It bears repeating.
I'm working on a Pb STARTER BOX (more on that as GLAUGUST rolls around), and one of the things I wrote up was a strange theatrical horror dungeon. As a piece of work, I think it's strong- I could run a deliciously creepy game with it- but something nags at me about it, and the language of In Favor of Repetition helps me pin down why I feel like it's out of place in what's supposed to be a quintessential Pb adventure.
In the Motescape, there are two types of dungeon: tombs and shrines.
Tombs are ruins, overripe with dead worlds. Hulking, rusted war machines that predate man's discovery of fire, sunken castles with alabaster towers, ruined alchemical laboratories reclaimed by malignant molds. What was here is gone, and what is here is dying too.
Shrines are touched by God. Riverbend altars to local spirits, bloodstained altars in fungal groves, byzantine chemical cathedrals. Sites of worship where the stories of the saints crackle with holy life.
The best Pb dungeons are sites that work through the problems of faith and death. How do we shirk their duties, embrace them? How are they swallowed by empire? What is it to live, to live, in the ruins of generations who never found the answers they, too, sought?
Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.
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