Dungeon Meshi

Ruminating on Magiamachy, my sketch for a knockoff Fate/Stay night ttrpg. It's gotta be pvp, or it just won't work, but I also want to provide some kind of alternative win condition that isn't just "play a different game now." So: When players are eliminated, they're assigned a new playbook that represents an additional threat disrupting the Magiamachy, like "the Order of Magi wants to shut down the ritual" or "yeah it's aliens." Each of these will either alter some of the fundamental rules, making cracks to allow alternative win conditions, or they'll just straight-up have defined wincons on them.

The initial rules of the Magiamachy look like there's only one way for things to end, but as those rules are broken, new possibilities appear. plus this lets players keep playing even after their character is gone

Wormgame uses spell components as the limiting factor for its spellcasting, which is a clever way to do spellslots without using the phrase "spell slots," but you mostly get the spell ingredients on the surface, not in the dungeon. The monster harvesting system is for alchemy, different thing, doesn't do spells. But! that one "spell components are the reason wizards dungeon crawl" post i saw was compelling to me, so now i'm imagining a megadungeon setup where "hey you found a vein of Sorcerer's Sulfur, you can harvest enough for one cast of Fireball every time you pass this floor" is part of regular dungeon exploration "new component cache discovered" on the event table, "your old cache has been raided by rival adventurers," etc. I'm also imagining "add a renewable component cache to the mapped dungeon" as a potential level-up option for wizards, or "you can now repurpose one component as another" idk i think there's juice here

i read His Majesty the Worm! game's got plenty of buzz, you don't need my rec, but I come out of the book appreciating how much it explains how to use OSR trademarks like dungeon maps and random encounter tables. "integrate your random encounters into whatever spot on the map they show up, and swap them out with new events when the party returns to the surface" is really really helpful procedural advice, albeit one that necessitates a lot of preparation. And to its credit, it breaks down exactly what you need for that preparation really well. Once you have your city and underworld maps and their respective event tables, it gives you a ton of material to work with and dominoes for your players to knock down.

However

The dungeon creation advice itself left me a lot colder. It has a process for determining the macrostructure, but each individual floor kinda reduces to "draw maps, come up with a bunch of interesting things to happen." Even the "dungeon seeds" in the back have maps, but don't have room by room breakdowns. Which is the point, they're a starting point for inspiration, but the end result is that you still need to draw the rest of the owl when preparing things yourself.

His Majesty the Worm does a better job of showing me what a megadungeon needs than any other game I've read. It's bridging the gap between where you start and what it needs that's tricky for me.