How would you do a setting where the entire known world is a dungeon, city of ember/gurren lagann style? I want to run a sort of mega dungeon setting where tales of the surface world are barely more than folklore to the inhabitants of the dungeon
>>47782432
Is the story/plot to escape this dungeon, or delve deep enough to escape?
>>47782432
Where do they get food?
>>47783287
The foundation of the ecosystem is chemosynthetic bacteria and other microbes feeding on thermal vents. From there you just travel up the food chain. It's also possible to just have wizards or other magical phenomena create light which enables photosynthesis.
>>47783371
That's pretty contrived desu
>>47783287
You eat the monsters. Like in stone soup.
>>47783287
Magic.
>>47783382
It's how it works in real life. Or do you think tubeworms just live off the salt in the water?
>>47783510
Of course I know about them. A setting where that's the basis for a huge city is still extremely contrived.
>>47783521
Which is more likely:
1: that the base of our ecosystem is thermal vents, which we can observe and which spring forth from the earth, which (as we all know) the god under the mountain tells us contains all good things,
or
2: that all the energy in the world comes from a ball of gas burning billions of miles above us somewhere up in the ether, a ball nobody in the dungeon has ever even SEEN?
Call it contrived if you want, I call it empricism.
>>47783550
It's just another one of these dumb "hurr durr wouldn't it be cool if X instead of Y" settings that doesn't make any sense
>>47783521
OP here, I figured any civilizations would likely be small villages, under 1000 inhabitants, if even close to that. Food would be mostly farms and farm animals, though some races might hunt for food. No sunlight, but you at least have root vegetables. I'm imagining dwarf fortress-type sustained food sources, if you lock the fortress underground.
>>47783626
Root vegetables require sunlight
>>47783626
>>47783673
Just grow mushrooms famulimus
>>47783673
Yours do. Have ones that draw energy from IR radiation or something.
>>47783521
Magic, Anon. If you can accept magic and dragons, you can accept huge mega dungeons.
>>47783550
>empricism
>>47782432
Arx Fatalis?
>>47783510
>tfw don't know who LE is
>Beogh?
>the game is so minimalistic and pared down it's not fun anymore
>muh bloat
>muh removing random shit cuz reasons
>muh keeping joke vaults doe cuz dey add flavurrr
>
>>47783729
Even if you don't think so, a dragons or magic represent a smaller suspension of disbelief than the thermal vent bacteria supporting an entire mega city.
The first two relies on introducing things in addition to what we know about the world.
The third relies on changing the entire world, probably in a way that would make conflict really stupid or at least different, since you've completely changed the normal basis of the economy.
It's the same old argument.
If there's dragons in the setting I should be able to play a loli barbarian with a 1 ton hammer!
No, because the dragon can be explained in ways that doesn't make the entire rest of the world retarded, the loli barbarian with the one ton hammer can't.
>>47784331
>>47783729
Ok, look, how about this: instead of lava, the core of this world is filled with raw, liquid magic. Ancient races built massive harvesting stations that plunged through the crust of the planet to draw magic directly from the core and used it for all their advanced wizardydo, but magic dissipated into the environment so quickly as you got further up through the earth towards the surface that it became advantageous to live as close to the bottom of the harvesters as possible. So, they became population centers, with vast cities growing outward underground from each station, and huge caverns carved out to become parks and farmlands. With magic leaking into water and air, all sorts of wild caves and caverns were filled up with lifeforms that fed on it and each other.
It all got really huge, with more stations and connections between the cities rather than having to skip up over the surface, and small settlements between them, isolated research stations where pockets of naturally-occurring weird stuff happened, et cetera. Eventually, some douchebag hubris disaster happened and the surface was blocked off and all the advanced shit failed. The cores of the cities, the highest-class and industrial areas, were subject to some giant disaster and became filled with monsters and mutants and wild magical effects. Civilization collapsed and the population fell massively but managed to crawl its way back to your typical sword and sorcery level, but still underground, supported by the ecosystem artificially created ages ago.
Does that sound better?
>>47782432
I would set it in a large city's underground transport network, the dungeon's premade and easy to reference, but has more maintenance passages and service rooms than any one person could memorize. Plenty to work with, and maintaining a balance between familiar and unknown that is critical to making settings players can get their heads around and interact with.
>>47783287
Nanomachines, son. Grey goo, left by predecessors, generates magic, light and biomass.
bimpo for inturrest
you could just rip shit from the world's largest dungeon.
even has a bunch of stuff about the ecosystems too.
IIRC there was a D20 setting called DungeonWorld with this premise as a 1 world dungeon. No "outside". No relation to the modern hipster Dungeon World RPG.
>>47783510
>Okawaru
>CG
He's basically fine with anything save betraying one's allies. The game has its own alignment chart anyway, no need to force it into D&D. Good, Neutral, Chaotic, Evil, Chaotic & Evil. No further combinations.
>>47785133
And where do the nanomachines get THEIR power?
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
>>47782432
Already did one.
Magic empire took all their POWs, lower class, criminals, and other unwanted peoples and shoved them into a pocket dimension prison.
This prison was provided minimal power and food by the magic empire above.
All in all it was pretty shitty.
PCs were a task force that was sent down to recover one of the prisoners.
>>47782432
As long as you have playable felids it'll work fine.
>>47784331
>dragons or magic represent a smaller suspension of disbelief than the thermal vent bacteria supporting an entire mega city.
No they just require not being a massive faggot, something you apparently aren't capable of.
>>47783550
2: A giant ball of fire scorching and burning everything it touches, and there is no ceiling that protects you.
Truly a living hell, who would ever want to leave the safe underground realm?
Don't dig too shallow, or !!FUN!! awaits you.
