 Welcome to MAPCROVE, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle and this video is brought to you by the WERYAK. I, for one, welcome our WERYAK overlords. WERYAKs have become something of a running gag on the project I'm working on, and Deanne Mandick, the artist, drew a picture of it, and then Daniel Fox made stats for it, so now it has fallen to me to make a layer map for it, and it thought it was a great opportunity to talk about Dungeon Ecology. I will have links in the description below with the map that we're drawing today, as well as the stat block for the WERYAK in the Zvihander system. Let's start with the definition of terms. We have the word ecology, which basically means, in gaming terms, plausible interrelationships. Dungeon Ecology means that everything that is in that gameable area seems like it has some reason to be there. There's a food source nearby for the monsters. If there are people living there, they have a place to cook and sleep and defecate and all this kind of stuff. It adds to the believability of the game world and adds to the immersiveness of the experience. If some of these questions about the logistics of how these creatures operate in this area are answered, it doesn't take the players out of the game quite so much. A common example I hear cited for bad Dungeon Ecology is, say, if your final boss monster is an enormous dragon that is somehow contained in a room where there is no entrance or exit large enough to use, so it just seemed to appear there, and at some point a player might find themselves scratching their head and going like, wait a second, how is this thing even here? At which point you just kind of have to shrug your shoulders and say, well, I didn't think about it. Now I think a helpful and useful way to kind of keep this ecology in mind is to kind of follow the GM agenda that Vincent Baker puts in his game Apocalypse World. That is to make the world seem real, make the lives of the player characters not boring, and finally to play to see what happens. That last piece on the agenda might not readily offer an interpretation to Dungeon Ecology, but trust me, we'll get there. Something we are not talking about today is Gygaxian naturalism. Gary Gygax, one of the original authors of Dungeons and Dragons, had this way of writing monster descriptions as if he was writing about actual animals, even though they were magical. We're not going to be talking about that today. I really honestly think that is an entirely separate topic, but we are going to talk about is theme and what that has to do with Dungeon Design and Ecology. In the recently released game Trophy Dark by designer Jesse Cox, he uses themes, a single word at the start of every adventure, and this single word is what you will as a GM always return to for when you need to narrate a little bit of detail or add a bit of flourish or make sure that you're staying in the mood of that adventure. We're going to use the word Weryak as our north star, as our theme. Now Weryak is a compound word. Of course, we get Wair from Wair Wolf, this idea of this shape-shifting, like-and-thrope animal, and we also have the animal, the yak, the big fuzzy cow. So if we diagram this out a little bit, we can make an association cloud around both halves of this word and start to unpack our theme. We are at the point now where werewolves are so ubiquitous, they kind of seem to exist as creatures unto their own. But really, if you think about it, they are the product of a curse, and a curse means that there is some kind of higher and darker power that is holding sway over these victims. This is wonderful because it already suggests a relationship, it already suggests a power dynamic. Whatever this thing in this layer that has created this Weryak and is driving it to do these awful things, we can build that into the ecology. I'm imagining that our Weryak is a yak rancher, and while digging out a root cellar in his stable, he discovered ancient ruins beneath there, and that is where he was stricken with his terrible curse of lycanthropy. Now at night, he turns into the Weryak, and he goes and does the bidding of the dark voice in his head, the voice that was buried in the barrows underneath his stable. So what is this dark bidding? And what's he up to? I think he's building an army of the undead. He is starting to resurrect this thing that I'm going to call the skinless skull. And one of the things that he is doing is he is taking other skeletons that he has found in this barrel mound, and he is attaching yak's skulls to them, and then discarding the the other skulls somewhere else in this dungeon. So we have our undead Minotaur bone constructs walking around, causing all sorts of problems. And then we have just kind of these, you know, these restless dead skulls that have been discarded. And again, all of this is surrounding the actions of the Weryak that are being puppeted by this by this skinless skull force. So how do these poor discarded skulls feel about their where they rate in the pecking order here? Right? How does how does a relationship suggest itself? Maybe they want their bodies back. Maybe they want this whole tomb to kind of be put back the way it was. Maybe they were buried here specifically to guard this skinless skull thing. And you know, they're they have like headless ghost bodies floating around not knowing what to do. Like the whole thing has been interrupted because of this dark presence leaking through and getting through to this poor yak rancher. Now, it may not have escaped your notice that a Weryak basically looks like a Minotaur. So I want to play off of that as well and put a big maze in here and really really play up this kind of classic Minotaur's maze dungeon situation. But it's got like it's got a bunch of this unfamiliar, you know, curse, skinless skull stuff kind of all happening in the background and that that might fluff up a tired trope a little bit. Also, we have skulls and ghosts and you know, shambling Minotaur skeletons. Let's make sure that not all of our creatures in this are undead. If there's a cleric in the party who has turned undead or some other solution for dealing with undead, that's going to be your go to and all of the creative problem solving goes straight out the window with a one size fits all answer. So let's add variety in the room with these chattering skulls. I'm going to add these face worms, these worms that have been eating these cursed corpses down in the maze. And they have since grown kind of these human faces of those they have eaten. And I'm also going to add horned weasels, these burrowing creatures that their proximity to the dark energies of the skinless skull have caused them to grow yak horns. So between the worms dining upon the undead and these weasels and the Minotaur's and all of this stuff. It's all interrelated to the skinless skull that was buried underneath the stable in the burrow mound. All of this stuff has a causal relationship and therefore causes all of this this ecology to emerge. And always remember that ecology just like world building is really nifty for the GM to know. But unless it comes out and affects play at the table, it's kind of worthless. You only need to understand your dungeon ecology well enough that it helps you carry out the first point of the GM's agenda. That is to make the world seem real. If you have pages and pages of notes or your personal wiki to keep track of your dungeon ecology or something, you're probably in danger of not following through on the second item on the GM's agenda list. That is to make the players lives not boring. If you're constantly info dumping with all this world building or ecological factoids, that's boring. Nobody needs to know the caloric intake of face worms. And finally, if you followed through on a clear theme, and you have your dungeon ecology set up with a power dynamic and a reason for everything that is there to be there, then you get to play to see what happens that third item on the GM's agenda from Apocalypse World. Do the players rush in and somehow destroy the skinless skull and end the curse of the wear yak? Well, let's play to find out. Do the players promise to help the skulls regain their bodies in exchange for some kind of supernatural aid? Let's play to find out. Will the wear yak ever forgive me for what I have done? Let's play to find out. That's it for this episode. I want to send out a very special thank you to Deanne for drawing the wear yak and Daniel for doing the zvihander stat block. And I also want to send out a special thanks to Ben Milton of the questing base for featuring me in his newsletter. I was already subscribed to that newsletter. And if you could have seen my face when I saw this channel mentioned in it, oh, it warms my cold dead heart. This episode topic arose from a Twitter poll. So since I am mad with attention, go ahead and follow me over there. Subscribe to the channel. Leave a comment about things that you would like episodes on and maybe we'll meet in the layer of the wear yak.