Murkdice
CREATOR
4 days ago
Project Update: 60 minutes left!
We've given a load of sneak previews of Inkvein over the past couple of days. For this last call to back it, just 1 hour from the campaign ending and so close to the Pentower Dungeon Expansion stretch goal, I’m going to share the draft foreword of the book.
I’ve talked a lot about what is in the book, but not why I wrote it.
When I was eleven, I went on a school trip. Part of it involved caving. Not casually walking around a few large chambers, but getting suited up, helmeted, and head-torched. I was a tall boy, nearly 6ft by that age, and my muscles still had a lot of catching up to do. I was still afraid of the dark; I remember staring at the yawning mouth of stone that held only dark within.
I had to crawl through letterboxes and try to heave myself over slippery ledges that I was too tall and weak for. My helmet kept catching the cave ceiling mere centimetres above my stooped head.
Towards the end, I had to squeeze through a tunnel filled with water up to my waist. One by one, my classmates dropped into it. When it was my turn, as I sank into the water, my light began to flicker and give out. The people before me were already far ahead, obscured by corners and twists, and I had to move forwards before anyone else could descend safely behind me.
With light fading and the darkness closing in, I waded and pawed my way through the tunnel, dragging my fingers along the walls and hunching to fit into the constricting tube. I still remember the feeling. The disorientation. The alien nature of the space around me. I learned a couple of lessons: our tools and senses can fail us, can abandon us, and that there are places that I do not belong, that I do not know, and perhaps never can know.
Earlier than this, at 9 years old, a wave caught me and tumbled me to shore in a grip that I had no power to resist until I washed into the shallows. I had felt a tiny portion of the ocean’s mass envelope my body, and it was suffocating.
I knew this feeling before these incidents. My earliest memory is of a jumper being pulled over my head and the head hole being misaligned. It took too long to be fixed. My sight was gone. My hearing muffled by thick twisting fabric. My arms were constrained, pinned to my body.
I hate being trapped. That is why this book exists.
If you think a caving megadungeon written by someone with claustrophobia might be interesting, now is the time to get it!
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