Perpendicular dungeons

[Susramanian]

This is my promised post about where to put all the puzzles I've been coming up with. I made a new thread because perpendicular dungeons can be a whole lot more than just out-of-the-way places to stick the puzzles.

What is a perpendicular dungeon? It's a dungeon within a dungeon, like the small water cave in T2's Moria, for example. I'm calling them perpendicular dungeons because that's how I picture their intersection. The Old Forest is a horizontal dungeon; that is, it's a row of adjacent levels. The player might find a set of ruins in the Old Forest with a > taking them down to a vertical stack of basement levels, which would thus be perpendicular to the Old Forest levels.

The goal of perpendicular dungeons is to add lots of random content to the game in such a way that it is not obvious to the player that the content even exists until he stumbles upon it. Right now the game is basically a collection of linear dungeons (as opposed to a linear collection of dungeons, which T4 most definitely is not). It would be nice to put some branchings in the dungeons so that the player is occasionally confronted with a surprise and an important decision: carry on to my original destination, or detour to explore the scary ruins? And once you've explored one branch, do you leave or do you backtrack and explore the other branch?

As for the implementation of perpendicular dungeons, I'm thinking that they should be random but with themes. If the game decides to generate one in the Old Forest, for example, it would pick a vertical stack arrangement (tower or dungeon), or a north-south adjacent arrangement (path leading into the scary northern parts of the Old Forest). An appropriate room generator is picked based on this arrangement, a number of levels is picked (same as the base dungeon, plus or minus one?), a random boss is generated at the end, and bang, instant random dungeon.

I suggest that these perpendicular dungeons be well above the level of the base dungeon. The first time a player runs across one will probably be about like the first time a player pokes his head into the Ancient Elven Ruins: instadeath. Now he knows to prepare carefully with future characters. This means that, for the most part, people will be skipping these dungeons and moving on with the central plot or coming back to clean them out later. In the former case, we give the player the nagging sensation that they're missing out on something interesting, and in the latter case we give them something concrete to look forward to. I've always found it quite satisfying to discover content that's out of my league, and then come back later armed to the teeth, ready to explore.

Okay, back to the puzzles. Suppose there was this ancient madman of an Archmage who built himself all sorts of strongholds around the world to hide his loot in. Being a madman in a video game, he decides to guard his loot with fiendish puzzles in addition to fiendish, well, fiends. In game terms, this means that T4 generates a collection of say four perpendicular dungeons and scatters them around randomly. They should probably exclude things like adjacent forest levels. I'm thinking stacked tower levels or stacked dungeon levels or adjacent cavern levels. The > on each level is hidden in a Y room, thus requiring the player to complete at least one puzzle to move on. As with other perpendicular dungeons, their level is quite high and they should not be undertaken lightly. Maybe there's a special quest item at the end of each of the four puzzle dungeons, and if the player has them all, they can do something cool. Say the blue wizards have a sealed door in their sanctum, and after you defeat them, if you have all four puzzle quest items, you can open this sealed door and get some sort of post-win bonus dungeon. Hooray for optional bonus content!

[Sirrocco]

If you're going to do this, I'd suggest a quest to find/beat them, spawnable somewhere - primarily so that you'd have a place that autorecorded where these dungeons *were* for the PC to come back to find later.

[Susramanian]

Maybe the quest appears automatically when you first see the perpendicular dungeon entrance. Maybe you get a lore entry instead of (or in addition to) a quest. Something like, "You've stumbled across the long lost Tower of Randomname hidden deep in the Old Forest! Only the gods know what secrets-- and perils-- it hides."

[Sirrocco]

Any would work. I just want there to be some way for the player to relatively easily be able to check where they are in-game.

...and I think it would be at least mildly entertaining to name the guy something like "Randonam"