Dungeons and the rarity of NPCs and Divine Intervention

The word Dungeon is used as an umbrella term for any of the many catacombs, above or below ground, in DejinVesmir, it is sometimes even used for castle ruins or cave complexes.

Rarely, is it really an oubliette as its sole purpose.

There are many thoughts as to why these exist and perhaps more puzzling why the remain so unpilfered.

Of course part of it is the obvious: its fun for the player characters. But, in trying to make it internally consistent, lets discuss some things about the world.

There are 20 million beings on Nakana. Most live in The Cities. As in real life most people just want to live out their daily lives. The number that want to “adventure” is about 0.05 percent. Adventure beyond the mundane adventure so to speak. So, on the whole planet you have about 10,000 true adventurers.

You run into those because you are one of them. The hangouts are known.

You ignore normal politics that would keep many busy (friction between the cities, nobles warring, etc.). Realistically, if you wanted to, you could have adventures IN The Cities too.

While things like “magic items” seem trivial to you a single one is out of the commoner’s price range.

By definition all player character are “special.”

So, you may ask, when I pass on information to the priesthood—for example—why don’t they simply go to the Dungeon and empty it out, or retrieve what I mention. They seem to value the information. They have high level priests ready to crush me, why not go forth and loot?

Magic.

Literally. The Cities are located on a magic center. Things work well in The Cities. It’s stable. It is a bubble against the world of Chaos that is Nakana. It is assumed that all player characters have a better ability than most to navigate in the world. Magic, or psychic, works better for them than the commoner. They are still one of ten thousand or so, but the rest of the populace has “better things to do.” This is true even of a warrior.

Also, while it is not often discussed, most of the interesting “dungeons” are warded, in the sense that literally, the information about them fades and degrades easily. It is the player characters presence that makes some things work or exist. It is allowed that the player character carries forward knowledge, but realistically it is constantly disappearing.

While there might be 5 or 6 major dungeons “known” to player characters there are four million years worth of buildings and artifacts. The major dungeons are known to YOU the player character, but those dungeons are a tiny fraction of possible dungeons (thus random discoveries). Thus, every time you say “the elven dungeon” to even a high level NPC it could be a surprise to them where it is, what’s in it, and they would only want to go if a player character is going. It is all sort of implicit, but it is why the player characters are the nexus of major events and the story of DejinVesmir. Even a weak character is at worst one of 10,000 in the world.

Indeed, statistically it makes no sense for a god to EVER give divine to a player character. You are part of a group that is 0.05 percent of the population.  Most of the gods gain power from worshipers. If they simply ignored every adventurer their power would be unaffected. There is an implicit understanding that they know player characters are “special” the question is how special and can you cut through the noise. While for a whole planet 20 million is not that many, it still means that for the non-great gods that say 800,000 are vying for attention during the year. Lets pretend that gods only “work” 2000 hours a year. That’s 120,000 seconds. That means they have to deal with 8 people per second vying for attention. A lot of noise! But, of course the god is realistically only going to bother with a few per day. So your odds are not the 40 in 800,000 per week, but much higher. They answer a player character because they know it has a higher payoff…they sense you are special.  You’re still probably 1 in ten thousand though.

The point is that a campaign is like a story, at least a popular fiction one. It would be boring to read a story about a cobbler who lived and died making shoes—period. By definition a player character is an interesting character in a story. The character may still die off, but it will be part of the story.

Dungeons, their contents and the stories surrounding the contents are waiting for the next of the interesting characters. Sure, one of the 10,000 NPCs that are adventurers could go off and take all the treasure, but really the story is waiting for the NPC to turn in a player character for the story to progress.

Some action continues behind the scenes, for the milieu to progress, or to interact with the player characters in the future.  So yes, if a player character set the stage for something to happen to a dungeon, or a room, it will change and be affected, but generally if a player character, for instance, never enters a room…than it is largely unaffected by time and NPCs.