Hello everyone! Wow, Castle Whiterock is on a roll. Today we are sharing a design diary by Alex Kurowski, one of the contributors to Castle Whiterock. But before we get there, a few housekeeping items.

More stretch goals! You backers have been so kind to push us over $400k. We need new stretch goals! We are finalizing a few details and anticipate announcing these late today. We'll have a video explaining the choices plus of course all the stretch goal ideas mapped out to at least $550k, maybe further. More details to come soon!

The Lost Level. Remember that there are indie publishers supporting Castle Whiterock with their own DCC and 5E expansions! If you back the indie projects, you also get the rooms comprising the legendary Lost Level. Today we'd like to draw your attention to Made a Monster, a fun adventure from Long Con Press. The PCs and various NPCs from the Inn of the Slumbering Drake are transformed into monsters by Drugila the orc’s botched ritual! They must quest to return themselves to their original form and stop Drugila’s masterplan. More info here!

Now let's hear from Alex...

 

Castle Whiterock appeals to the nostalgia of my early gaming experiences and the unspoken rules that define the megadungeon. The tropes coded into the DNA of our hobby were introduced to me through Dave Megarry’s Dungeon!, Milton Bradley's HeroQuest, and SSI’s “Gold Box” CRPGs like Pool of Radiance. Castle Whiterock embraces many of these tropes directly; for example, by equating dungeon level to PC experience level, a game design signal to players that to delve deeper is to accept greater danger (and greater reward!). It is a dungeon which utilizes its verticality to provide multiple entrances and exits from one area to the next, giving each adventuring party that crosses its threshold a genuinely different experience based on the choices they come to make. Its monstrous factions – including duergar, orcs, troglodytes, and demons — live in proximity with complex relationships, histories, and exploitable motives for canny players to leverage. Part of the reward is peeling back what is observable and coming to understand how this ecosystem came to be.

 

But Castle Whiterock doesn’t just rely on convention to bring all its parts together. There is a lot that is surprising as you peek under the surface.

 

I love when a monster I have seen countless times in the past is reimagined to create something entirely new. One memorable example for me as I was previewing Castle Whiterock is a humongous, bloated stirge that dwells in a cavernous area of the dungeon. It has swelled to such an extreme size that it can no longer fly, relying instead on swarms of its own offspring to drag it bodies to devour. When prey runs scarce, she is just as content to devour her young directly. Finding something like this is disarming and tests every assumption players have made about an otherwise common foe.

 

Deeper on the same level, a group of youthful stone giants get their kicks in by riding on the backs of purple worms throughout the Underdeep tunnels. At its core the situation is an example of adolescent hijinks, a concept familiar from our own ordinary world, translated into how it plays out for fantasy creatures living in this dungeon environment. These types of encounters breathe an authentic and whimsical life into the dungeon delve format that are fun to come across and develop as a GM and lay fertile ground to create memorable moments for players.

 

Castle Whiterock's environment itself is unpredictable; players expecting nothing beyond worked stone halls and dank caverns will find themselves in for quite a few revelations. Among the discoveries awaiting you is a gate to a fairy-inspired demi-plane gripped by an epic conflict between its denizens and a goblinoid army mounted on giant wasps (if ever you needed an excuse to bust out the Dragon Rider's Primer for aerial combat, this is your chance!). Elsewhere, an extraplanar prison remains as a remnant of a previous wizard's bizarre experimentation. Deeper still: a pyramid sitting inexplicably within the caverns beneath the castle, with every indication that it is very, very far from home. The dungeon's surprises are embedded in its history and provide rewards of discovery that go well beyond its considerable riches and magical items.

 

If you yearn to recapture what made you fall in love with dungeon crawling while encountering ideas you haven't seen before, Castle Whiterock offers the best of both worlds. I look forward to sharing it with my own children once they are ready to pick up the dice in hopes it leaves them with the same lasting impressions that the earlier era of D&D left on me.