Exalted Skill Complications

The idea of the #dungeon32 "contest" was to build a megadungeon by creating a brief outline of one room, each day, for the year of 2023, in a particular kind of notebook. This is the result of mine, with an introduction written after it was all done.

Introduction

This presentation of what turned into Descent Into Pandemonium explains, up front in this introduction, some things that became only clear as the design went on. This makes the megadungeon a bit easier to understand, particularly the glossary. For the most part, however, the sections after the introduction remain mostly as they were originally written, so you can sort of see the evolution of the idea. There are a couple of places where an idea from later in the process necessitated changing a prior location slightly, but this was avoided most of the time.

Premise

The #dungeon23 pitch suggested making the dungeon have a level a month, but this one is done a level a week. The rough plan was a decent ever downwards, with order giving way to chaos the deeper you go. By the time you get to the bottom, you're accessing planes of chaos.

Given that, it seemed right to start with a temple devoted to order at the top, abandoned for two millennia. As it turns out, this time frame obliterates a lot of what you might normally see in a dungeon. Some research discovered that, over 2000 years in an underground, slightly damp environment with breathable air…

• …stalactites average about 20cm of growth.
• …all wood, cloth, leather, and organic materials decompose to dust and dirt
• …bones will have decomposed to dust
• …teeth will have fully or mostly decomposed; a few might remain intact
• …most metals (e.g. copper, iron, silver) corrode to dust
• …brass and some other metals may or may not have survived, based on their immediate environment
• …glass, stone, gold, platinum, and bronze remain mostly to fully unchanged
• …some crystals (e.g. quartz) remain intact and some (e.g. salt) do not, depending on their chemical makeup

This last fact led to the early idea that this temple to order was specifically attracted to crystals as expressions of order spontaneously created in nature, making crystals a theme through much of the megadungeon.

Sources

This megadunegon was built for high-fantasy, dungeon-delver roleplaying, but not for any specific game. It pulls references from the entire history of the genre, somewhat at random, and various editions, third-party additions, and knock-offs of popular products, some of which have an SRD and some don't. Names of creatures known to be "protected content" have been changed, but the rough idea used. In cases where different SRDs contain very different ideas of how threatening a particular monster should be, likely the more imposing version is intended. In short, the types of monsters listed act as a tropey shorthand, without having to take up space with stats or references. You might need to look some of them up.

Very little thought was given to ideas of "balance" or "appropriate challenge", but this megadungeon isn't intended for beginners and, as high-fantasy, assumes heroic competence. If you port this to a game of choice, you'll need to do a little work to match the threat level of your PCs and the system you are using.

The three chaos gods behind much of this story are never named, always referred to as "a god of strife", "a goddess of discord", and "a god of insanity". Choosing specific versions of such deities never become important as the design went on, so never happened. Feel free to assign whatever specific faces and trappings you want.

Rough History

• The “Kiooliciti” (kiːuˈlɪsɪtiː) refers to a religious movement/culture centered around worship of order and law, particularly in how it manifested in crystals. Though advanced, the Kiooliciti have been forgotten, the Kioolicit language extinct.
• Two thousand years ago, a Kioolicit temple flourished here, on the slope of a temperate mountain forest, part of a magically advanced, but now extinct, civilization.
• Though some activity took place above ground, the bulk of the temple descends, in levels, into the rock.
• Geomantic forces concentrated a potent source of order into a huge geode deep in the rock, with the temple built here to protect and access.
• The Kiooliciti forged a powerful artifact, The Axiom, to harness and use this source of order, ultimately constructing most of their society around it.
• While the priests spread Kioolicit teaching and culture to extend their influence, the culture’s mages became obsessed with using portals to capitalize on that influence, and built a tesseract connecting their labs across the globe.
• Three chaotic gods bristled at the existence of The Axiom, and became briefly obsessed with the idea of corrupting its power to stabilize a permanent path between the plane of Pandemonium and the center of Kioolicit society.
• The machinations of these gods arranged an unlikely alliance of extraplanar chaotic forces, which breached the temple’s tesseract and moved up to attack the temple.
• Kioolicit defenders managed to stall the invaders before they reached the surface.
• The short stalemate was broken by necromantic plague, turning many of the temple defenders into an undead horde.
• Remaining defenders managed to confine the horde to the lower levels of the temple, then gathered what they could and abandoned the temple entirely, burying the surface entrances, and severing portal connections.
• In time, the invaders shattered The Axiom and absconded with its heart.
• The invaders, having accomplished their actual goal, never breached through to the surface as the Kiooliciti feared and, over two centuries, the garrison guarding the surface faded to nothing, along with what was left of the Kioolicit culture.
• Within the temple’s somewhat humid conditions, two millennia have taken their toll on what was left behind.
• Over that time, most of the potent wards and spells used to seal the temple have also faded.
• The chaos gods, being chaos gods, grew tired of their new link between Pandemonium with the temple and abandoned it within a few decades after the invasion, but the elaborate conduit remains.

Glossary

• The enropics are a collection of related, large, frog-like, humanoid species, native to a chaotic outer plane, who reproduce by infecting others. Along with demons and proteans, the entropics formed the bulk of invasion force.
• Kiooliciti (adjective Kioolicit): an ancient, now extinct, multi-species culture driven by a worship of order and law that flourished in this region two thousand years ago.

Scale

Until the later months, maps use a scale of one square being a square meter. If you want to say that each is five feet on a side instead, no one will stop you.

The Temple Beneath

A. The Surface

Half-way up a forested mountain, an ancient trail leads to ruins.

1.1 Stone-Capped Well

• Rune-covered
• Repellent

1.2 Feet of the Colossus

• All that remains of a massive granite statue, created by magic.
• Overgrown, no paths remaining.
• Scattered haphazardly on all sides of the left foot are balls of hair and bones (like owl pellets), about volleyball size, as well as larger solitary bones, skulls, and antlers.
• Ancient and weathered

Map

Week title

Week description

rooms

Map

Week title

Week description

rooms

Map

Week title

Week description

rooms

Map

Appendices

Appendix A: The Arch Keys

The early Kiooliciti experiments with portals led to the five "polyhedral" portals. The location of these are summarized here, in addition to the location of the keys that allow their use:

• Tetrahedral (yellow): 3.26, tesseract entrance. Keys: 2.2, 4.7, 4.8
• Cubic (orange): 1.28, smashed. Keys (shattered): 2.14, 4.26
• Octahedral (purple): 3.11, near geode. Keys: 1.13, 2.14, 4.7
• Dodecahedral (green): 4.16. Keys: 2.11, 4.4, 4.14
• Icosahedral (blue): 5.17. Keys: 5.3, 5.10, 5.27

Appendix B: Shards of the Axiom

Since reassembling the Axiom forms an overriding goal of this megadungeon, here is a list all the locations that mention containing shards of the shattered artifact:

Appendix C: Tesseract Connections

When the Kiooliciti built their tesseract, they labelled the edges of its graph not the nodes. (After all, it is the edges that are the hard things to create and monitor.) Each edge (a connection between rooms of the tesseract) has been given an alchemical symbol. Most are two way (↔), some are one way (→), and some are broken (—). The edges are:

• 🜁 air 3.26 → random destination.
• 🜂 fire 1.21 — 3.26
• 🜃 earth 3.26 ↔ 4.15
• 🜄 water 3.26 ↔ 5.1
• 🜉 aqua vitæ 4.15 ↔ 6.2
• 🜌 vinegar 4.15 ↔ 5.1
• 🜍 sulphur 4.29 ↔ 5.11
• 🜏 black sulfur 5.7 ↔ 5.17
• 🜑 mercury sublimate 5.10 ↔ 5.17
• 🜔 salt 5.6 ↔ 5.7
• 🜕 nitre 5.11 ↔ 5.21
• 🜖 vitriol 5.3 ↔ 5.7
• 🜨 verdigris 5.21 ↔ 5.30
• 🜶 alkali 5.17 ↔ 5.31
• 🜳 regulus 5.4 ↔ 5.5
• 🜬 sublimate of antimony 5.4 ↔ 5.8
• 🜢 sublimate of copper 5.5 ↔ 5.8

• 🝁 quicklime 5.15 ↔ 6.3
• 🝅 alum 5.15 ↔ 6.3
• 🜩 tin 5.2 ↔ 5.8
• 🜚 gold 5.16 ↔ 5.19
• 🜛 silver 5.20 ↔ 6.1
• 🜠 copper 5.29 ↔ 6.2
• 🜪 lead 5.2 ↔ 5.14
• 🜜 iron 5.8 ↔ 5.31
• 🜫 antimony 5.20 ↔ 6.1
• 🜾 bismuth 5.16 ↔ 6.4
• 🜺 arsenic 5.8 ↔ 5.13
• 🜼 realgar 5.30 ↔ 6.4
• 🜸 marcasite 5.20 ↔ 6.4
• 🜿 tartar 5.10 ↔ 5.16
• 🝃 borax 5.31 ↔ 6.1
• 🜘 rock salt 5.2 ↔ 5.11
• 🝉 gum 5.9 ↔ 5.13

• 🝊 wax 5.2 ↔ 5.20
• 🝕 urine 5.2 ↔ 5.29
• 🝞 sublimation 5.2 ↔ 5.22
• 🝟 precipitate 5.10 ↔ 5.24
• 🝠 distill 5.15 ↔ 5.23
• 🝢 dissolve 5.8 ↔ 5.25
• 🝣 purify 5.2 ↔ 5.27
• 🝤 putrefaction 5.17 ↔ 5.26
• 🝩 crucible 5.9 ↔ 5.28
• 🝪 alembic 5.25 ↔ 7.3
• 🝭 retort 5.23 ↔ 7.31
• 🝑 trident 5.24 ↔ 6.5
• 🝎 caput mortuum 5.20 ↔ 5.27
• ⍚ “evaporate” 5.26 ↔ 6.1
• ⍝ “encase” 5.27 ↔ 5.31
• ⍢ “grind” 5.27 ↔ 6.2
• ⌱ “extract” 5.28 ↔ 6.3