Revision as of 12:49, 9 June 2005

== Dungeonpalooza ==

Dungeonpalooza is a collectively-created world for any version of Dungeons and Dragons, Castles and Crusades, or just about any fantasy system where the GM wants to add a bit of levity -- and dungeons. LOTS AND LOTS OF DUNGEONS.

Dunegeonpalooza is designed to be a "living system" -- constantly in flux, with enough freedom for GMs to throw in just about any creature, location and dungeon their minds can create. The tone is generally humorous, although there are opportunities for drama and even terror. It is safe to say that if you aren't playing the setting at least some for laughs, though, that you are missing the point.

The primary adventure setting of Dungeonpalooza is the dungeon, and there are dozens upon dozens of such locations in any given section of the soon-to-be-created map.

The idea is this: Dungeons, old-school ones, were fun. Yes, they were somewhat silly. No, sometimes they didn't make much sense. But it was this wondrous anarchy that made them memorable and at times wonderful.

All of the background material of Dungeonpalooza is designed to give the Game Master ample reasons to send players packing off to forbidden caves, underground temple complexes and vast citadels of night deep within the earth.

It is largely assumed that bad guys lair in dungeons in Dungeonpalooza. In fact, they all do. Depending on the GM, this may even be considered a point of curious honor for the evil ones:

Ortak the Unclean: "Didja hear about Xyanthra?"

Blazzzor the Lich-Lord: "Yeah. Something about a floating citadel?"

Ortak: "I know, I know. It's horrible. I mean, lairs are hidden underground. That's ... that's just the way it's done."

Blazzzor: "Indeed. Evil exposed to the sun and air? It's just ... just ... unnatural!"

The Dungeonpalooza Theorum is this: The wackier the dungeon, the more fun for the players. The entire setting is designed to promote this sort of play. There is a sort of world background, but its primary function is to provide a backdrop to all the dungeoneering.

Magic mouths spouting riddles, living cystal statues, rotating rooms, checkerboard floors, fountains that change your sex if you drink from them, girdles that change your stature if you wear them ... it's all here and should be. While every dungeon should have some sort of internal consistency in terms of difficulty and theme, weirdness and humor are the watchwords for a Dungeonpalooza quest.

Enjoy what we've created so far, and add your own ideas -- either to the offical thread in the forums, or here.

A List of the Dungeonpalooza Continents Thus Far Created

A Low-Rent, Black and White Map of Dungeonpalooza

S'yar Wan

The rainy, overcrowded continent of S'yar Wan is the ancestral home of humanity, but it has become the most cosmopolitan of the continents.

In its coastal regions, S'yar Wan is a mix of rural expanses and clusters of squalid villages. The villages and farms of coastal S'yar Wan are slow to advance partly because of the tenacious vermin population that breeds in the woods. Life on the coast is a constant struggle to fend off rats, spiders, dire rats, bats, wererats, cannibal locusts, and two-headed rats. It isn't unusual for travellers to return to a recently-visited town only to find that the entire population has moved out following a truly epic mouse infestation. Local mayors and town guards often hire beginning adventurers to take the fight to vermin in their foul nests. An embarassing number of these adventurers don't return.

Northern S'yar Wan is cut off from the rest of the continent by the Saishona Mountains, which make travel extremely difficult. As a result, the mountains are home to various secluded and independent communities, including a nunnery populated by beautiful female monks, a prudently-sequestered school for novice summoners, and a penal colony for orcs taken prisoner by Paladins sworn not to slay helpless prisoners. Every five years, one representative from each community in the mountains goes to the peak of the highest mountain (Mt. Ungar) to settle any disputes. This is about as productive as one would expect.

The warm southern region of S'yar Wan is mostly humid swampland, home to humans and lizardmen. As populations grow, the lizardmen have begun building expansive bridge systems over otherwise uninhabitable swampland. Mass combat is impossible on these bridge networks, and so small, opportunistic groups of warriors can loot and pillage the communities there without fear of facing mass resistance. Almost the entire current generation of lizardman children have been shipped to fighter colleges in Schlackengravva to combat this danger. So hurry up.

The heart of S'yar Wan is a sprawling redwood forest. The forest is best known for the handful of great cities at its center, including the great market city of Kain Lim, the magic-oozing city-state of Libram, and the thriving kelptocracy of Coldcock (where the local Rogue's Guild has wisely turned its skill at skullduggery to election fraud and managed to become the ruling party). These cities would be impossible without the valiant efforts of the Red Woodsmen, a band of rangers who defend the outer rim of the redwood forest with a solid perimeter of fortified tree forts punctuated by larger stone fortresses. The Red Woodsmen mainly fight back the vermin infestation so common on the coast, but they also do their best to hold back other threats. The Red Woodsmen, for all their courage, are not especially potent, and don't fare as well against competent warriors as they do against wandering rodents. As a result, their fortresses change hands often, perpetually being taken over by enemies and then reclaimed by the Woodsmen (sometimes with the help of hired adventurers).

S'yar Wan is criss-crossed with trade routes and its merchants love to engage in intercontinental trade. However, after accidentally exporting pestilent devil rats to several continents, the traders of S'yar Wan now take care of their shipping from floating offshore docking stations and transport goods to and from the mainland with swimming couriers or rafts. The floating station system breeds corruption, and so many of them are little more than creaky, sea-sickness inducing vice dens or well-guarded repositories for ill-gotten treasure.

Within S'yar Wan's borders lie two great cities:

Kain Lim The Marketplace

Once a small city-state, Kain Lim gradually fell to its own capitalist doctrines. The whole of the country is now a vast marketplace, where anything and everything can be bought or sold.

The whole of the marketplace is ruled by a noble house. Their shop is the largest, and sits squarely in the center of the marketplace.

Justice is swift and brutal in Kain Lim, as the inhabitants do not want outsiders to fear soming into the Marketplace. There are constant armed patrols who will not hesitate to use deadly force when someone breaks the laws of the land.

At its outskirts, Kain Lim is ringed with hundreds of temples and shrines.

Within the boundries of Kain Lim, one is never more than a few stalls away from a place to eat, drink or rest.

The City-State of Libram

The art of magic requires vast amounts of study and practice to become even remotley skilled with. In order to help with this process, long ago a cabal of wizards and sages founded a magical college, named Libram. At first, the school was fairly small, and students were allowed in by invite only. But as time went on, more and more students were accepted into the school, and the campus grew. After a while, small towns began to appear around Libram, offering the nessessary support to the school.

As time went on, the campus grew, absorbing the surrounding towns into itself. As space started to become an issue, the university began to build up, and then out, towering over the surrounging area like an enourmous oak tree. Now, Libram is a sprawling city-state, teeming with magic; it's said that even the lowliest beggar knows a spell or two, and it's common knowledge that anything magical, be it enchanted weapon, magical item, or unique spell, can be obatined here. For a price.

As wizards graduated, they found that they still had use of the many services Libram could provide. Most wizards chose to remain living in Libram, while other constructed towers and keeps outside the city limits. Now, the continent surrounding Libram is dotted with these towers, and wars between wizards are not uncommon.

Gods and the Afterworld (thus far)

The Shining One

The Shining One is the sun-god of the setting, a tireless crusader against evil. He is, as gods go, fairly meddlesome in the world of mortals, reaching down to smite darkness when it rises on the land. His priests are often trained to be expert dungeoneers and spelunkers, being the Shining One's agents where the sun itself does not reach.

(Domains include Good, Sun, Fire, and maybe Glory from complete Divine. I see him as rather focused at what he does, but if others wanted to include War or Wrath or the like, that wouldn't be entirely inappropriate.)

Granted Power: Clerics of the Shining One who are underground can glow with light equivalent to the brightness of a single torch at will. This way, parties can delve into the deepest dungeons while still forgetting to bring that torch they bought during character creation.

Sometimes, the Shining One gets a bit too zealous and mistakes simple selfishness for world-spanning evil. Not often -- just often enough so that the PCs might accidentally become a focus for him for a time.

The Lurker Beneath

The Lurker Beneath is not a nice god. Its domains include Chaos, Evil, Death, and Earth, and those with access to the book of vile darkness can add Corruption, Darkness, and Pain to the list, and the Complete Divine suggests Madness and Pestilence. In Mythic Times, the Lurker Beneath was known as the Darkness Manifest, but it was struck down by the other gods, the high church splintering into thousands of warring cults, and it was entombed deep, deep, deep within the earth. The Lurker Beneath's cults, who all worship it under different names and aspects, seek to unearth their dark god, the labyrinth designs of their tunnels a foul geomantic ritual to summon aberrations and others of that ilk to defend them against those heros who would try to stop them.

The Lurker Beneath does have a name, one known only to his cultists. It is so horrible and alien that devastating acidic balefire consumes all who hear it. The cultists of the Lurker are known to sow discord by scrawling the name in restrooms, passing notes containing the name to adventurers and then running away, and by training parrots to say it before releasing them into heavily populated areas.

But it is said that there is a greater name -- a truer name. Finding the Lost Name is the obsession of all of the cultists, for it is said that those who know and comprehend the lurker's True Name will usher in his final return, a holocaust of death, freedom and ecstasy (but mostly, truth be told, death) that will consume Dungeonworld/verse/whatever as a purifying flame.

Tickets available now. Book early, 'cause it's gonna be one hell of a show.

@@ Line 103: / Line 103: @@
 As wizards graduated, they found that they still had use of the many services Libram could provide. Most wizards chose to remain living in Libram, while other constructed towers and keeps outside the city limits. Now, the continent surrounding Libram is dotted with these towers, and wars between wizards are not uncommon.
-''''' Schlackengravva'''''
-Schlackengravva is the harshest land in Dungeonpalooza.  Jagged mountains, cutting winds, volcanoes and boulders that randomly fall from the sky conspire to make Schlackengravva the rocky resting place of many unprepared adventurers.  The die-hard inhabitants of Schackengravva are mostly sturdy giants and borderline-masochistic dwarves, but unnatural creatures of pure evil have recently begun to ascend from the dwarves' mountain tunnels.  Whether they will choose to stay in Schackengravva once they spread to the surface and find out about the randomly falling boulders remains to be seen.
-Travellers are most likely to visit northern Schlackengraava, the seat of the Dwarven Empire, but the northmost tip of Schlackengravva is an exception.  A portion of the continent's northern coast is inaccessible due to a weird formation of pointed stone spires protruding from the face of the sea.  Even at their tips, the spires are no more than 8' apart.  No sea vessel larger than a raft can navigate the monoliths, making any kind of serious trade military action impossible.  This same area of the coast is blocked from the rest of Schlackengravva by a dense mountain range that is almost as deleterious to overland travel as the spires are to sea travel.  These mountains, a long stretch of the coast, and, it is rumored, the spires themselves are home to self-sufficient tribes of goblinoids.  The goblinoids have never gotten along with the Dwarven Empire, but because their interaction is limited and large-scale warfare is impossible, the two powers continue to coexist, and the rival races prosecute their cold war primarily by roughing up members of the other race who walk into the wrong tavern.
-Beyond the stretch of far northern territory protected by the spires, all the land in Schlackengravva north of Axebeard Bay belongs to the Dwarven Empire.  The Empire, one of the oldest societies in Dungeonpalooza, is a strict and mighty world power that has honed its all-encompassing legal system to a marvel of efficiency devoid of bias, corruption, recklessness, reactionism, mercy and any sense of humor.  While the Dwarven Empire and its powerful military controls its land absolutely, many of the other creatures who inhabit Schlackengravva live in mountain caves just as do the dwarves, and so the dwarves are continually finding rebellious or even undiscovered populations within their borders.  The Dwarves handle the neverending task of establishing control over newly discovered caverns with a bounty system.  Those who lead Imperial warriors to safe (read: violently spelunked) new cavern systems get a special commission based on the size of the caverns and the strength of its old inhabitants (if any).  Bitter humanoid mountain dwellers such as orcs and ogres are known to stock nearby empty caves with traps and guard animals to discourage dwarves and their hirelings from seeking out their communities.  Like most plans formed in orcish committee, this scheme has backfired horribly, and the dwarves now have a very good idea of where to find hidden orcish and ogre communities (somebody has to have set those traps, right?)
-Until recently, the Dwarven Empire was also firmly in control of the mountains that run alongside the massive Axebeard Bay, the hub of trade for the continent.  Within the past 50 years, though, weird creatures have begun to rise from deep tunnels that reach up through the continent's crust and into the dwarven mountain-cities.  Demons, pale abberations and monstrous human-looking fiends have all begun to appear in numbers, and a near-epidemic of undeath has spread through the mountains like a wildfire in a forest full of Charcoal Golems.  As a result, most dwarven communities have either retreated to the north, to the south, or up into the higher reaches of their mountain-cities, where they have set up fortifications against the invaders from below.  Some have suggested that the tunnels lead to submerged temples of ancient gods, to alien planes, or even to the afterlife.  In any case, the mountains surrounding Axebeard Bay are increasingly dangerous, and trade has dropped off sharply.  Fortunately for locals, enrollment in their legendary fighter colleges is still very high, and the colleges are rapidly becoming the new center of the economy.  The most famous of the colleges is The Urferberf Academy for Axemanship, where Master Urferberf Drek teaches apiring fighters from all over Dungeonpalooza the art of the axe.  Urferberf and his assistants teach many combat styles, and each class awards its own distinctive sash to its graduates.  Students of the school typically feel both a strong kinship and an interclass rivalry between students of different styles.
-South of Axebeard Bay, the mountains and harsh, cold winds of central Schlackengravva give way to the volcanoes and harsh, scalding winds of southern Schlackengravva (the randomly falling boulders remain constant, though they are known to be mossier in the north).  The Dwarven Empire does not officially hold any land in the south, though it does support colonies there.  In contrast to the homogeneous north, the south is a patchwork of dwarf, giant, orc, goblin, human, and magma elf settlements.  Each community is small, warlike and fiercely independent, because southern Schlackengravva has nothing to offer to more peaceful communities.  The only reason to venture there is to mine rare magical minerals like mithral, to hunt for the red dragon lairs that dot the south, or to do battle in the notorious gladiatorial arenas of the extreme south.  Also, it is said that somewhere in the southeast there are naturally occuring firestorms whose aftermaths include rains of molten gold.  However, anyone too stupid to think of a better way to make money should probably not be living so close to volcanoes in the first place.  All water in the dry south comes from springs of boiling water that are known to become clogged from time to time.  Unclogging these springs is known to be the worst job in Dungeonpalooza (aside from employment in the dreaded grimlock brothels of Lice Valley).
-ON CLIMATE: No one knows quite why the weather in Schlackengravva is so unnaturally punishing, and the source of the heavy boulders that occasionally fall from the sky is even more mysterious.  The leading theory is that some spell or divine act intentionally made Schlackengravva as uninhabitable as possible; this would also explain the sharp spires along the northern coast.  Skeptics point out that no god or powerful wizard would be stupid enough to try to run off dwarves with mere falling boulders, and that nothing has been found in Schlaackengravva that would warrant attention from such a powerful being... not yet, anyway.
 =Gods and the Afterworld (thus far)=

Difference between revisions of "Dungeonpalooza:Main Page"

Revision as of 12:49, 9 June 2005

A List of the Dungeonpalooza Continents Thus Far Created

Gods and the Afterworld (thus far)

Navigation menu

Personal tools

Namespaces

Variants

Views

More

Search

Navigation

Tools