the madness, but there is a pair of workers. They work on absent silks and seem to be miming actions they did in the past unstopping.

There is evidence the place has been neglected, all the fires are dead and cold, spilled and cooled wax coats the surface of one worktable.

A key piece here is the tapestry that was being worked on. It depicts the issues occurring here. Things like silkworms refusing to make silk, latched losing grips on reality, mold and ash on crops, and new construction happening to help. The tapestry is unfinished, showing its artist stopped working in the middle.

End of the Week Comments

I’m not sure I will always do weekly roundups, I’m not sure I’ll finish, I wont say that I’ll do either, but I will say that this week was fun. I’m not sure I’m going to do a room today, 1/8/23, because I wrote all this, but we shall see.

General RPG Writing Thoughts

I just wanted to put in a small section here to talk about past unfinished projects, and the future of my writing. I have several unfinished projects floating about. They may or may not be finished, but I’ve not deleted my work on them yet. They may still happen, I’m just waiting on myself to not dislike what I see when I open the files. Some of that distaste is due to burnout on the project, but at least one or two of them are suffering from something else.

The thing is, while I wont boycott playing Dungeon and Dragons 5e, because of the updated licensing terms that WotC released for the new edition and because of rumors swirling about other things possibly happening with the OGL, I just don’t want to write under the OGL anymore. Whether the rumors are correct or not, the new license terms don’t appeal to me, and honestly, 5e isn’t even my favorite game. 5e is the baseline experience, its the thing we play when we just want a chill game. I can write the things I write outside the OGL for any number of other systems, so thats what I’ll be doing. I’m moving my creative energies over to Worlds Without Number (most likely anyway) as that is the sister game to my favorite game Stars Without Number. Who knows, maybe I’ll do some sci-fi stuff too. Either way, no more writing under the OGL for me.