Megadungeon Book Club 5: Castle Triskelion 2
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 first floor (2nd floor for us Americans) of the Outer Ward.
Check out last week's post here.
First Floor
On reading this floor its obvious that it's actually 3 dungeon areas stapled together, any of which could be taken and used somewhere else. I find the combination of the three here on the second floor of the Outer Ward to clash a bit but its all perfectly serviceable and definitely not just bland empty rooms.
My favorite of the three areas is the inner garden, which actually stretches to the open sky above, breaking up the upper floors. The garden is its own separate biome, complete with different encounter tables, a dungeon merchant, and access to several other different parts of the floor. I think the layout presented is a bit too close together for my comfort (the bees in the garden would be literally everywhere at the size of the hive described, which is maybe the point). I like the garden mostly because it could be removed and magically inserted somewhere else, since the whole place is magic anyway. The literal placement of the garden isn't as important as its role of connecting other places together. It feels very Ynnian in vibes.
The inn complex is second favorite, though honestly what I mean by that is that I could take or leave it. The most interesting part of the inn to me is that the goblin faction lives there.
The outer room complex is least favorite, the complex is what I'm calling all the other rooms that aren't the garden or the inn. They're adequately described and have some good resources for the party (more usable weapons, another potential dungeon merchant, some potential ally NPCs) but I didn't find myself wowed by anything in them. They're eminently serviceable and their presentation and description would save me time at the table.
I'm a fan of the localized ghosts and spirits that are starting to crop up in Triskelion. I like that they can't be turned, it makes the rooms with ghosts feel like an actual lair. I wish more ideas about how to banish them permanently without magic like Exoricism had been added to the room descriptions.