The Gigadungeon and Other Notes on the WotC Interview

-It is unexpurgated--nobody said "Hey, can you talk about D&D 4 please? 'Cause that's what we sell here." The cost-to-benefit ratio calculations here for their marketing people are complex ("D&D being associated with porn fights stereotypes about gamers" MINUS "D&D being associated with porn--and arson, and petty theft---may upset some parents" MINUS "This guy doesn't play anything we currently publish" = They did it anyway) but I can't complain with the end result. I appreciate it.

-Gigadungeon--the whole planet is a dungeon--My original notes were toward an even more complicated project: a dungeon the size of the universe. Actually, more of a dungeon instead of the universe:

Earth's cities grow.

Imagine they do not stop growing. Imagine an urbanized Earth, bulding by building building upon building built on mountaintops, K2, Everest, urbanized, with traffic, the frozen antarctic dense with pannelled bunkers, canyons filled and then so filled and all around filled so full that the canyon is only a vaguely-understood concept about what is underneath what we know--like the planet's mantle, crust and core, underneath the buildings is rock--what is rock? No-one remembers.

The rusting spires with a geology of their own--forgotten conduits leading to forgotten fuse boxes feeding old bulbs the fields of architecture and archaelology mesh. Skyscrapers marching over cliffs like tin soldiers, down into the sea under perspex domes and stainless walls and then growing there, and then up and out of it again. 80% of the vast city-planet has quaint, polluted venetian canals connecting the lowest levels, sixty storeys beneath where most people live. It grew.

The Gigastructure became the only place. An extending great place that took up all of space, almost all of space, all of space except where there were planets, or suns, or class-12 Massive Supraplantary Organisms.

Like this: There is a planet, then cities on it, then the cities grow larger and they do not stop. The whole planet is urbanized. Then the planet's nearest moon is urbanized, then the buildings on the planet and the moon grow taller and mesh upward and more labyrinthine until they connect in a woven spire of exotic steels and nation-sized gravity-mollifying mechanisms, the moon no longer in orbit, merely fixed to its mother by an inhabited corridor.

Then again with each nearby planet, moon, space station, to the Dyson shell of energy-absorbing machines smothering the sun, then all these spaces connected, and then all of the space in between, too, in every direction into a solid block the size and shape of the universe with all astronomical bodies entombed within it and all animals, monsters, cultures, phenomena linked into a monolithic skyless maze-city of panelled chambers, tubes, hallways, transoms, shafts, glass-walled terraces looking out into dark, long vertical gaps between barely-inhabited sideways, opposing cities, each forming the roof of the other, the spires interlocking like sharp teeth, wells, fusion engine-trams, endless escalators lined with concession stands, crawlspaces, staircases, niches, branching zero-gravity capillary tunnels, and with all known archtectures represented somewhere and integrated into the dizzying entirety.

And then it aged and got old and forgotten and dungeonized--so there's no space in space--just a big sci-fi dungeoncrawl in every direction forever.

-The pictures--I am guessing that's the only Medusa picture they had on hand--I suppose they weren't going to use that. (Warning: About as not-safe for work as a drawing can get)(Once in a while I gotta earn that "content warning".) It's interesting to note that their medusa is definitely a "medusa-as-playable-PC-race" type picture.

The flail snail is, as always, appreciated. Simon Tilbrook and Alan Hunter--we owe you so much.

-WotC contacted me independently about doing the interview, but if I had to guess I suspect the "I Hit It With My Axe" producers probably had a hand in tipping WotC off.

-Just got this from what appears to be a Christian gamer:

I've heard about your blog on various places before and had preformed a very negative opinion. I popped on over after seeing the Wizards interview, and frankly, its actually a great D&D blog, better written than most, and a nice variety of topics. I don't think I'll be a regular reader, as most of your views run counter to my own, I definitely think you are a gifted writer, a great DM, and your blogs bad reputation in some circles is total crap...[etc.]

So, that's nice. Though I will note that these "circles" do need to be rooted out and destroyed.

-They not only left the reference to Death Frost Doom in, they linked to it. If I'd known I would've mentioned the late AGP's 100 Street Vendors of the City State. And every other DIY D&D product I could think of.