Clockwork Mansions and Theoretically Infinite Universes
or, some of the prep work I've been doing for Dungeons & Dragons
Clockwork Mansions...
About three months ago I set myself the task of designing a clockwork mansion from the ground up. We’d reached a high octane moment in one of the D&D campaigns I run - a player character had been fatally poisoned, and time was quickly running out to find a cure. Embracing my duty as a Dungeon Master to make this moment as white-knuckle as was humanly possible, I told them the only known dose of the antidote was currently locked away in a vault deep in a sprawling mountainside fortress-mansion whose owner was unlikely to simply give it to them and whose security measures they were unlikely to survive if they tried to steal it.
They immediately started planning the heist.
I’d been itching to make this mansion in D&D ever since my recent return to Dishonored 2. One the stealthy stab-em-up’s flashiest, E3-ready levels is a clockwork mansion built by Kirin Jindosh, an inventor and war profiteer gifted with oodles of genius and absolutely no morals. As your character breaks into the house in search of Jindosh, rooms can rearrange themselves around you at the simple pull of a lever - furniture folding in and out of the walls and floor, staircases forming and dissolving, entire rooms moving between different levels of the house. It’s a sight to behold, and makes exploring the house and discovering its layout an adventure in and of itself.
As much as I wanted to do this in D&D, I immediately ran into problems. First and foremost, what makes the clockwork mansion cool in Dishonored 2 is primarily the visual effect of the mansion shifting around you. Like any work of pure imagination, D&D is unlimited in its SFX possibilities - what you can see and do is limited only by what you can compellingly describe. Counterintuitively, however, this makes visual setpieces like the clockwork mansion less impactful in D&D than they would be in video games, as part of what makes the original effect impressive is not quite knowing how the game devs managed to make it work. The only factor determining the “coolness” or lack thereof of your D&D level is your ability to describe it - a great description can make a mundane location special as much as a bland or confusing bit of flavor text can sink an awesome concept. Recognizing this (and how difficult it would be to draw a digital map for a mansion with any number of modular layouts), I decided to kill my darlings and scrap the clockwork-ness of the mansion itself.
So what did I do? I did make a mansion - 4 glorious floors of puzzles, traps, mysteries, and combats. The mansion was indeed guarded by clockwork soldiers with four sword arms each - holdover enemies like those featured in the game. Access to different parts of the house was regulated by Walls of Light - lethally high-voltage electric currents that keep people without the proper credentials from passing through certain doorways without a nasty shock. And the mansion was indeed inhabited by a war profiteer - though mine was a paranoid old woman who was only eight years old and innocent of the sins of her father when the rest of her family paid for their profiteering by being poisoned at a family dinner.
But I put my own twist on it too - the technology in the house wasn’t powered by steampunk whale oil contraptions, but elemental crystals that will feature heavily as the campaign continues. Instead of being the vanity project of a self-absorbed loner, my mansion was a sprawling home to a huge, multi-generational family with plenty of secrets and bad blood between them. One of my favorite puzzles required the players to comb the family portrait gallery and recreation rooms to glean enough about each family member to deduce where they were sitting at the dining room table during their final, fateful family meal. It put a spotlight on my favorite part of the house, which incidentally was not the structural gimmick of the clockwork house, but the backstory I had designed for it to make it my own.
The biggest thing I had to change were the elements of the level that teach the players its mechanisms and rules - while Jindosh’s mansion comes in the middle of a game a player is already expected to know how to play, the oddities of this bonkers mansion were totally new to my players. In practice, this meant teaching my players the dangers of, say, walking through a wall of lightning by presenting them first with a broken one they could walk through without dying, sprinkling the electrocuted bodies of too-hasty thieves near active ones, and color-coding ones that had been tampered with so they’d know what to expect.
My goal is to someday put up the adventure in its entirety on the DM’s Guild, but until then - it still needs some work! - for a taste of my kind-of-clockwork mansion, check out some of these maps I made for my players to run around in.
The entertaining floor, including spiral staircase, ballroom, swimming pool, and saunas.
A wrecked basement and a secret laboratory.
The family floor - rec rooms, portrait gallery, a haunted dining room and a conservatory perfect for a boss fight.
…and Theoretically Infinite Universes
Oh yes, that. I’ve also been working on a campaign wiki for this whole homebrewed boondoggle of mine. Maps, cities, characters, plot arcs… all of them have been finding their way out of the random Google Docs I’ve stuffed them into over the past year and into a somewhat orderly system my players can see and search.
As I get ready to teach a summer class on worldbuilding, I’ve run across in my research the concept of worldbuilder’s disease: the compulsion to keep building a world to the utter exclusion of actually doing something with that world (telling stories in it, playing games set there, etc). I have been afflicted by this syndrome before.
But with this campaign, I feel like I have the opposite of worldbuilder’s disease. This campaign began as a one-shot - an adventure designed to be played in a single sitting, usually with characters the players will never play again. It was The Three Musketeers meets The Purge, a madcap race against time to save someone from death in a city gone mad, the first homebrewed content I had ever run as a Dungeon Master… and it was possibly some of the most fun I’d ever had with D&D. My wonderful players agreed to play another installment, and then another, and then another. Suddenly, before we knew it, this had turned into a full-length campaign. But I had done none of the worldbuilding that usually accompanied a campaign.
So over the next few weeks, as I flesh out yet more hijinks for my players to enjoy in this dark fantasy monstrosity I’ve built out of chewing gum and spit, I’ll be adding new articles and information to the campaign wiki. If you’re at all into just looking at pretty worlds as they turn from ducklings into swans, maybe it’ll be the spectator sport for you, and you can catch all of the constantly happening footb… I mean worldbuilding happening here.
Always turn left,
Ceci