Enigmundia: Lords of the Kingdom of the Wheel

Not to scale. Use at your own peril.

Further thoughts on megadungeons, the Kingdom of the Wheel, and a strange intersection with the God in the Machine campaign premise brought me to this:

• The OverKing ruled over the Kingdom of the Wheel
• Portions of the Kingdom of the Wheel were ruled by the KeyLords. The KeyLords were masters of the arcs, tangents, secants and chords. They were also wielders of the Keys -- strange magical wands, rods, and staves resembling oversized tuning forks that hummed with strange eldritch energies

Then came the war with Discord.

• It shattered the Kingdom of the Wheel, sundered hubs from spokes, splintered arcs, shredded important segments of the architecture of the Grand Wheel.
• It fractured the unity of the Council of Sleep. A maddened handful of KeyLords wished to awaken the Keys before their time and were punished and banished from the Hub.
• It scattered and isolated the Congress of KeyLords across the broken remnants of the Grand Wheel.

Ultimately, the Kingdom of the Wheel was broken and the Core of the Wheel, the seat of the OverKing's power was lost.

Those who know of its history struggle to unearth its ancient secrets. Ancient allies and enemies struggle to recover artifacts from this plane-spanning civilization.

But it is rumored that a few surviving KeyLords are quietly gathering the lost Keys. But to what end?

A Menagerie of Megadungeons

I've been trying to get back to the concept of the Kingdom of the Wheel from my older posts -- the idea of well-known megadungeons, with regular parties of adventurers mapping segments of it, sharing it with several rival mapping guilds, contributing to a dungeoneering town or city that has sprung up around the economy of adventurers and their quirks.

To that end, I encountered a new resource -- www.megadungeons.com -- which only started up this year. I also rediscovered a post from Blood of Prokopius about a solo game called How To Host A Dungeon which, sadly, seems to only be available in PDF form to those of us living outside of the Americas.

I've also been eyeing Doomed Slayers by Jurgen Hubert for a neat take on the culture of adventurers -- one that may not necessarily be adopted country-wide, but certainly take effect in the areas near these megadungeons.

I've also been looking at my old purchased megadungeon material... not sure where I'm going with this yet, but there's interest, and I'm hoping that going through this stuff will trigger something.

There are certainly products that have come out in the past about cities with megadungeons beneath them -- Undermountain is one. In fact, in the heyday of the D20 craze, there was a 'dungeonworld' type supplement. In the OSR realm, there was the completed 'Greyhawk' levels and various experiments in megadungeon design and construction. And let's not forget those fabulous web-based geomorphs online.

So what is it? What are you trying to tell me, brain?