Musical Dungeons

29 December 2023

Intro

Most of my writing is inspired by whatever flavor of music I'm mainlining at the time. To describe it like a robot: music is accessible, an extremely diverse medium, and easy to mine ideas from. My favorite module I've written, FIVE A.M. PANIC!, came straight out of the feverish energy I felt the first time I listened to Panico a las 5am by Angel Rada.

Today as a little exercise I'm going to make a short dungeon based off a random song.

"Procedure"

I don't think you can proceduralize the act of being inspired by art, but I'll try.

• Note interesting lyrics, turns of phrase, images, etc.
• Name three feelings or images the song inspires.
• Synthesize into one strong "anchor" image
• Build outward from there.

Setup

I'm going to be making a six room bite-sized dungeon inspired by Marcia B's procedures in this post.

For the song, I'm going to practice the ancient art of shufflemancy and use the first thing that Spotify's AI DJ gives me.

The song that he gave me is Cynical One, by TV Girl. A pretty low energy, wistful song. We'll see how it goes.

Step 1: interesting lyrics, images, etc.

This part is usually all intuition for me, but it's an interesting exercise to write it all out. I don't think I would usually have this many details, but I wanted to extract a few tiny bits to show the breadth of inspiration available.

• the sound of a door opening in the first few seconds
• the looped sample from Song to the Magic Frog
• "house on the hill"
• "wine and roses"
• "you can't go trading me places"
• the voice being cut off at the very end of the song
• deadpan guy singing, more ethereal feminine voice backing
• the psychedelic, almost hypnotic album cover

Step 2: three feelings or images the song inspires

These are just off the dome. Don't put too much thought into them.

• pining. yearning, even.
• gentle self-deprecation. or blame?
• something pastoral under a starry sky, like a field.

Step 3: synthesize into an "anchor" image

A wooden house on a hill, surrounded by a field of red roses. It's night. A line of identical women dance out the front door and down the hill. They're flickering, ghostlike.

Step 4: the rest of the fucking owl

Rolling on the layout table in Marcia's post above, I get number 2: a triangular layout with a few branches.

Since we've got a house on a hill, I'll rotate this a bit to have a sort of path going up to the house, with a few locations branching off from there.

Now I'll add some locations: just reasonable things you might see in a rural space like this.

1. Bottom of the hill
2. Hill path
3. House
4. Windmill
5. Stable
6. Graves

Next up is a "special" room, a trap, two monsters, and two treasures. I'm using the details mined earlier here. This part's pretty iterative. While I was writing this, I started to get the shape of what I wanted from the dungeon, fleshing details out and editing little bits of earlier parts.

"Special" room

Inspiration: the looped sample; wine and roses

The graves in the back of the house. Two lots are open with rectangular holes. One is filled with dark red wine. The line of women emerges from the other. Submerging someone in the wine adds another woman to the loop. Filling in the wine-less grave frees everyone caught in the loop, spitting them all out at once.

Monster 1

Inspirations: deadpan guy singing, feminine backing vocals; pining, yearning even.

Farmer who looks like he hasn't slept in years. Dead eyes, messy grey beard. Ghostly, pale hands can be seen gently touching his neck and shoulders. Whoever he is, this is all his fault. Rather than hurting you, he will try and throw you in the wine-filled grave in the back. Carries a coin: ten years sober!

Monster 2

Inspiration: gentle self-deprecation. or blame?

Scarecrow watching over the hill path. It sags sadly from its perch, head hanging low. It's seen everything that happened here and felt so powerless to stop it. If you go up the hill it barrages you with painful psychic visions, hoping you'll run away.

Trap

Inspiration: the vocal sample cut off at the end of the song

In the stables, most of the guts have been ripped out and replaced with a huge generator. It's hungry for any fuel and emits a weird staccato high pitched noise, like someone coughing out the phrase "he-" over and over again. There's no noise otherwise.

If you talk near the generator, it eats the noise with a feeling like having a tooth pulled. The first syllable of the first word spoken replaces the "he-" noise, and you take damage as the wind gets stolen from your lungs.

Treasure 1

Inspiration: wine and roses

At the bottom of the hill, the line of women disappears into the field of roses where they dissolve into a puddle of pale white wine. Getting drunk on this stuff causes the original trapped woman, whose image is repeated over and over again in the line, to possess you.

Treasure 2

Inspiration: the looped sample

Jerry-rigged frankensteined raggedy-ass video camera with a slug-like glowing cathode ray tube on top. Recording someone with this causes a hazy, ghostlike image of them to repeat the recorded movements whenever you hit play. Footage lasts 6 seconds and there's enough memory for one stored recording.

Put it all together

1. Bottom of the hill
   • Roses. Line of identical ghostly women dance into field and dissolve into pale white wine.
     • Getting drunk on wine allows the ghost of the looping woman to possess you.
2. Hill path
   • Ghostly women dance down trail. Roses on either side.
   • Scarecrow hangs ashamed, driving away visitors as best as it can. Assaults with painful psychic visions.
3. The House
   • Women waltz in from backyard, through living room, out the door.
   • Bedroom reeks of death. There's a corpse, obviously. Long tubes filled with wine connect body to generator (5).
   • The Farmer sits in the living room, recording dancers with video camera.
     • The camera is magic: it records a 6 second loop of whoever's in front of it and can replay it at will. Holds one "loop" at a time.
4. Windmill
   • Creaky, rusting. Scraps of cloth are layered gently at base like a quilt.
     • When the Farmer adds a new person to the loop, he takes a scrap from their outfit and puts it here.
5. Stable
   • Big generator. Remnants of hay and old animal musk. No sound other than generator's coughing high-pitched "he-" noise.
     • Talking near generator causes it to suck the words out of your body, hurting you and changing the noise it emits.
   • Tubes go to bedroom in house (3) and graves (6)
6. Graves
   • Two mounds and fragile crosses. Two open lots. The source of the dancing women.
   • One grave is filled with dark red wine. Tubes of the stuff connect to generator (5).
     • Submerging someone in the wine traps them and adds another woman to the loop.
   • The women emerge from the other, climbing from the grave. They look real at first, but their color fades as they dance away.
     • Filling in this grave stops the loop. Everyone submerged in the wine is spat out all at once.

And that's that!

Hope you enjoyed this. If you use this method to make anything of your own, I'd love to hear about it.