Megadungeon Book Club 8: Castle Triskelion 5
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. Studio315b compiled the rest of the dungeon and we've been reading along with that. Studio315b also updated their main post above to give more of an idea of what we're covering the next few weeks, give it a look if you want to follow along or join in!
Check out my post from last week here.
Inner Ward, Ground Floor
The long-prose style descriptions of the rooms are beginning to grate after several hundred in-depth descriptions of rooms that players will spend perhaps 10 minutes in, tops. The voice of the author is still very strong and it's easy to clearly picture these rooms so it's not like the prose has zero value, I'm just getting tired of it. As a GM, I'd skim a lot of these rooms by the name of the room and not use the text just to save myself reading something the players likely won't ask about. On the author side, I can see why there is an inclination to completely describe the room so as to leave no doubt to its contents.
The content of the Ground Floor is broadly that of tradesmen and interactions that the Castle would have had with outside visitors, making it essentially a mirror of the Outer Ward crammed into a single floor. After having read the Ground Floor of the Inner Ward, I think I'd encourage players to ignore the Outer Ward altogether except in the cases they got bored or sent there to look for something, the Inner Ward's Ground Floor makes a good enough introduction to the Castle. In my experience players hate to leave uncleared floors and rooms behind them though, so you'd have to either excise the Outer Ward entirely or really convey that they should move on somehow diegetically.
The Red Legs and the forces of Vicenne Triskelion serve as good intro factions to the dungeon, though I'd prefer they were written to be a bit more proactive. As described in the text, they stay in their specific separated portions of the complex (and do... nothing?) until the players arrive. Both the Red Legs and Vicenne supposedly interact quite a bit with the outside world (highway robbery and acquiring food, respectively) so it would be nice to see more evidence of that in the dungeon behavior descriptions. As is, the Red Legs are going to be goblins/bandits with different aesthetics and Vicenne's hobgoblins will likely only be remembered as tying to the outside world if the players demand to know how the dungeons are being fed. If the two are supposedly at war, why aren't they making larger barricades between their areas? Why aren't they gearing up to launch raids on each other? Why aren't they looking to opportunistically hire 3rd parties to attack the other?
The throne room has 3 thrones and someone sitting in each throne sees a different room. This is a cool idea and opens up a lot of space for quick communication in the Castle. I'd have expected the floor factions to have taken note of this and been using the room for such activities, especially Vicenne with his ties to the rest of the Castle.
The library has a scroll translator machine. This rules! Especially for games that place an emphasis on languages, having a machine to translate texts from one to the other to open up more access to magic is a great idea. I especially like that the machine could probably be used where it is if the players wanted to stay on good terms with the Librarian -OR- it could be moved if they wanted better access to it.
The Inner Ward has a seriously weird ordering to its numbered rooms. They vaguely correspond to how players would likely explore through the floor, with adjacent rooms usually having adjacent numbering, but this rule is not held throughout. With the way the hallways and interconnected rooms spiderweb all throughout the dungeon, I would have preferred the numbering be a little more uniform, or more of an obvious pattern. As is, I had to hunt down the next numbered room several times while reading the text, only to find it down a sort-of adjacent hallway 4 rooms away.