The Memory Dungeon

This dungeon has no map. You know the entire layout by heart, because it looks exactly like the place you grew up. The yawning, rocky entrance leads into a maze of tunnels, which change shape as weak, gritty rock collapses piece-by-piece. Stretching off the long maze, a wide, lazy river flows from the kitchen to the bathroom. Loud snores reverberate through all the caverns near the parental bedroom; two ogres guard the rusted irons doors.

  • Entrances at door and windows, each with a half-way group who take resources from outside.
  • Coat-rack: bats sleep over the day, and their screams can encourage the earth to collapse.
  • Every bin in the house is a patch of spore-filled fungus, which chokes anyone going close.
  • Laundry means a patch of mushrooms. The inhabitants fight over these little fungal gardens.
  • In the parental bedroom:
    • A witch has maps which cover parts of the oubliette, below.
    • A team of bandits live at the top of the cavern, debating whether or not they should agree to make the witch give them magical strength.
    • Two ogres have joined the troupe, and enjoy the excellent armour that the bandit-blacksmith creates for them.
  • The stairs don't go up, they slide down, with slime making ascension almost impossible.
  • Kitchen: the default height is the table - everything below is a black abyss.
    • Down on the floor, bioluminescent creatures glow, immune to any spore-clouds.
    • Fridge: the deepest cavern, always frozen cold, where some ancient lich stored books on alchemy among frozen corpses.
    • The phone's charging station is a colony of spore-folk.
  • Toilet: narrow but deep lake.
    • Describe someone falling into water while wearing plate armour, with a two-handed sword across their back.
    • Above, a crack in the rocks lets stream-water from above flows into the shower.
    • Gnomish gardener in the oasis where the sunlight hits.
  • Your bedroom has bears which enter through the window.
    • Sock-pile has gnomes.
  • Closet:
    • The cordless phone is a spore-folk baby, crying in the darkness for its people by making rhythmic squeaking sounds with its skin.
    • Everyone wants to steal the baby - the screaming is actually a squeak.
    • They're fertile, and make mushrooms grow anywhere with half a drop of water.

Aims

It's hard to read a full adventure module - you keep having to go back and check you've remembered all the important points. And no matter how much you read, you always need the module open at the table, so that you can check it again. Even when you haven't forgotten anything, you still repeatedly check the book in case you might have forgotten something.

The Plan

I want zap an entire dungeon into the reader's head. I want it to be so easy to memorize that they just look at a passage and think 'yes, got it, ogres at the door', and not only commit it to memory but feel confident they can tell other people what they would see, if they walked through that location.

Oddities

There is no actual map, and there can't be.

The reader knows what the place looks like, but the author does not. Where does the river from the kitchen to the bathroom go? Which rooms does it divide? Only the reader knows.

Constraints

The module must only use elements which are common to European households in the 90's. It must never reference something which we cannot remember from our own house.

  • It cannot reference a sibling's bedroom.
  • It cannot assume the bath and toilet are in the same room.
  • It cannot reference a patio.

However, I suspect it can reference stairs. Those who grew up in a high-rise apartment have stairs outside their home. Those who grew up in a cottage almost certainly have at least two steps leading up to the house's front door.