Magical Dungeon

(by Patashu, compiled by Kornel Kisielewicz)

Okay, there's this dungeon, as per the usual...

....However, excess magical residue has distorted it dimensionally. Half of the staircases, instead of going through a level of the dungeon, take you through another area altogether (a forest, grassland, lake, shore, cave system, city...) where the next stairs down resides.

It seems like a neat idea to me, and a plot shouldn't be too hard to weave around it (wizard guy is studying the dungeon to be able to harness the dimensional distortion and control timespace at will...or artifact at the bottom floor is causing the distortion and if not destroyed/relocated will cause it to spread everywhere...).

I don't have any programming skills as-is, though, so I was at least wondering what everyone thought of it?

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Mechanoid

Would be better if it occasionally looped in the X and/or Y axis, thus if you run in a strait line you will end up in the same spot you started; and no mapping.

But it is a good idea.

AsterAzul

I've actually thought through this one before. I've been kicking the can over a little sandbox world design with very tiny worlds that are based on geometric shapes, where the dungeon is an exploration of the worlds' insides. So you would descend the various levels into the earth and pass through the different planes of element that way, like in Native American myth. I had a brainspasm over the thought of implementing a sphere in ASCII, though. Man has a hard enough time trying to draw a danged map of the world in real life.

Cylindrical has the advantage of simplicity, though. Going off the edge sticks you to the side of a circle.

Although you could represent the insides of a sphere in 2D, by scaling the levels up and down the sphere. I suppose you could use different shades to represent the sphere's elevation, with a constantly circular apparent top. I'm not sure if that would be more amusing or more a pain-in-the-butt, though.