Megadungeon Book Club 11: Castle Triskelion 8
I'm taking part in Studio315b's Megadungeon Book Club! We're looking at Castle Triskelion by Tim Stypinski for the next couple weeks. Studio315b compiled the rest of the dungeon and we've been reading along with that.
Check out my post from last week here. Check out Studio315b's post here.
Inner Ward, 3rd Floor
Love factions, simple as. I also love little factional complexes in dungeons, particularly when they're guarding or living around a place of significance in the dungeon. It gives you a reason to interact with them, put up with the foibles of their culture to appease them, make repeat visits back to the area. In the worst case, the players make a plan to eradicate the faction and carry it out, giving you the excuse to mix up other factions' power-balance and/or send people after the party to get revenge. It's a win-win!
The factions on the 3rd floor are resisting the above about as much as can be expected by this point in Triskelion. The Cobbling Elves explicitly just want to live their lives (they're a classic "we just live here" faction). The Gutter Gremlins are called out as bad potential allies right in their description. The Evil Gnomes are called out as evil with mysterious and chaos motivations, but I suspect that most tables could hack them into a place where they would make good allies (for a bloodthirsty or cruel party). Pelleas is in a similar boat, where suitably neutral or evil PCs could likely work with him quite well to get access to vat-grown hirelings and druid magic.
The rest of the rooms on the 3rd floor follow the funhouse theming we've seen in previous floors. The anti-gravity in floor 3.5 is fun and cool as a gimmick, though I think players would acclimate quite quickly. When will we see dungeons that have gravity pointed towards a wall instead of a floor I wonder? Make a platformer out of a dungeon map.
I struggle to think of a reason for the players to come to this portion of the dungeon (the entire upstairs of the Inner Ward) besides talking to Pelleas, so it's possible that he should be foreshadowed elsewhere. It would be great to see the koalinths elsewhere in the dungeon carrying out Pelleas's will to gather materials or specimens. In general, I think dungeon design should think about why players would come to that part of the dungeon more than once, meaning, determine a reason that is not just "that part of the map is blank." Exploration where the PCs find something interesting and then never interact with it again feels hollow, I'd prefer to see reasons to come back to specific regions of the dungeon like "lots of loot here" or "a machine that combines two creatures is in this room."