Towards a High-Level Dungeon Crawl with Muta-Metal & Lumina

Heather Hudson

Muta-Metal: This metallic liquid responds to human thought. Concentrate and you can permanently shape it into whatever form you desire. One vial of muta-metal could become a grappling hook, a sword, a set of lockpicks, a roll of iron spikes, or even a wire cable extending up to 50'. It can be poured inside things and then hardened to form a seal (great for locking doors) and it can be magnetised. With several vials of muta-metal, it is possible to create improvised mechanisms, traps, tripwires and so on.

Muta-metal is available in most towns. It is prized by adventurers but shunned by common folk because of its transient nature: after a few days, the hardened muta-metal rusts away to nothing.

Design-wise, I hope this item will encourage creative play and improvisation, with less focus on pre-planning the characters' inventory. This may seem like a minor variation on the theme of 'Quantum Adventuring Gear' as seen in Dungeon World and various other games. However, I've found that Dungeon World's Adventuring Gear mechanic is generally used to handwave things that the play group isn't interested in. "Yeah, of course I have some rope." Muta-metal, on the other hand, presents itself not as a shortcut but as a toy; hopefully, it will encourage improvisation rather than skimming over it.

Pyeongjun Park

Lumina: True dungeons are not just holes in the ground; they are places where a foreign plane intersects with our own. The environment in such 'Dungeon Fields' is inimical to human life. Even when there is light to see by, the air is filled with a miasma that distorts and dims everything. In the face of this miasma, humans quickly sicken and die (or worse). The only thing that counteracts its effects is Lumina -- the eternal blue flame, given to humanity by the gods themselves.

Adventurers descend into the Dungeon Field with jars of Lumina to fuel their lanterns. While the flame lasts, it not only provides light but can also be used to ward off monsters and burn away corruption. but slowly the miasma wears the Lumina down, and snuffs each flame one by one.

Replacing torches with a magical flame makes their role in the game economy more explicit, while thematically moving things up the spectrum from low fantasy to high fantasy. Letting players expend Lumina to drive off monsters will make them more aware of how many they have left. The miasma offers a solution to the problem of "What to do if the PCs actually run out of light?" Instead of blundering around in the dark, the players are faced with a nightmarish gauntlet-run back to the surface, beset by monsters and by progressively worse penalties from miasma sickness.

These two items, along with the Alchemist from my last blog post, have been kicking around in my head as part of some hypothetical high-level anime-flavoured megadungeon. In each case I'm thinking about how to retain the fun elements of a hardscrabble OSR dungeon crawl, but with a different aesthetic.