Mysteriously Dangerous Dungeons

[Rennn]

Once the CS releases, Aegrus and I plan to collaborate on a mod which shall (for now) bare the working title of 'Mysteriously Dangerous Dungeons'. The goal is to use only vanilla assets, so installation will be quick and painless, as will uninstallation.

 

Disappointed with how short and linear the caves are? Do you wish tactics played a larger role in battles? Do you wonder where all the epic dungeons that always seem to show up in fantasy books and movies are?

 

MDD aims to expand on Skyrim's dungeons by reworking several enemy types and expanding dungeons far beyond their original endings.

 

All caves, mines, and a few select ruins will be expanded several times over. Where normally it would take you fifteen minutes to clear a cave, now it might take an hour before you finally sprint to the surface, your companions slaughtered by the abominations hiding below. Caves will be far, far deeper and darker, and will get more and more dangerous and dark as you descend into the bowels of Nirn. Many mines will be expanded, and some will even stretch across Skyrim to meet other mines, in a twisted labrynth inhabited by a plague of trolls. Keep in mind, MDD will not care if you die; walk into a troll-infested mine complex unprepared and instead prepare to be torn apart.

 

Trolls will live in greater numbers in mines and deep caves. They will be almost impossible for even a high-level character to kill without fire, as their health will regenerate unfairly fast (just like in the lore). Fire, however, will turn trolls into fodder for your blade. Indeed, 'tis said that trolls even flee from flame and light.

 

Falmer will attack in swarms, fearing sunlight but living in massive tribes deep underground.

 

Spider caves will stretch far underground, some going so deep that they fall to a sheer drop. Adventurers may be forced to climb down by torchlight, dropping from rock to rock as they seek an escape from this nightmare. Spiders will become bigger and more common as you descend, starting out small and weak, but eventually, if you go deep enough, you will find groups of giant spiders and hordes of their smaller brethren. Spiders will fear nothing, as they're robotic killers, but blunt attacks will crush their chitin armor quite easily compared to the ineffectual swing of a blade.

 

In general, the goal of MDD is to make the vanilla dungeons of Skyrim more legendary, as well as using mines as a pseudo 'quick-travel' system, provided you avoid the infested ones. The preliminary plan is for Aegrus to handle the cave expansions, while I handle the mine network and enemy tweaks. I need to see the CS before I'll know exactly what's possible though, so don't count on this mod being finished for quite a while.

[Darksun45230]

I'd love to see concept screenshots when it's finished. Edited December 18, 2011 by Darksun45230

[huntsman2310]

Awesome! The largest group of Falmer I ever fought was during the penultimate thieves guild quest when chasing Mercer Frey.

 

It was only 8 of them.

[Rennn]

Keep in mind, as well, we're not planning on attaching quests to the mod. It's meant to add our ideal dungeon types and to allow longer adventures, rather than clearing what was supposedly an entire ancient city in ten minutes.

[huntsman2310]

Gotta be careful about how long you make them to be, too long and it will just become tedious.

[Aegrus]

Tedious? That depends on how you look at the additions. If you see them as another portion of the cave to be cleared, then it probably will get tedious. To get this straight early, what we're aiming for is not simply a longer dungeon, but a system of dungeons so massive that to find a nexus chamber (with multiple bosses) feels like a real accomplishment. We want the player so far underground that they feel as if they are delving into the heart of the most vile, most powerful forgotten societies in Skyrim. Indeed, they will be. Plan for lots of darkness and large, named versions of monsters. Plan for buried dwarven cities populated by armies of Falmer, ancient Draugr shrines to mighty spider queens, and other things like that.

 

The places where tunnels meet will be very rare and very hard to get to, but we want to make them stunning to behold. If everyone could get to them, it wouldn't mean anything.

 

We'll consider suggestions, but ultimately, we're making this mod because we want it, so I don't much care if it's a hit or not. This is strictly extra content, so there's really no downside to it. Even if you don't like the length, simply don't enter it or don't download it, and you haven't lost anything.

 

Anyway, to restate, this isn't going to be finished any time soon. We need the construction set first, anyway. I modded dungeons in Oblivion and Morrowind, though I never posted any for download online. Rennn has similar experience. However, neither of us have done anything this big before, so we'll have to learn as we go. I'm not going to set a release date on it.

[micryda]

iam totally whit your idea!!!! i hate the boring dungeons whit no special enemys

i hope this mod will happen!!

[Rennn]

I dabbled in Morrowind and Oblivion for a couple months as practice, and I've worked on several retex mods, so I should know just about everything needed to make this work. But yeah, I agree with Aegrus. You can suggest things, but ultimately this is based on our own vision of how a fantasy game should work. Realistically, no lone champion could ever hope to 'beat' the world. That's why we're going to make the deeper levels so unforgiving; I want to have to sprint away in terror from time to time.

 

It's honestly my goal to make sure that almost nobody ever finishes the deepest levels of the toughest caves.

"Yeah, Ima just swing my sword at this legendary cave-sized spider till it dies. Ignore the thirty dog-sized ones on the ceiling."

In a scenario like that, I would expect the player to either gather an army of thralls, atronachs, and companions, or flee. You wouldn't be beating something like that on your own, especially since realistic darkness will be important in the deeper dungeons, making you use a torch or a spell if you want to see.

 

The unique enemy types (not trolls, lol), but giant spiders, chaurus, and other things like that, will most likely require a high resolution retexture since vanilla would look terrible blown up so much, so that's where my Gimp experience will help.

Edited December 18, 2011 by Rennn

[ryanwh]

Are you replacing dungeons are adding new waypoints on the map to make new ones?

But yeah, I never stumbled on anything resembling a "Falmer city". In theory there should be some major epicenter for them somewhere but it doesn't exist. Same for spiders. Same for ancient dragon worshippers and vampires. And, for certain, trolls, which were generally underutilized. A couple places felt appropriately epic in the Dwemer caves and a lost city inhabited by Foresworn, but it was few and far between.

[Rennn]

Are you replacing dungeons are adding new waypoints on the map to make new ones?

But yeah, I never stumbled on anything resembling a "Falmer city". In theory there should be some major epicenter for them somewhere but it doesn't exist. Same for spiders. Same for ancient dragon worshippers and vampires. And, for certain, trolls, which were generally underutilized. A couple places felt appropriately epic in the Dwemer caves and a lost city inhabited by Foresworn, but it was few and far between.

 

Neither; the best way to go about it without losing any content would be to add new doors (such as trapdoors and that sort of thing) at the bottom of existing caves, and expand from there. All vanilla dungeons will remain intact, but caves will now sometimes link and twist over long distances. Some cells might be dark and creepy but might not even have enemies in them. Others, if you get close to a nest, might be absolutely filled with baddies. Rarely, caves will converge on a very deep hub (like the Deep Roads from DAO), which will house a unique legendary creature of some kind. Something that I can think of as an example on short notice would be a giant, white, blind cave bear worshipped by the Falmer deep below the surface of Nirn. It'd be named something like 'The Pale God', and there'd be about a bazillion skeletons and dead Falmer around it to explain what it's been eating for the last few decades.

 

Mines (my area) will almost all be linked with at least a couple other mines, forming an expedient way to navigate the world without resorting to quick-travel. This was inspired by characters in Forgotten Realm's books using dwarven mines to travel quickly (no dwarves here though :) ). However, certain abandoned segments of the tunnel-system will be troll-infested. As luck would have it, most rare ore deposits are deep underground where the cave trolls hide from sunlight. Mines won't often link with caves unfortunately, since we'll make two seperate .esp files, and caves I want linked to mines would have to be built by me as well, specifically for that purpose.

 

Ruins are a very low priority since they were made by men or mer to be self-contained, and can be expected to be much shorter than a natural cave system or an ancient mine system. If ruins are expanded, it'll probably just be to make Dwemer ruins seem more like cities (like the lore says they should be).

 

We also plan on adding a few seperate markers when needed for gameplay purposes (if we need a quick escape from a cave, for example), but by far most of them will simply be linked to the end of existing dungeons, and will be entirely optional. They'll end up inside other vanilla dungeons eventually, if you survive the trip. We'll leave towns completely untouched, since they'd conflict with the open cities mod (you know somebody is already planning one) when that gets made. A big goal is to make this easy to install, easy to uninstall, with minimum amounts of custom resources (they bloat dev time and download time), and minimum conflicts.

Edited December 18, 2011 by Rennn