My ‘Three Mile Tree’ campaign is an example of this: a tree that is three miles high, which the PCs explore. Castle Gargantua was another. I can think of no others (although my knowledge of the field is hardly exhaustive). I don’t believe we have scratched below the surface of the possibilities in this region.
During summer I visited the ruin of Byland Abbey, one of the many monasteries destroyed by Henry VIII, in this case in 1538. Despite the fact that the buildings have practically been levelled, what remains is still impressive, and walking among the ruins one still gets the feeling of being dwarfed beneath a great and complex construct whose vast scale one cannot properly fathom.
It got me thinking that a megadungeon set within a real-scale ruin, but with PCs who are only 1cm high, would be interesting.
What I like about this idea most (and what I also like about the Three Mile Tree, as it happens) is that it expands the scope of exploration. One is not limited to the horizontal plane, but can combine it with the vertical: the PCs do not have to go downwards, interacting with a series of flat dungeon levels, but can climb vertical or near-vertical surfaces in order to reach new areas.
They can, for instance, climb walls and insert themselves into gaps which presumably lead to extensive caverns and burrows:
They can ascend and descend huge staircases, each step of which may be in effect a dungeon-level of its own:
They can go into really fucking massive caverns:
And walk amongst really fucking massive obstacles:
And they can explore ledges, wall-tops, sills, and the like, on which people of similar size to them have built little towers, citadels, villages, tombs, and hey, even abbeys, of their own:
What is being achieved here, I suppose, is an additional exploratory field, between the dungeon level and the regional/hex level. What the ‘BIG Campaign’ does is insert an area map which links together lots of mini-dungeons, all at different levels and altitudes, but is more compact and detailed than a hex map proper, and with a unified theme/architecture.
There is an adventure in Dungeon magazine #18 called "Chadranther's Bane" that somewhat fits the bill. Teeny-tiny shrunken PC's trying to get back to normal size in a world suddenly way too big for them.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if that was before or after "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids"?
DeleteI love it! In my old graphic novel series “King of RPGs”, the fantasy setting was inside an actual sandbox. A giant sandbox (desert setting obviously, caravans, oases, cities), surrounded by the Great Wall, beyond which lay the Forest of Night (the lawn). The main existential threat to the heroic desert folk was the Plants, the giant jungle of weeds slowly encroaching on the sand whenever it periodically flooded (rained).
ReplyDeleteNice. I also had an idea once to do a campaign setting based in my back garden.
DeleteThere is an adventure in Dungeon magazine #18 called "Chadranther's Bane" that somewhat fits the bill. Teeny-tiny shrunken PC goodness. It has a tagline of "A change in perspective makes all the difference."
ReplyDeleteSome of the community created adventures for Mausritter might be adaptable for this purpose.
ReplyDeleteI'm also reminded of an idea I've had on the back burner for a while but never done anything with: stealing the Zentraedi from the Robotech: Macross cartoon. (They're a species of genetically engineered humanoid warrior giants with the technology to shrink themselves to human size at need for purposes of espionage, etc.) I was thinking of a whole region inhabited by them, but they'd all alchemied themselves into small form to conserve food or something - the adventure would lead the PCs into all these giant-scale spaces, trying to figure out where the former inhabitants had vanished to....
I'm reminded of an adventure (homebrew AFAIK) an old DM put us through where we ran into a sea-faring wizard who was going around shrinking people and creatures and trapping them in his giant magical aquarium for his amusement. We wound up getting shrunken and tossed in the thing, and exploring the place definitely had the verticality and that "out of scale" feeling you're talking about. The latter was mostly due to various full sized bric-a-brac in the tank as well as uneven shrinking that led to encountering a relatively tiny (but extremely angry) kraken, some "giant" normal fish, and a few "giant" kuo-toa.
ReplyDeleteThe "underwater adventure" thing did kind of get in the way of fully appreciating the size change stuff, though. Little too much spice in the soup, perhaps?
Shrunken adventurers has endless appeal to me. As a kid, I tried to read the Borrowers books numerous times - I loved the concept so much, just couldn't enjoy the writing.
ReplyDeleteI remember a fun little dungeon in one of the One Page Dungeon Competition books, where the players had to investigate something down the drain in a wizard's laboratory, and were shrunk to an appropriate size.
This is surely what The Big Rubble of Pavis was meant to be. In the early RuneQuest writings you got the impression of this colossal ruin, walls built by giants, with vast buildings constructed from the stone organs of a gigantic statue, then dominated by trolls and Dragonewts, now finally open for exploration once again. Sadly, later writings downsized it.
ReplyDeleteThis is surely what The Big Rubble of Pavis was meant to be. In the early RuneQuest writings you got the impression of this colossal ruin, walls built by giants, with vast buildings constructed from the stone organs of a gigantic statue, then dominated by trolls and Dragonewts, now finally open for exploration once again. Sadly, later writings downsized it.
ReplyDeleteThis is surely what The Big Rubble of Pavis was meant to be. In the early RuneQuest writings you got the impression of this colossal ruin, walls built by giants, with vast buildings constructed from the stone organs of a gigantic statue, then dominated by trolls and Dragonewts, now finally open for exploration once again. Sadly, later writings downsized it.
ReplyDeleteThis is surely what The Big Rubble of Pavis was meant to be. In the early RuneQuest writings you got the impression of this colossal ruin, walls built by giants, with vast buildings constructed from the stone organs of a gigantic statue, then dominated by trolls and Dragonewts, now finally open for exploration once again. Sadly, later writings downsized it.
ReplyDelete