Detached in the deep dark DNGN
There's a petrified humanoid laying on the beg and the walls are covered in frozen gas. There's a solid silver heart inside the check cavity and I have no idea how they'd find out.
It was at this point I decided that reality was broken inside the DNGN.
The party went in expecting to find riches but mostly, they've found cultists and earwax. Trying to hold reality together in a place like this seems pointless. The players were under the assumption that this place had some sort of meaningful order. That things in this place were purposefully placed.
But they were not.
The place is chaos.
It makes more sense that the star god cultists have, in summoning their deity, have broken reality. They've spent centuries living in the corrupted dungeon and they're now absolute symbiotes. They are melded with structure, unseen god, and each other. They work at tasks they do not comprehend as nothing born of mortals can understand the motivations of the Star Gods. The halls and rooms have slowly turned, change, and mutated to point of being unrecognisable. Each space meticulously molded into some element of otherworldly strangeness. Snippets of the Star God's attempt to understand this world it has been brought to.
This sort of dungeon does not make sense in a setting that attempts some element of verisimilitude.
However, DNGN is an interesting case. The simplicity of layout, vagueness of meaning, and lack of proper nouns allows for interpretation at the table. I threw this dungeon into the mountains, one of many options in the small sandbox I had put together. Granted, I had not read through it all the way. I'd run the first level a few times with Into the Odd and thought it would pose an interesting location for the party to toy with if they found it. It was the first thing they moved into.
They did this mid-session. I'd not read over anything before we started. But each location has just enough information to get things started. Just enough to immerse the players in the space. The vagueness, ultimately, worked in my favour. Take this description for example:
Corpse: Cybernetic parts can be cut from the body (worth 100gp to a cult). Leather pouch containing a journal (penned in an unknown script), 12gp (next to the corpse).
This is the first room the party entered. I was able to align the unknown script with a script they'd found in another adventuring site. The cybernetic parts I could connect to a cult that they dealt with while in town. And, finally, the 12gp next to the corpse. This is weird. Why is it there? Is it stacked up in a pile? Is it in a pouch? Is it just thrown on the ground? I went with a neat pile and that it was old weird money.
What I'm getting at here, is that the adventure allows for adaptability. Which is great, but it's just so fucking weird. I can't see a reason for such a place to exist without it being a doorway into the deep weirdness of chaos and the abyss. I think my issue here is that the players, my players, my dear friends think of things as complete-able. They're recent converts from 5E and now happily follow me in my exploration of TTRPG systems, but that 5E-ness still lingers. They often think their characters are heroes, and they might be sometimes but this dungeon has nasties that will ruin them.
For now... They will continue into the depths.
And the madness will grow.