Dungeon Purgatory

I used to frequently dream of wandering alone through a strange place; usually an old building or a forest.  And I was always vaguely looking for something. These dreams always had a very melancholy vibe.

I don’t have this dream so much these days. Unless I’ve been playing Dark Souls.  Fans know exactly why this is the dream Dark Souls gives you. 
Typically in videogames, when your character dies, you reset to your last save point, and it will be  as if you never died. In Dark Souls, this mechanic is worked into the story: You are cursed with Undeath. Death is painful, but never liberating. Your character is essentially trapped in a very sad and mysterious realm. (follow this link and listen while reading this post) The only way out is to pursue its mysteries and fight a lot of cool bosses. Ultimately, you are confronted with a choice between sacrificing yourself to re-starting the Age of Fire,  or you may allow the world to finally slip into a new Age of Darkness. Neither option is inherently “correct.” But I tend to think of the latter as more progressive.

You can hear people in the OSR talk about dungeons as a sort of Hell or a Mythic Underworld. But I don’t think anyone has talked much about Dungeons as Purgatory. My group seems to have discovered Dungeon Purgatory, and Undeath is the key to it.

Path to Purgatory
The Original Idea was to create a mega-dungeon which was supposed to be the ultimate Haunted Castle setting. My main inspiration for this was probably the Castlevania games, where the eponymous castle is described as a creature of Chaos; a sort of entity and dimension unto itself. I thought up about thirty distinct areas which might be part of this Castle. But since I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life designing this single campaign, I decided to delegate.

Creative Meeting. Note list of famous vampires in upper left.

I called a creative meeting with my group, where we plotted the areas in relation to eachother and we each became responsible for running 4 of the 28 levels. We have been running this campaign for months now and are on the 8th area. It has created a distinct style of play with certain pros and cons. It has created a great opportunity for people to run game for the first time without a lot of pressure.
 
It has also resulted in a sort of Creative Socialism, where no-one has total ownership of the project, and therefore, no one is willing to take complete control of certain broader aspects of the setting, like the nature of the Castle itself or any over-arching plotline. Crazy things keep happening because of spell failures, everyone is pretty much using any crazy prestige class or build they want. The party is wandering up the levels of the castle for no better reason than that we have no better idea of what to do. Our Ascent resembles nothing so closely as some vaguely allegorical spiritual pilgrimage (because it doesn't resemble much of anything else). And boy, our characters are in sore need of some spiritual improvement! Our general rottenness could perhaps explain why we were all spontaneously teleported to this plane.

Parenthetically, unless there is some good reason for it, starting a campaign with spontaneous teleportation is a good way to annoy the players who made a backstory and intended to interact with the campaign world in a certain way. In this wacky-ass mega-dungeon, it wasn’t too bad though. I’m fairly certain that my characters backstory involves a coma or an acid trip and the campaign is her experiencing a very vivid hallucination.

But the vague, possible allegory is not quite what makes it Dungeon  Purgatory.
At some point in the initial planning, we decided that we didn’t want character death to be a big deal. When a PC dies, they go to a nether-world where they have to participate in three trivial challenges. Failure of a challenge means the loss of a valuable  item or piece of equipment. So death stings, but isn’t so bad. I particularly appreciated how multiple character deaths lead to a sort of   “Oh my God, They killed Kenny!” levity. The only problem is that, if death has no meaning to your character, where does the element of risk come in? How do you know when your character has finally Lost?

Because we are all playing rotten people for some reason, we have had multiple PvP incidents. Two of my 3 deaths so far have been caused by other PCs.
It’s like; Geez, try to hunt one of those white horses with one horn and you are marked for life!  Anyways, PvP action has typically been isolated incidents, grumbled over and (possibly) forgiven and forgotten in the face of the perilous randomness of the whole setting.
 
But in this most recent case, my character was not the only slayee, but was the victim of a triple party member kill!  It’s not as impressive as it sounds (blah blah, war story, blah blah)
Our characters will all be coming back from the dead,  no big deal. In character though, we must now be fearful, hateful  and mistrustful of the triple-killer. Obviously, killing her will be no sort of effective revenge.  As a result, I believe we have found the true character death in Dungeon Purgatory.
In Dungeon Purgatory, a character is done for when their actions have caused them to be so hated and shunned that no-one will cooperate with them any longer. The shunned one will probably have to travel alone, and find themselves unable to progress without aid. The character becomes unplayable.
The character is done for when they can no longer progress. They are stuck and Dungeon Purgatory becomes Dungeon Hell. All hope abandon, ye pitiful bastard.

This is a game, and we will quickly have our fill of this very sad character end. There will be a new character rolled up; a nice one. And the slate will be clean, and a good thing too.

What is the point of this? Only that I am amused that this stupid, ridiculous campaign has turned up some terribly poignant subtext.
I also suspect that it is the sort of subtext you only pick up on if you think really deeply about games. Like if you are the sort of person with a gaming blog.