Identity, Mythology, and the Megadungeon
Here's another #dungeon23 update for y'all, courtesy of some real "how the sausage is made" historiography on my part. This is for my megadungeon called MYR REGATH, the City of Sortilege.
This update honestly has more to do with me as a person and a creative, even more so than the dungeon itself. It has to do with the evolution of doing a project like this over such a long time, going back to my roots, and finally having a mythological framework to tie all these disparate levels together more so than simply "because I like all this crap".
Myr Regath began, as an idea I had in 2019, to do a megadungeon of a Tiefling city. Inspired by the 4E supplement Vor Rukoth (which was a sandbox of plot hooks, treasure and locales of a ruined Tiefling city) I thought it would be cool to have a civilizational center of D&D's most iconic ancestry. Infamously my friend cautioned me that our play group "would love it, as long as all the roleplaying, exploration and politics that we enjoy was present in this dungeon too". Of course, I thought, I could fold all that in. I distinctly remember sitting down to begin making it room by room, mulling it over for an evening, and deciding that I was not talented enough to do that quite yet.
So I scrapped that, delayed D&D for 2 more weeks until I had different ideas, and that game went on to run the next three years, being some of the best D&D I ever got to run and creating a play group that's survived the pandemic.
So all these years later, I was excited to revisit my idea of a Tiefling city. Here are all these parts of a city that I think would be fun to explore, their wall street, their ancient zoo, their spell library and gladiatorial arena...make them levels, room by room. I included demons and devils, as well as a whole cathedral dedicated to Asmodeus. They're Tieflings, clearly they'd have that lying around!
My interests wandered even as I still made rooms, and while filling out a Fungal Forest level, I decided to lean into fae and faeries. There are mad, subterranean fae that flit about the bowels of Myr Regath's parks. Earlier this year I'd been reading a lot about djinn and found a fascinating amount of overlap between djinn and faeries - they hate iron, they have specific rules they follow (and can harm you should a puny mortal break said rules) even as they present drastically differently.
This led me down a rabbit hole - one I'm still falling down - of finding a third sphere of overlap, in the mythological entity known as Sheydim. Sheydim are (again, generally) like faeries and djinn in that they don't like iron, they can become unseen, and they can be bound to certain talismans. Like djinn as well, they have free will and can choose between Good and Evil and between various human faiths. Sheydim come from Jewish mythology, and reading about them I had a eureka moment.
Were Sheydim the missing piece to my art, as well as a dark corner of my own mind?
[Content Warning: religious trauma]
I am not practicing, but I had a Jewish upbringing. I phrase it that way because, for most of my life, I've resented that part of my life. I had a lot of resentment and angst about the scholarly pressure put onto me to perform as a Jewish youth. I didn't have the language for it, but now - knowing that I am likely on the Autism Spectrum, and only this year have been medicated for ADHD symptoms - I was resentful of the expectation to have to learn a whole other language and alphabet when I could barely keep up in my standard STEM school environment.
I hated that part of my upbringing and myself that I a) dragged my feet, delaying my Bar Mitzvah for almost 2 years and b) immediately closed it off once I felt like I had some autonomy in making decisions about my life. What I would consume, how I would think, how I would learn, categorically was not Jewish.
Of course that's not entirely true, and I knew that then. I was a product of my environment. I loved my parents, and liked them even more after I started college and got to see how shitty my hand of cards could have been, that my parents were humans with flaws and talents like anyone else. Like myself. When the synagogue where I'd had my Bar Mitzvah was shot up by a Nazi with an AR-15, I was in denial of just how deep of a depression I proceeded to enter.
How could something that I'd tried to cut out of myself hurt me so bad? I was holding the knife in one hand and my heart in another, how could I still be affected by such heartache? Of the few regrets in my life, not going to the vigil afterwards is probably in my top 5 or 10, even as I knew I really wanted to.
That started me down a path of Anti-Fascism, in my fevered attempt to understand how we got here, where we're going, and how to make sense of this world. Coming back around to being kind to myself, before I can be kind to others.
Through reading mythology, spending this year making this fictional space, trying to create connective tissue for all my interests (devils AND faeries AND terrors beyond time, etc, etc), I've come back around to Judaism.
Or at least, Jewish mythology. I had a moment of trepidation reading through The Tree of Souls, like I was opening a can of worms, that after all these years I'd be right back where I'd tried to claw away from. I was more nervous of the possibility that - after all these years, it would be my hyperfixation on TTRPGs that would bring me back to G-d, how fucking stupid that would be as a story - but that was unfounded.
Religion and faith are (I think) meant to be cobbled together. You pick and choose what you're supposed to find central, but after reading a lot of these myths, my anxieties were assuaged. I feel closer to this cultural background, but my beliefs (worldview?) have not been radically altered. I am still myself, still feel good about where I am, even as I am changing into one that enjoys exploring the mythological bones of the realm my parents fought so hard to make available to me.
Life is change, and even as I regret one thing or another, I've never regretted learning more. I've always enjoyed religion, mythology and ancient history, and maybe have been circling a long path backwards towards my own beginning. I feel undeserving or like an outsider to this place, but I've already learned the most important lesson of The Torah:
"That which is evil to you, do not do to your neighbor. All the rest, that's commentary."
To be more specific, ideas like these have been rattling around in my brain. This is the album description for the musician Yotzeret Sheydim, a Jewish experimental music maker:
These words - like the weird little guys - have been haunting me as I've made these creative leaps in my writing. Sometimes I feel like my enjoyment and focus on dungeon23 has possessed me. That "passionate ardour" that consumes so many artists, it weighs on me in ways good and bad. I feel accomplished, and also like other projects (making my own TTRPG, trying to start an art cooperative, etc) have fallen to the wayside.
Possession is one term for it. Another would be that I've been making demons of mine own:
So what's this all mean for my project?
Myr Regath has become the ruins of Jewish (inspired) civilization.
I was struggling to come up with scaffolding to explain/support why this fantasy civilization had been influenced by Hell, consorted with faeries, and were destroyed such that great divination (i.e. sortilege) was required to avoid total annihilation. I was playing with ideas of this place having been "colonized" by Hell - damaged by the wheel of violence, then turning it upon others even after the overlords were overthrown - but that was too much baggage.
Reading some of the original myths on Asmodeus - Ashmodai, Ashmandai or Asmodai - rooted him in the lifetime of King Soloman. Not just that, but beyond being a devil he's also a Torah scholar, who convinces Soloman to let him out, resulting in him stealing his identity and ruling in the king's stead for 99 years. Myr Regath was not so much to be colonized subjects, but led into idolatry by a Satan wearing the skin of its most famous king.
This is all to:
- Marry my high-concept interests
- Make use of all the dungeon content I've spent this year plotting out
- Reject the IP and aesthetic of The Seattle Company's D&D
- Create something more vital / earnest / from-the-heart
This also means cutting out Tieflings entirely. I originally envisioned this whole project as an ode to the most iconic ancestry from D&D - now leaving them behind in the dust. Not just for reasons of IP - even as I settle in my own skin with a Judaic background, it would be irresponsible beyond belief to make a corrupted race of horned people into Jews. For reasons I hope I don't have to explain! :^D
Thus my mind has dwelled a lot more on the relationship (or interrelationship) between devils, faeries and sheydim. Obedience of rules, existing beyond the realm of sight, being able to be bound to physical objects through great effort. In the context of Myr Regath, I'm playing with the idea of devils and faeries both being different "tribes" of sheydim. What outsiders and those not-in-the-know would describe as separate enemies are closer in nature than anyone could imagine.
This lets me have the best of all worlds, while having a metanarrative explanation for why all these enemies are here.
Devils and faeries both had a hand in the destruction of this Jewish-like civilization, the sheydim existing as an anti-spark of the society that has been relegated to dark, trap-laden corridors.
I've been on this process for a little over a month now, finally having the spoons to try and put this out of the unseen realm and onto your screen. Since I've had the inklings, I dedicated September's megadungeon level as a kind of point-crawl - a series of rooms based on the Sefirot of Kabbalah, connected together with teleporters rather than tangible hallways. For October, I'm working on one level that dips its toes into Sheol.
Next d23 update will go into greater detail on that level - and its ups and downs - as well as further ruminations on how to introduce a universalist family of spirits that devils, faeries and sheydim all exist in. Here's a teaser of my attempt at a physical refraction of The Infinite, now in dungeon form:
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