The Fountain of the Heavenly Waters - More Notes for Dungeon 2023

Previously: https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-ospreys-bastards-and-scourge-flutes.html

Thinking of central organizing concepts for my 2023 mega-dungeon - a framework to riff off of when I'm low on inspiration, and to give structure to what might otherwise be just a long list of disconnected rooms.

So: most of the mega-dungeon is within the lost city of Lacrimada - pretty cliché history, once-magical, advanced metropolis and all that, now fallen into ruin. The secret of Lacrimada's success is something within its depths, an ocean of raw chaos or god's blood or whatever else.

Lacrimada itself is essentially a gigantic fountain/water treatment plant, sucking up that uncanny wellspring, processing it into various outputs, dispensing it over the land and throughout the city, and recycling the water returned to it by waterfalls and canals.

The city's built around the pipes and reservoirs of this fountain, its pumps and water-wheels and relays. Traps and hazards might occur from the natural decay of chains and other machinery, build-up of pressure, chambers suddenly filling with or being emptied of water, or perhaps as purification or filtration mechanisms - the presence and nature of a monster might also be indicated by how it chewed through a filter or grate.

I'm going to have to do some reading on pre-electrical pump systems and so on for more ideas.

Lacrimada's water was the stuff of miracles: panaceas, life extension, healing any wound, etc. Stuff you should've been able to build a paradise on - and it was close to paradise for a time. However its people became obsessed with the water's process, with its and their eternal refinement over human concerns, and so doomed themselves. Aesthetically, I want the humanity of the city to be dwarfed by its infrastructure, homes clustered in the shadows of dams and aqueducts, like Blame! or Naissance dialed back into antiquity, brutalist behemoths overgrown by the damp.

Imagine the following, but instead of pleasant greenery, the buildings are covered by reeking mold, fungal filaments and mushrooms - perhaps great fields of mussels where the water flows over them.

Lacrimada's monsters too are warped by the waters - from imbibing congealed, stagnant, befouled samples of it, or as exemplars of its people's divergent ideas of perfection. Many will be hard to kill, capable of regeneration. Taking advantage of the space by knocking them off bridges into vast pits, venting them out of a disposal tube, dropping an elevator on their head, and so on may be the only way to be rid of them for good.

The party too should be able to access this unnatural healing - at serious risk, of course. For all the mutation tables people have written up, I haven't seen many get rolled on. Lacrimada should help with that - expect mutations galore. As you discover access shafts and re-activate elevators to plumb the city's depths, you should get clues on how to cook up various concoctions with its water by studying it, maybe whip up your own cargo cultic still.