Megadungeons locale or setting?

[Bruce Cordell]

I've got two different characters currently running through separate playtests for Jewel--I'm playing the rogue halfling Mortho in one and the medic Hawthorne in the other. Freaky good time, which I suppose is all I really want from the experience.

 

[...m...]

A very obvious example is the Living Dungeon in 13th Age’s THE STONE THIEF. Much though I enjoy numenéra (I have run two campaigns using it), the company is still pretty traditional in terms of high-level design and I don’t expect their mega dungeon to be more differentiated from traditional forms than The Stone Thief.

...i think that this dungeon plays to two opposing campaign frameworks (science fiction expedition to a remote anomaly, fantasy delve into an aberrant artifact), each with opposing approaches to the same experience, constitutes a fairly novel take on the megadungeon paradigm...

 

[Von Ether]

Recent interviews do make it seem like he missed a lot of the OSR, but is belatedly catching up on it now.

Which is funny as a lot of MCG's adventure advice for Cypher GMs is very similar to OSR:

• Design towards the environment, not game balance
• Let players experiment
• Let the environment provide tools to experiment with

So both game styles share some cornerstones

 

[CharlesRyan]

Yeah, as a close personal observer of Monte (though I certainly can't speak for him), he's well award of what's been going on the in the OSR movement over the past decade or so. And I think the elements of that movement that appeal to Monte have, as Von Ether calls out, been well reflected in MCG's products.

I'm not super close to the OSR movement myself, but I'd venture to say that Jewel in the Sky is a product that looks like the opposite of OSR at a quick glance, but is surprisingly close to its ethos when you dig just a bit deeper.