Fatal One: 2 aka Two Fatal

This dungeon is killing me.

I was visiting my family back in March when I hit upon a great idea for 2 Fatal. I sketched out a few sections of dungeon, wrote down some ideas, and came back from the trip with a lot of enthusiasm and energy to build out the successor to the smash hit: Fatal One.

You see, I wanted to improve upon the dungeon design such that we'd never have a situation where it felt like the run was a total loss if something went poorly early on. If a party member dies, or too many high level spells need to be used so that it would be hopeless to run at the boss, I wanted there to be something of value the party could accomplish.

What if the party could return loot found in the dungeon that the next party could take? What if instead of the dungeon resetting every time, it was a single persistent dungeon that was bigger? What if 2 Fatal is a story from the early days of Arcadia where one side is assaulting the dungeon of another side in some great war and we instead have a set list of semi-premade, semi-customizable characters that get deployed to the dungeon each run where if they die in the dungeon, they're gone from the list of available characters to play, but if they survive and leave the dungeon, perhaps with loot, they can be used again? What if the loot gathered was available to any group who wanted to run, and they could pick what things to take and what things to save for future runs? What if there was a special party made up of the leaders who didn't run the dungeon but planned the next teams to go, what gear they would have, and what their objectives would be: Scouting, battling particularly difficult rooms, gathering loot, finding secrets, etc.

And that's where things started to go wrong.

The very mechanics I want to include to make every run feel useful or meaningful also complicate the whole thing and turn it into a mess. They create a series of cascading problems, which require fixes, which add complexity and create more problems... Eventually we end up with a very complicated, difficult to run, dungeon that has lost the spirit of the first dungeon. We end up with an event

I can't tell you how many maps I've scratched out on paper, or actually laid out in photoshop. I've lost count of the hours I've put into making this dungeon that keeps not working out.

So here we are, months later, having dumped an ungodly amount of time into secret planning (because unlike other campaigns 2 Fatal must be 100% planned offline), and we're more or less back at square 1.

I want to make this game happen, but I need to reassess what it is that made Fatal One so good, and how to play to that spirit.

The only good news is that all the practice in laying out dungeons and coming up with dungeon theory is applicable so once the heart of the game is secured, everything else should come real quickly.