Aspects For The Temple of Vimuhla

"Inside the Temple of Vimuhla"
Photo copyright 2012 by John Everett Till

In my Con of the North FATE Core Tekumel scenario "Raid on the Temple of Vimuhla" one experienced Tekumel and FATE player asked me: 

"Instead of mapping the entire temple, and narrating movement from room-to-room, why didn't you just create some Aspects for the temple?"

Great question!

I suppose one answer is that I wanted to preserve the element of a dungeon crawl. There are probably many ways of creating a dungeon crawl feel, which is after all an affect, but I stuck to a very traditional room-by-room OSR-inspired literalist map-keying approach. That helped my immersion as a GM. I feel like I have been in the place now.

Dungeon World Goblins by Kyle Ferrin

I picked up Dungeon World this weekend, so am sure I will find some other approaches there to designing a dungeon crawl experience that are equally inspired. I know I sure like the goblins.

Another answer is that my long term goal is to create Aspects for every important location in the temple. By the time I was done with con prep, I had already spent 1.5 days writing up key temple locations using Ken Fletcher's wonderful handout.

I started with the trees and not the forest. 

But if I were to specify a few important Aspects that capture the temple's essence - or the affect of being there - here is what I might choose:

• A temple AND a fortress
• Lord Vimuhla demands sacrifices!
• The sacrificial fire pit draws quite a crowd
• A twisting maze of rooms and cells underneath the sanctuary
• The torture chambers are just the beginning