Shalom and salutations! Bringing you an update on MYR REGATH, my dungeon23 megadungeon inspired by my love of ruined-cities-as-dungeons and inspired by Jewish mythology. Last month I did an esoteric experiment with the Sefirot, but for the season of scares, I decided the opposite level would be THE JEWISH UNDERWORLD!
Don't Jewish people not believe in Hell? Or an underworld? What's going on?
Sh'eol is a word that appears 66 (ish) times in the Torah. Many secular Jews and scholars put Sh'eol as cognate with "the grave". It comes to what we call contemporary or Rabbinic Judaism from the religion of the Ancient Israelites. There's not extensive fables of characters seeing what's down in Sh'eol, but it comes out of the Near Eastern underworld traditions like The Akkadian Erṣetu and Sumerian Kur. Like the underworld present in The Epic of Gilgamesh, these peoples believed the underworld as both the destination for human spirits, otherworldly spirits and Gods, but also a physically subterranean place.
Fun fact, if you want to write Kur in cuneiform, the pictograph are three triangles arranged like a mountain top. This is the Near Eastern tradition that Sh'eol comes from, placing it somewhere between Ersetu, Kur and something like the Greek Tartarus.
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| Catacomb hallway in Beit She'arim Necropolis |
My megadungeon has been running so long this year, having delved so far down beneath the surface, I thought it time that the confines of the dungeon intersect with the underworld. There's not a ton of descriptions of She'ol specifically, so I heavily lifted inspiration from the neighboring traditions.
The underworld is place of many gates and far corners, so I relied on a dungeon layout that was circuitous, with many locked doors as well as magically locked gates that require exploration to find.
I've had plenty of nonlinear maps before, this is the underworld. You got to explore its far corners if you wanna get out!
Topside
Beginning in the lower left, Level I (the sewer) turns from sewer trough to a wooden pier at a river, with Samael acting as a Boatman. Sail up the
River Abbadon to the first corner: a
Tomb of All Kings, relying on the Gilgamesh Epic's
images of dusty, shelves holding all the crowns of Man with nothing to eat but clay and nothing to drink but mineral libations.
Then to a Garden. First it started just as a means to put in trees with gemstones for fruit, but then I pivoted that this is a kind of platonic/archetypal corpse of the original garden, i.e. The Garden of Eden. With an evil unicorn wandering monster, naturally.
Due to the nature of this being the level of a megadungeon - yet crossing paths with the underworld - this mountain necropolis is surrounded by a sea of black sand and bones.
If PCs hop off their boat and try and walk on land, it's gonna be the mechanical equivalent of lava.
Except all the moisture and soul-energy is rapidly sucked from their bodies. A near-instant death for all but the highest renown PCs, Samael's warning on the boat should be heeded.
Yet walking up the main path up will mean they're harried by The Ziz, a gargantuan griffin-like bird that's as big as the courtyard. Smart heroes that manage to sneak/fight their way inside and steal some of the tomb wrappings of the ancient kings will enable them to make more interesting choices. Wearing the garb of the dead in Sh'eol will let players walk around in the black sand (albeit briefly).
I am hopeful in imagining a scenario where players get the garb, and try and figure out how best to scale up the mountain, having solved the deadly-sand problem but still needing to avoid the Ziz to, say, scale directly into The Garden, for example.
Beneath the Mountain
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| Descending further into Sh'eol presents a mirror of itself, as One's Inner Self is a Mirror to The Beloved |
Then you descend to The Palace Ganzir, a remnant of the prior traditions sitting in dust and cobwebs. The elohim or divine spirits/ghosts of the old gods still remain, entrapped and ensorcelled by the prevalence of The All Merciful. Find the keys in Ganzir and process through Gehennom. The souls of those who transgressed in life remain here, burning away their evil inclinations until they can either pass on into the world beyond or to return to earth to try again.
Putting my drawings together in photoshop present two immediate observations:
- I wish I had made Ganzir Palace way bigger. Not sprawling, but larger. I think my stylistic choice for 5' wide walls hindered me here, when I could've crammed way more stuff in like in Gehennom just to the left.
- Reading about Prophet Samuel's ghost being conjured in The She'ol literature helped me figure out how my overall dungeon uses incorporeal undead
I've been using the term Echo to describe ghosts in Myr Regath. The dungeon is itself an echo of the city that was destroyed long ago by The Sheydim, and the undead - zombie and ghost alike - mime out the remembrances of their lives when outsiders aren't exploring it and fighting them for their loot. This is partially set dressing and also validating the OSR principle of always using reaction tables, even for (most) of the undead. If you encounter a room full of 12 zombies and their reaction is Friendly, they're not so much welcoming you as they're compelled to act out what little they remember of their lives.
When the Eshet Ba'alat (The Witch) of Endor summons The Prophet Saul from Sh'eol for the purpose of necromancy, the specific word used for his appearance is ELOHIM. Elohai is one of the names of God in Judaism and the Ancient Israelite religion, so to refer to The Prophet Saul as "a God" is pretty unique. In this dungeon there are Echoes (ghosts), Greater Echoes, and I think beyond that are Divine Echoes or "Elohim". The afterimage-ghosts of those incredibly important to the city's faith, the mythology and religion of Myr Regath, as well as remnants of prior religious traditions like sticking Ereshkigal and Nergal in a corner of my underworld level. They're Elohim, echoes of the divine.
The Jewish Apocalyptic version of Hell (Gehennom) is interestingly evocative of what we know as The Christian Hell and also starkly different. My favorite detail is that even in Hell you get shabbat off; you burn for your "sins" six days a week, but even you and your tormenters are deserving of a sabbath day of rest.
I'm including that in my random encounter tables; the maximum result of my encounter tables are always something fun and interesting (2 = dragon, 12 = wizard). I think 12 in Gehennom is literally finding all the souls of the damned sitting at a shabbat table breaking bread, enjoying a meal and solidarity before ultimately clocking back in at the torment-in-hellfire-factory.
To Sum Up
Really happy with how my first draft of Sh'eol came together. Whereas my sefirot experiment fell flat at the end, I feel like my Sh'eol has really got some legs. I've been doing a lot of researching and reading, and balancing my love of archaeology/mythology/mysticism with the drive to design some really fantastical maps and locales.
In further drafts, I'm going to try and make Ganzir a lot bigger. Maybe add one more row of rooms between that large hallway, add even more traps and mythical gatekeepers.
I'm also going to try messing around with thinner walls, when necessary. I've had a lot of mileage from modeling my style off of the venerable Dyson Logos - the giant whose shoulders I happily stand on - but I can't forget that I'm allowed to experiment and change things up.
There's a light at the end of the darkened limestone tunnel for Dungeon 23. October is wrapping up, which means there's just 60 days of 1/room a day. I may take some time in November to plan - I've had a lot of thoughts on how to execute the dungeon's final level, The Queen's Ziggurat. It's so far below and beyond imagining that you either have to venture through the underworld or the refractions of God's emanations to reach it, so I feel pressured to do it well...
I am also tempted to add smaller looped dungeons earlier on, to add some more optional areas to earlier parts of the dungeon. This might also be solved by multiplying the entrances to the megadungeon - something I've thought on for a while because it's very common in advice on these sorts of things - but I'm reeeally glad that I've stuck with this project. It's been off and on, but always end up circling back. It takes up a lot of my project-making energy, sure, but on a daily basis it inspires me to work on my other interests and WIPs.
I feel like I've learned some really valuable drawing and layout skills that I can take into further projects, or even trying to fully put Myr Regath together under Waylaid by Errant.
No promises, but one can dream...
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