Mike Mearls Games
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The Magic-User
🕑 Added 2024-03-12 19:55:12 +0000 UTCHere's another class built using the Odyssey engine. It's a throwback! Or not!
This class is built for a dungeon crawling TTRPG. Its working title is Dungeon Lost, and it is a world where the common tropes of dungeon delving are enshrined as core principles of the world.
In Dungeon Lost, the world was formed long ago as a prison to contain the Annihilator, an entity of pure entropy. The Annihilator seethes and writhes deep within the world, desperate to escape and undo the hated world of creation that binds it.
Sometimes, its endless churning produces a tiny crack in its prison. Its energy flows out, seeping toward the surface and freedom. Luckily for the folk of the world, such a fissure represents only a tiny shard of the Annihilator's power. But, unhappily, that shard is enough to form a dungeon.
A dungeon is a bizarre and deadly reflection of reality. The creatures, hazards, and treasures found there are born from the fevered imagination of the Annihilator. It cannot create - it is the Annihilator after all - but it can look out at the world and create strange, sometimes nonsensical reflections of what it perceives.
Much of what the Annihilator spawns serves to protect its slowly growing escape route. It creates traps, monsters, and wards to prevent intruders from reaching the dungeon's lowest level. Each level is like a step toward freedom for the Annihilator, so it spawns an especially powerful servant to watch over it.
Most mortals avoid dungeons, but eventually someone must destroy them before they allow the world-destroying Annihilator to escape. Unfortunately, the dungeon's power increases as mortals enter it. An army entered a dungeon once, and only once. The Shrieking City is a monument to that folly.
Instead, small bands of adventurers enter dungeons and seek to destroy them. The best way to destroy a dungeon? Steal its treasure. To create its path to freedom, the Annihilator must create objects on each level that it can use like rungs on a latter. Luckily for mortals, those objects take the form of gems, gold, and magical items.
Beyond wealth and power, such items grant a portion of their power to those who extract them from dungeons. Steal a dungeon's treasures, and you gain levels.
That's the basic premise of the game. In addition to all the stuff you expect from a 5e game, it also includes a set of rules for dungeon exploration that bring tension and danger to delving back into dungeons. It also gets rid of passive Perception, the single rule that undermines exploration game play IMNSHO.
But, we'll get to all that in time.
Comments
Marshall
Good incentive for doing dungeon crawls: literally dungeon world! I'm very interested to see the dungeon crawling exploration portion. Wondering if the experience will be heavily based on looting treasure based on that description. Passive perception Is a bugaboo. I'd like to hear your upcoming take on that and how it undermines exploration.
Michael Sixel
Haven't read the class yet, but this world sounds unique and fun.
