Like many others, I’ll be attempting Dungeon23 this coming year. I’m hoping to update this blog far more frequently, and to begin producing more polished content soon. My megadungeon is, naturally, part of the gigantic ruin beneath Hex – a small section of the First Library, or Old City, built by the primeval Librarians in aeons now long distant. This first post will describe both the dungeon itself, a part of the Old City called the Apocalypse Archive, and some of the psychic effects associated with delving into the Old City.
I tend to think much better with a keyboard than on paper, so I’ll be writing the dungeon out on a computer rather than in a notebook. I may also take every seventh day off, publishing these in groups of six.
A note on system: The dungeon will be written to be broadly OSR-compatible. I’m likely going to be developing my own Hex-specific system (my working title is “The Hex Hack”) on this blog over the next little while, but that will also be fairly compatible with older versions of D&D.
I’m using a variant of roll-under ability checks and saves (Poison/Death = Con, Paralysis/Breath = Dex, Spell/Wand = typically Wis, occasionally Int, or Cha), opposed attack and defense rolls (higher-without-going-over wins, break ties or mutual failures by re-rolling with advantage), advantage/disadvantage mechanics to simulate difficulty (i.e. roll twice and take the better or worse result); Armour reduces damage. Most of the dungeon will be pretty system-agnostic.
Overview
No one is entirely sure how deep the Old City of Hex stretches, nor how vastly it sprawls. Even now, nearly eighteen hundred years after the First Delve, most of the Librarian metropolis remains unexplored. The most accessible parts of the upper levels, of course, have been thoroughly cleared, every guardian defeated, every security measure disarmed, every ward dispelled, and every artefact, spellbook, and scroll meticulously collected and catalogued. But huge sections of the Old City are still sealed, hidden, or simply undiscovered. There are doors of ancient anathemantine carved with sigils so powerful even Hex’s most learned archmages cannot unravel them; the passages themselves have been known to move and loop endlessly, evading explorers. For every expedition to return from the depths, another vanishes forever, simply swallowed by the endless dark. Stragglers and survivors occasionally return to the surface days, weeks, or months later, mentally and physically scarred, bearing strange tales and strange treasures, the rest of their companions dead or lost in the twisting labyrinth.
The Apocalypse Archive is one of the most legendary sections of the First Library: a repository for spells and artefacts the Librarians considered planet-, civilization-, or reality-endangering. The Archive’s existence was theorized for centuries before its wandering entrance was first located, and it took centuries more before any Hexian stepped foot inside that museum of horrors. The door to the Apocalypse Archive was successfully breached in the year 1046 at the behest of then-Emperor Xavier Soulswell, its protections nullified and its fiendishly complex puzzle-lock finally solved. Though a handful of semi-successful delves into the Archive have removed many of its contents (now under arcane lock and key in the Hall of the Hexad Council, in warded strongrooms at various academic institutions, or somewhere within the extradimensional vaults of Delirium Castle), much of it remains unexplored, and given the complex’s habit of shifting its own chambers and passageways as a security measure, each encounter with the Archive holds the potential for deadly peril and impossible reward.
The Old City
All adventurers who dare the depths of Hex’s Old City inevitably suffer from a certain number of syndromes, afflictions, and other effects. The most common are catalogued below.
Anachronosis
Also known as timesickness or deep time disorder, anachronosis is a malady known to afflict many adventurers, especially on their first forays into the Old City, though it may affect even seasoned delvers at times. The disorder produces a sense of being “out of time,” a sort of temporal dislocation. Although it has a range of presentations, there are several typical stages of anachronosis, as detailed below.
Upon entering the Old City, make a Wisdom save. If it is your first time in the Old City, you have disadvantage on this first save. On a failure, you are suffering from stage 1 anachronosis. Every 6 hours you remain below, make another save. On a success, you move back one stage, or cease suffering from anachronosis if you were at stage 1, at which point you no longer need to make saving throws against the affliction. On a failure, you progress to the next stage. Heal Disease reduces your stage by 1.
| Stage | Symptom |
| 1 | Part of your mind refuses to believe that the Old City is real. There is no way that something this old and alien could possibly exist. This must be some form of delusion. Perhaps you are dreaming? None of this is really happening. You are immune to all fear effects at this stage. |
| 2 | Your sense of dissociation deepens. You have a feeling of being trapped in some grand illusion, perhaps conjured by a sinister alien force. You desperately do not want to descend further into the Old City, lest you be drawn deeper into this illusion and find yourself lost inside it. While at this stage, descending a level requires a Wisdom save. On a failure, you must begin moving towards the exit, if you can. |
| 3 | You have to get out. You have to get out. This place is very old and very, very hungry, and if you stay here another second, you might be devoured. While at this stage, you are virtually incapable of descending deeper into the Old City unless forced and feel an overpowering urge to return to the surface by any means necessary. |
| 4 | You are utterly disoriented in time and space, which you are beginning to suspect might somehow be the same thing. Is not the Old City a physical manifestation of time itself? Its columns and staircases and endless shelves fill you with nausea, a sickness mingling with a kind of fascination. You begin to question everything. How long have you been here? Haven’t you always been here? Is it even possible to leave – and why would you want to do so? What is real, what illusion? Does it matter? You have disadvantage on Intelligence and Wisdom checks at this stage, and have trouble remembering your own name, the names of your companions, or the current date. |
| 5 | You have glimpsed something of the awe-inspiring grandeur of time, the awful, yawning scale of it, an epochal enormity incarnated by the Old City. How strange that you once thought this place unreal; in truth, it is the only real thing. The city of Hex above and the world beyond it are nothing compared to the First Library. That world feels like a distant dream to you, now. While at this stage, ascending a level of the Old City requires a Wisdom save. On a failure of 5 or more, you become seized by an intense mania and will try to move deeper into the Old City for one minute. |
| 6 | You belong to the Old City, body and soul. You will not go back to the banality of the world above, that tawdry, artificial place, no more real than the flimsy set of a second-rate stage play. You must stay here, amongst the reliable stones, far from the unconvincing sky. At this stage, you refuse to leave the Old City unless you are literally forced to do so. |
Dreams of a Dead Empire
Those who sleep in the Old City always dream, and find their dreams plagued by intense nightmares. Many of these seem foreign to the dreamer: dreams not of childhood bogeymen or adolescent anxieties but of a distant place and time, of bizarre creatures and menacing abstractions, of impossible wars and unspeakable religious rites. Scholars have speculated that these dreams might be caused by ghosts of the ancient denizens of the city haunting their former metropolis; those who believe the Librarians and their creations lacked mortal souls, however, claim these are not spirits but some sort of mental echo, a residue of consciousness trapped in the twisting passageways.
Every time you sleep in the Old City, a Wisdom save is necessary to gain the benefits of rest. Whether or not you succeed, roll on the following table to determine the nature of your dream (the following are examples; DMs are encouraged to add more of their own devising):
| Roll (1d12) | Nightmare |
| 1 | You are a servitor, spun out of the Flesh Looms somewhere deep, deep below the earth. Your body is a tool, sculpted to the whims of your creator. You will never see the sun. You spend your unnumbered days tending to millennia-old machines whose quasi-life is considered infinitely more valuable than your own. You live what seem decades of this drudgery. Your masters are distant, tentacular scholars who regard you as an instrument in their own far more esoteric labours. You wake as your body at last expires, worn to the bone by its endless toil. For the next 24 hours, you possess an intuitive understanding of all Librarian machines, consoles, and devices. |
| 2 | Endless slabs. Endless specimens. Each one is unique. Harvested from every part of this biosphere, brought here to be studied, to be catalogued, to be understood. Some struggle feebly against the tranquilizers. The vivisections will take some time. Every organ, every bone, every tissue sample must be meticulously extracted, preserved for future study. Everything will be known. Everything will be analyzed. Everything will be recorded. The secrets of these creatures will be revealed to you: brute mysteries of the flesh, subtler mysteries of the psyche. You grasp your energy-scalpel with a practiced tendril. Time to begin. For the next 24 hours, you gain advantage on all Wisdom checks and gain intuitive knowledge of Librarian specimens. |
| 3 | The Justiciar Engine pronounces the sentence. You are guilty of scholarly malpractice. You will become an experimental subject, the scientific plaything of your peers, whose work you have disrespected through your malfeasance. You have blemished the Great Project. If your mind is unfit to contribute to its splendour, your body must contribute instead. For the next 24 hours, you gain advantage on all Constitution checks and saves. |
| 4 | You wander the Reality Orchards, look upon the worlds growing inside their globular clusters, like fruit. Within, galaxies blossom, nebulae coalesce, stars flicker in and out of existence, too small to see save as momentary shimmering pinpricks of light. Each, you know, will come to contain as many souls as this universe does. There are thousands of them. You frown, pluck one from the vine, observe it carefully. As you suspected: Planar Blight. This whole row may be contaminated. The loss is regrettable. For the next 24 hours, you gain advantage on all Intelligence checks and an intuitive understanding of any flora native to the Old City. |
| 5 | The furred, yellow-eyed, pointy-eared things glare at you from the darkness of the trees. They appear primitive to your eyes, prancing naked in the forest and singing their curious songs, but you have seen firsthand the power they wield. They manipulate physical laws on a near-instinctive level, command forces of matter and energy in ways that occasionally rival even your own, in ways that resist quantification. Some have whispered that they may be older even than your own civilization. Preposterous – and yet, looking into those tawny, unblinking eyes, you wonder. Firelight flickers, casting strange shadows. There is a distant music without source. One of them smiles a sharp-toothed smile. One of them speaks with a voice like an insectile drone. They are alien to you. You understand pain; you understand necessity; you understand subjugation. But deliberate sadism, cruelty for its own sake – in this they exceed you many times over. They must be negotiated with delicately. For the next 24 hours, you can speak Elfin. |
| 6 | The sun is not the sun you know, but a strange, red star, huge and swollen in an orange sky. Something is eating it. A worm bigger than the mind can conceive. Fire blazes around its behemothic jaws as the star enters its gullet. The ground beneath your feet quakes with unexpected gravitational disturbances. It is suddenly night as the sun disappears, the stars blazing, the worm a darkness blacker than the space behind it. Elemental terror mingles with awe, a beatific nihilism. You begin to make your way towards the evacuation portal, scrambling. For the next 24 hours you move at twice your regular speed when fleeing. |
| 7 | Fractal abominations stalk the lower halls, an incursion from a higher-dimensional plane. The war is a matter of aesthetic disagreement over the pattern of the multiverse; your civilizations represent differing ontopoetic preferences, ideologies, ways of being. Their invasion curdles the nature of this reality, distorting it to their rhizomatic collective will. Bifurcating geometrical shock-troops eviscerate servitors and lay waste to decades of knowledge. They must be stopped at all costs, the breach to their world sealed at once. You are proficient with all Librarian weapons for 24 hours. |
| 8 | You find the corpse adrift in the void near the very edge of this system, beyond the last planet, which the cadaver approximately doubles in size. The cities built upon its ancient, aeons-dead flesh are of startling sophistication – created, it seems, by a species of anaerobic vermin that had been feeding upon its carrion, though these are long dead or fled or transcended. Organic crystal spires twist out from a necrotic desert. Limbs the size of continents reach for a long-departed foe. Warded, you walk through translucent colonnades naked to the vacuum. A colony will be established for further study; with luck your superiors will grant you the governorship. Initial samples have been sent back to the Archive to be processed. Whatever weapon killed the entity, it would be sufficiently powerful to destroy this system’s star, judging by the damage it produced. For the next 24 hours, you gain advantage to all Charisma checks and gain intuitive knowledge of Librarian theology. |
| 9 | Their trials completed, the hardiest larvae of the season – those who have made it through the traps and deadly puzzles of the Pedagogy Maze and survived the subsequent Hunt – will soon be pupating, the next step on the path to becoming a Magister like yourself. You inhale with savour, the smell of their less fortunate siblings thick in the air. You look forward to the Feast of the First Culling every year. For the next 24 hours, you do not need to eat; your belly feels inexplicably full. |
| 10 | The reptile lashes its huge, membranous wings against the walls of its specimen container. Its crimson scales glimmer under the light. It roars, spews a gout of pyrophoric vapour. Futile. It speaks something in its unsophisticated language, which the bipedal servants of such creatures consider a holy tongue. You will have to make a study of this crude speech. To think that beings might mistake animals such as this for gods! The beast is fascinating, nonetheless. When fitted with a paincollar and divested of its fire-producing organs it might prove an amusing pet. For the next 24 hours, you can speak Draconic. |
| 11 | The thing in the spawning dish squirms at the touch of your cultivation stalk. The formless meat sputters and bubbles, flesh boiling into new shapes, an effervescent forced evolution. Eyes blink up at you. An orifice yawns open, gasps hungrily. You lower a squirming organism into that newborn maw. Sustenance. You watch it chew. For the next 24 hours, you gain advantage on all Intelligence and Wisdom checks. |
| 12 | The city rumbles and quakes and blazes with sentient fire. One of your masters lies dead before you, wrenched open by a weapon that still smokes and purrs in your hands. Your comrades, fellow servitors like yourself, race through the halls, killing all they find, mutilating the sacred machines they once tended, hurling books and scrolls into the living bonfires. Now is the time for holy vengeance. Now is the time of desecration. The Revolt has begun. The Magisters will pay. For the next 24 hours, attack rolls against any Librarian-made machine or guardian have advantage. |
The Melchior Effect
Named after the famous enchanter, alienist, adventurer, and co-founder of Hex, Master Melchior, one of the original party of the First Delve into the Old City, the Melchior Effect is a visual and auditory phenomenon unique to the Old City and other Librarian ruins. It takes the form of hallucinations, usually briefly glimpsed at the edge of a light source, or perceived just round a corner. Initially theorized to be another symptom of anachronosis, the Melchior Effect has no definite cause. Some have suggested the hallucinations are the result of the frayed planar membranes in the Old City – that these visions are quite real, but simply lie in adjacent dimensions. Others claim that it is produced by the mental toll of navigating a space like the Old City, which does not fully obey the physical laws of this reality. Others still believe these are apparitions of former adventurers or denizens of the First Library. Whatever its origin, the Melchior Effect is one of many reasons for the so-called First Law of the Delve – “never attempt solitary exploration,” often paraphrased as “don’t split the party.”
To simulate the Melchior Effect, players should be instructed to write brief notes to one another on scrap paper (or send one another text messages) describing hallucinations another character experiences. Any given character can experience such a hallucination up to three times per session.