Erasure - 01. Hidden Lab
With my gaming group's Baldur's Gate 3 game finished, I'm on the hook to finish building the next adventure for our Beyond the Wall campaign. This adventure's vexed me for over a year, and if I didn't want to see this campaign to an end - we're two adventures from a satisfying conclusion - I would have dropped it ages ago. But I want to finish it!
So I spent some time yesterday and built a simple worksheet so I can write each room somewhere away from my computer. Combined with an outline I finished before the holidays I hope to overcome the writing fatigue and paralysis I get when I attempt to work on this adventure at my computer.
The goal is to tackle a room a day. In an attempt to keep myself accountable, I'm going to try and post progress here as well. It's not a dungeon23 - honestly, it's too trad and too complex to be as easy to write as that - but I'll get it done.
So what is the adventure, I ask, dreading trying to succinctly summarize two continuous years of almost weekly play and another year of much less frequent play. Okay...
After chasing a pookah into a frozen, fairy winterland, the teen and tween adventurers that make-up the party have set-out to remove the curse on the Principality of Winterbough. While racing rival groups with different ideas on how to succeed, they acquired the memory-trapping whip Erasure, which they discovered contains fragments of the cursed Princess Juniper's memories as well as the soul of her rival, the Countess Apolline d'Loup. They need to extract the memories trapped in Erasure as part of their bid to restore Juniper to livelihood. In order to do this, they'll need to psychically enter the whip, bargain with the soul of Apolline for access, navigate a fragmented memoryscape ruled by three different Junipers, and dissolve the magic holding the whip together from within.
Room 01 is the memory of the hidden lab they originally found Erasure in. I built the dungeon that room's from using maps taken from 2 Minute Tabletop so thankfully don't have to draw anything new. The less maps I have to make for Roll20 (or any VTT), the happier I'll be. Future rooms I can sketch-out on the grid on my worksheet.
Key features in Room 01 are books on the lab's shelves and Apolline herself. The party loves collecting books and I know will ask to page through them. I can recycle old notes from their first visit to help refresh them on one of the quirks about Erasure, and one of the things at stake - namely, it was built in-part from the trauma of a friend watching her parents' horrific murder, and that undoing Erasure to release Princess Juniper's memories will also release that trauma. I can also sneak a small reward into the books - crafting schematics for one of the party members, Persi, who is a living doll built by Apolline to maintain the lab.
Apolline is the first challenge, a person they have a lot of reason to dislike but have never met. She wants a body - something the party is uniquely skilled at making, weirdly enough - and knows her gating access to the rest of the memoryscape gives her all the leverage. She can be negotiated with to accompany folks through the memoryscape while a body is being made, and honestly I hope that happens - Apolline's been a boogeyman, but has never actually been a realized character in the story. She's emotionally manipulated and abused folks in or connected to the party, but that was in the past. For all intents and purposes, the party considers her the main villain, so I want to put them in a position where they have to travel with her so that villainy can be more than backstory.