The Journey Begins
The Astral City devlog #1
It is another grey dawn aboard the Lapwing. The snap of the airship’s rigging and the creaking of the gasbag above are the only sounds to disturb the oppressive silence. Pulling your collar tight against the chill air, you make your way to the bow. Two days out of Aberstock and still nothing to see in these damned clouds. You begin to doubt the tales told by mead-heads and hayseeds in every drinking hole on the long road from Benelux. A city amongst the clouds, with lofty spires of silver and gold. The gods have returned, to dispense wrathful judgment or to make the wheat grow tall, depending on who you ask. You spit over the iron rails and watch it disappear into the grey void below. The gods had never deigned to grace this land before, why should they start now.
The clanging of the ship’s bell jolts you out of your reveries. The deck is suddenly heaving with activity, and you have to force your way through a mass of gawking crewmen, craning their necks as their lieutenants bark orders. The Lapwing lurches to starboard just as she breaks free of the enveloping wall of clouds, and your doubts are forgotten. It is unlike any city you have ever seen, a tangled mountain of citadels and turrets, each higher than the last. Bastions of blackened glass and soaring walls of sandstone that would repel any army that walks the earth. It is a glittering metropolis where none should exist, a city suspended amongst the clouds.
Welcome to Ur-Thuun, the Astral City. This is a science-fantasy floating city megadungeon project I have been slowly working on over the past year. It’s still far from finished, but I have been enjoying the creative process and as long as that is the case, I will keep working on it. First off, huge thanks to everyone who has checked out my first two adventure modules, it’s been so rewarding to put my creative work out into the world and have it be positively received. Fragments of the Floating City and Manic at the Monastery are designed to work independently but also to expand the setting and develop the hooks that will eventually draw players to the floating city.
I am going to be posting more regular updates here, with sketches and drafts of dungeon levels as I complete them, and sharing my thoughts on the design process. If you want to support the journey, I would greatly appreciate it.
For now I thought I would share some of the Appendix N for this project; a grab bag of influences that are percolating in my process right now.
Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, obviously. This one had a huge impact on me as a kid. Nothing could be cooler than to be an airship pirate exploring a mythical city in the clouds. Throw in the magnetic city Laputa from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels here as well.
H.G. Wells The Time Traveler. The denizens of Ur-Thuun have undergone some strange evolutionary trajectories on its 1000 year sojourn through the spheres...
Dark Souls 1. Still the king in terms of interlocking level design and environmental storytelling.
Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun. The aesthetics of ruin taken to the extreme. Particularly been trying to draw on the overlapping layers of history, ancient technology, and alien cultures.
The art of Tomm Kidd. I mean look at it.
The next devlog will go over some of my dungeon design philosophies and share a few of the random encounter tables for the first few levels of Ur-Thuun. Stay tuned!
Exciting!