DISCLAIMER: I will be mentioning Dungeon Meshi spoilers within, please go read the manga if you haven't yet. It's REALLY fucking good and you will not be disappointed especially if you love megadungeons.
So I've been getting really into His Majesty the Worm, like really into it. It sells itself as a:
"new-school game with old-school sensibilities: the classic megadungeon experience given fresh life through a focus on the mundanities and small moments of daily life inside the dungeon."
which is very much My Group's Shit™. We played Heart: The City Beneath a few years ago and to this day I think it might have been the most enjoyable campaign for that group and I suspect the reason why was due to Heart's relentless devotion to the players crafting their own narratives through beat selection and the relationships that emerge from that. So suffice to say, when I saw a game that had that new-school sensibilities of character forward gameplay within the skin of an OSR megadungeon inspired by Dungeon Meshi (probably one of the best fantasy stories written in the last 10 years), well lets just say my Obsidian planning doc is like 6k words long right now.
So due to the fact that I tend to think best when talking to people, I thought it'd be a worthwhile effort to post my planning here in case anyone was interested in my process through this phase. Lets go!
That dungeon sure is delicious
The book comes with a whole section on making a megadungeon which has been very helpful to give me an outline to follow so why not start at the top and work down. Step 1: Origins of the Underworld. What are the essential truths of my underworld? What secrets does it hold and what rules does it follow?
Worm follows the idea of Anti-Canon where there is no designed setting for your coming campaign, the book makes reference to several deities like Mythrys and other names but it's completely up to the referee what they want to keep and throw out, none of it is important to Worm and I appreciate that. Having said all that, I will still be springboarding my lore off of these seeds it has planted.
TAKE 1: The Dungeon is Built by Rich Benefactors and Sorcerers
Now, we won't get into it here but I also had already generated a city above the underworld prior to my work on this section and what I generated was a city with a ton of religious institutions being ruled by a shadowy cult to Mythrys. This immediately made me interested in following the Mythrys thread and warping it in a way that this deity (who via the text, reads a bit like a Jesus figure) is actually some otherworldly entity that has been trapped at the bottom of the Underworld. This lead me to a few questions. Why was it trapped down there? What exactly about it is otherworldly? Who trapped it? Why do the people above venerate it as a divine person?
Why was it trapped down there? Because it's weird and different. Dungeon Meshi uses this idea of an otherworldly entity sealed at the centre of it's dungeon to great effect and all because it was too powerful on it's own so people wanted to control it. I may as well steal that as well so the dungeon is actually some kind of jail holding it.
What exactly about it is otherworldly? The Mythrys the people on the surface believe in is a person, maybe a human, maybe an elf, maybe an underfolk, maybe even an orc. In reality, Mythrys is probably unviewable and eldritch. I decided to call it a "Dreamer" and say that the people above and the world that the players know of is just a dream, or better yet a nightmare, that Mythrys is having. This isn't one of those "everything was actually just a dream and nothing mattered" stories though, this is just how the world was created. Everything is still real and tangible, everyone still has a sense of free will, and decides to commit heinous acts of violence all on their own, hence nightmare. I think it's a fun thing that could eventually be a big reveal at the end of the megadungeon (and maybe give the PCs pause about what to do about Mythrys).
Who trapped it? Right now, and this is still pretty subject to change, a very old civilization of people were controlled by Mythrys but as it got lazy some people were able to wrest free will back and trapped it, limiting it's control and freeing humanity. These sorcerers would go on to build the lowest layer of the dungeon as a sort of containment cell.
Why do the people above venerate it? Mythrys may be locked away but it's not easy to completely negate what is essentially a god's powers so it still has been leaking out influence which has manifested as a humanity wide shared delusion that Mythrys is actually was actually a human too and one day he would ascend from the Underworld to bring salvation back to humanity. The religion got rolling and by the time anyone who knew the truth thought to do something about it all, it was too hard to actively suppress so they leaned into it and used this as a useful lie to control people.
Now this is where my notes start to get a bit sketchy. I had several ideas for what the dungeon actually was physically. My earliest draft was as I wrote above but what about the other floors of the dungeon? Well it was all funded over time by kings and people with vast wealth with the allowance that these rich people could build anything they pleased as long as the Mythrys secret society could make a few edits (ie. build in traps). They never told the benefactors about all of this and merely sold it as "a wonder that will transcend time". With all this work happening, how did the shortcuts get built? Mythrys influenced the builders dreams to coax them to build shortcuts in (though the shortcuts are always weird, almost like they were built from a half-remembered dream).
I liked this idea but as I thought more, the idea of the secret society building in maintenance shafts and every floor being completely different cause it was a different person building it for different goals started to bother me for some reason so I gave it another try.
TAKE 2: The Dungeon is Actually Constructed by Mythrys
In this iteration, the lore is still the same (mythrys created humanity, some sorcerers trap it, etc) but instead of the dungeon being constructed by rich benefactors or sorcerers it is instead a vast network of caves that have been slowly over time influenced by Mythrys' dreaming and turned them in to the different layers of the dungeon as a way to coax down the most greedy and strongest of people to free it. I liked this dream world angle a bunch since I could do weird shit like have the connection to the cave floor be on the 5th floor of a belltower but quickly I realized, I didn't like the idea of no real connection between floors thematically. The visual of going through a door in the 5th floor of a tower and ending up in an impossible underground cave system seemed neat but lacked the thematic/visual cohesion of a purpose built structure.
TAKE 3: The Dungeon is Layered Failed Civilizations
After all of this work, I managed to end up on the most generic thing for what the dungeon is. None of the work I've done is going to complete waste though, I still intend to keep the bones of the lore (Mythrys is an otherworldly entity trapped by sorcerers who have a conspiratorial secret society that has lasted through the ages to eventually be the current ones in power and the religious zealotry is driven by Mythrys' influence on the people above). The key reason I ended up at this point is for thematic cohesion and giving into the worm in my brain that says dungeon meshi. In Dungeon Meshi, the dungeon is an ancient kingdom that was protected by being pulled under the land, the Golden Country. The cast descends down through the castle's spires, into the castle itself, down into the castle town, into the sewers under the castle town, and eventually into caves and an even more ancient Dwarven civilization buried below. There's a very satisfying logic to how they got down there and I really just wanted that.
Now with all that together, lets outline the finished lore (at least as it is right now)
Before there was Humanity, before there was Earth, there was an entity known only as The Dreamer. This entity once slumbered and dreamt about this lush garden filled with living creatures, some of them sentient, and so it came to be. These creatures answered it's beck and call and through these creatures it saw even more amazing things through their dreams. As it feasted, The Dreamer started to let it's guard down and it's enchantment was broken by some of extreme intelligence. These now free people found their creator and with their newfound free will, decided to trap it and free the other people. They were successful in trapping it deep in the earth but knew that no one could ever let it free. They began a secret organization that worked behind the scenes to influence civilization and kept watch. Many civilizations came and went over many millenia yet the Cult of Mythrys, as they came to be known, never fell. For every civilization that perished, a new grand one took root and built on the corpse of the old one, being nourished by it. This building, destruction, and rebuilding eventually built up layers of earth and construction covering the cult's prisoner. Over even more time, this underworld, as it came to be known, became inhabited by all manner of unsavoury creature that was not allowed to dwell on the surface and wasp populated with a mess of traps and valuables thought lost to time. It is now present day, above the Underworld sits the jewel of the world only ever referred to as "The City". At it's helm is the Holy See, a vast religious organization in veneration of Mythrys and his teachings. Within the sprawl though, an entrance to the Underworld has opened to the public and there is about to be a gold rush for the treasures of the dungeon. As is common with people, when there is a hole in the ground some people are curious how deep it goes; and those very same people intend to find out.
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| The dungeon they meshi through |
That's all for now! Next time, generating the underworld layout and thinking about what lies below.
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