Megadungeon Book Club 4: Castle Triskelion 1
I'm taking part in Studio 315b's Megadungeon Book Club! We're looking at Castle Triskelion by Tim Stypinski for the next couple weeks. It's a much longer megadungeon than the last few so we're reading it in chunks, this week is the Introduction and Ground Floor of the Outer Ward.
Check out last week's post here.
Introduction
The history section is basic but serviceable, providing a reason for the place to exist, why it's abandoned, what you might find inside, etc. It's a nice change of pace that this megadungeon was seemingly only abandoned 3 years ago instead of millennia ago, there might actually be living inhabitants and impact to local politics inside.
The fact that a large portion of this megadungeon is accessible from the outside is a huge gain. When players see windows, they immediately think about how to "sequence break" using said windows in my experience. Having two obvious non-window entrances (the ramp and the stables) is also good, gives players two immediate choices on where to go.
Outer Ward, Ground Floor
The cryptic oracle being the first thing a lot of players will see is cool. It's an easy way to exposition dump about whatever it is the players want to ask about while maintaining the classic trope of "the sage is unhelpful" (for better or for worse).
The rooms are presented neighborhood style, you can tell some rooms are connected thematically. Would have appreciated a small amount more buffer space between the "neighborhoods" to make the transition between gory executioner's room and leisure room a little more marked. It's better than a lot of alternatives where the rooms are entirely disconnected.
I wish the text description for each room was in a different format. It's just prose with very little in the ways of formatting changes or anything to it up or make it easier to parse other than line breaks. It's all useful text to establish thematics but I wish it was made a little easier to read. The rooms themselves were written and published separately on the author's blog so it makes sense that they're written with a bit more meat on them than raw bullet points, but I wish they had gotten a second pass.
There's an armory in the first few rooms that has a big pet peeve of mine for dungeon dressing: using rusty weapons for thematic dressing. Why make the weapons utterly unusable by the players? Make them poor quality or have them break on a minimum damage roll or something, but why not just let them use them? Bundles of spears and pikes are perfect old-school treasure, they're not that valuable and quite bulky, but they have a use so players still like to hold them and hold onto them. I think it would be very neat to keep the weapons in the first armory usable and let players re-arm themselves or their followers whenever they wanted until the resource was expended. It would push the players towards the exploitation of resources that they find in the dungeon, which is ultimately what you want anyway. The author seems to agree with this as far as armor is concerned, because you can find usable shields and plate armor in nearby rooms! Why not spears and pikes too?
I've complained a lot here but these are fairly minor nitpicks compared to the actual quality of the dungeon. It's got a good geographic layout (central hallway, easy access to stairs for those in the know) and the room contents are varied enough to stay interesting. You can tell from the elements that are visible what kind of place this was, and it sells the "creepy castle" vibe well. This is the first megadungeon that we've read in the club that has me thinking "yes, I might actually use this out of the box with few to no tweaks."
More to come next week! Check out Studio 315b's thoughts on the above here!