I found KC to be a very aesthetically pleasing town, but difficult to drive in unless you at on with the dao of the roadways: Streets that don't go through, intersections which aren't at right angles, lanes which jog to one side immediately after the crest of a hill, intersections with 5 or 6 spokes. One very slow roundabout. The overall effect was visually appealing, with harmonious concessions to the geography, but more challenging to navigate than a plain grid-style layout.
We visited the Nelson-Atkins museum , where I took the opportunity to study those magnificent suits of armor.
But another exhibit which got my attention was a series of prints from a folio by Giambattista Piranesi. The series was entitled Le Carceri -the Prison. Or for our purposes, we might call it The Dungeon.
On display were a series of monochromatic depictions of architectural forms which were fantastic vast, yet also oppressive and twisted. I snatched my girlfriend's smartphone and began taking pictures. Turns out that the series can be found on the internet with no difficulty.
Piranesi came from a family or architects, and had a firm background in the subject matter. In Le Carceri, he does to buildings what H.R. Geiger did to biological and mechanical forms.
Viewing these, the phrase "architectural violence" sprang to mind. A lot of the structures don't make sense, or (imagining them as real) they don't appear to be made for the inhabitants to conveniently utilize the space. Rather, even a party of fantasy adventurers would be rather hard-put to traverse such deadly tall and irregular spaces.
And the violence works both ways. The immensity of the spaces, and the appearance of what seems to be a population in the Prison gives a sense of vast age. One gets the sense that there is a terrible narrative tied to the space. It just screams Dungeon Purgatory to me. Over the period of imprisonment, it appears the inmates have not respected the grandeur of their prison. The makeshift bridges, tacked-on beams and oozy chains tell that the inhabitants have imposed some of their own desires and purposes on the Prison. In other words; "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me."
This gradual derangement even shows in the creative process:
Le Carceri- now with another millennium's accumulation of death-spikes and bridges to nowhere:
Does anybody else get the sense of the tremendous weight of the levels above bearing down on this otherwise relatively comfortable-seeming area?
These actually remind me a lot of the work of Edward Gordon Craig, a 20th C. thespian and set designer. Though his designs were more stark and modernistic, they also convey a sense of the dungeonesque:
Then we went to IKEA.
Consumerism kind of kills my soul, especially after visiting an art museum. It was the girlfriend's birthday. I really had no choice in the matter.
If you have never been to an IKEA, it bears some explaining; An IKEA is a housewares and furniture store on a massive scale. The principle of the assembly line has been applied to every possible aspect of an IKEAs operation; even down to how customers are shuffled through the store-complex.
IKEAs are huge complexes. They have to be in order for the assembly line principles to be efficient. The average American State can only support one IKEA. IKEA stores feature eateries at two places in the complex; one before entering the shopping labyrinth and one after checkout. There is also a daycare. That is how long they expect you to be at the IKEA.
You can't make this shit up. Not even if you are a dungeon master.
IKEA is technically a labyrinth and not a maze. A maze is a puzzle; it has branching paths and dead ends and is meant to be a puzzle. Properly speaking, a labyrinth is a single path, with an emphasis on the completion of a journey. Labyrinths are often used as a meditative aid with a spiritual focus. The IKEA labyrinth leads the masses of shoppers through every department, one after another. There is no grabbing what you need and leaving. There is only a slow march, shoulder to shoulder with the other mouthbreathers through the whole damn haunted house. To create a labyrinth for the purpose of meditating on material consumption is diabolically clever and possibly obscene.
The parking lot and garage however, were the maze-part.
The Chartres Labyrinth
While winding through the IKEA, I could not shake the notion that it was some a creation of dystopian fiction. I kept imagining some sort of space-ark where the inmate population shops in the IKEA-station by day to keep them pacified, repairs and restocks the supply to expend their energy, and then files back into the showroom to sleep at night. They do this for millennia, whilst aimlessly drifting through the vacuum of space.
And Dungeon Design
It has been pointed out that a dungeon can serve as a device for organizing encounters. It is a flowchart for organizing ideas where the player-character are constrained to the flowchart by physical barriers. This observation is obvious enough- it is even mentioned in the 3E DMG. But it is only really true if you think of a dungeon as a tool for railroading players.
Railroading is generally considered to be one of the cardinal sin of rpgs. Railroading occurs when the Game Master perceives the game as a story; with a beginning, and end and plot points in between. One scene logically leads to another. Breaking this chain of ordained events will break the story. And the dungeon master has a mess at this point. Either the story will break down or the DM will have to force the action back into its intended course.
Electronic RPGs railroad players as a matter of course. A computer program cannot react organically to new situations, so this is the way to do it. My favorite example of this is in Ocarina of Time. There is a chain of very specific actions the player must take Link through involving a windmill. This process is not necessarily intuitive, and a player could easily get stuck here.
Anyways, because most of us (nowadays) get exposed to Zelda and Final Fantasy long before we get to play real RPGs, a lot of us start off with the notion that this is the way to design a game.
A lot of DMs resort to railroading out of the best intentions. They feel the need to include a "story" in their game. They do not realize that the way to involve "plot" into a game is not to create a story and constrain players to it, but rather, to include elements of story-elements which behave organically in and of themselves, then allow the players to meddle with, provoke and exploit these elements until something interesting happens.
The IKEA is a railroad expressed both in architecture and in principle. Regardless of how imaginative it may be, it is manipulative and one-sided.
Le Carceri offers its inmates more freedom. Its atmosphere conveys oppression. But that sense of oppression is ultimately only notional. The very notion of a prison implies the challenge to escape. Escape is the condition for victory. To escape is a challenge which players are free to meet with their own devices and solutions.
So yeah, I'll take Le Carceri over the IKEA.
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