Story Design for Caves of Caneen

This is the second post about our upcoming escape game, The Caves of Caneen. Check out the first post here!

The Origin of the Story: The Story Origin

The story for Caves of Caneen came about by a few design goals that my partner and I had for our new location. A top priority is that we wanted the set to be reusable if needed. At our previous location we never had to replace a room. Each performed quite well, to the point where it never fully made sense to replace the games. But, that is a bit fallacious, as I never had the best data to work with in regards to room popularity. Now with our new booking software tracking individual player progress through all our escape rooms is possible. Meaning I can know exactly how many of our players have played all of our rooms, and can better predict when we should change a room. Additionally it sounds like tools like net promoter score will be bundled for us, so we can better gauge how our players experience our games.

Player progress tracking is an especially cool feature for our repeatable tavern escape room that will eventually be released. We could theoretically have our GM’s set the game up exactly where you left off on a repeat visit, but time will tell if that will even be necessary. A lot of our decisions boil down to business, and what makes sense at the time financially.

The story behind Caves of Caneen came about our want to adapt the story behind Clancey’s Lodge into our medieval fantasy universe. At some point in the adaptation I realized that there was far more new puzzles than what was adapted, so we may as well go the extra mile and make it an entirely new game. But the original idea was to move on from a haunted cabin and turn it into something else more fun to look at. I guess my head goes underground.

Fond memories of Clancey's Lodge...

A few months ago this was going to be our Dragon Heist room, set in a dragon cave. That’s when our ideas morphed into Caves of Caneen. It’s a unique prologue to the rooms to come, in that it establishes game and storytelling mechanics I’m curious if audiences are interested in. We dropped the wood esthetic, and fully embraced our rock 'n stone!

 Carved stone or hardened foam?

The story of this escape room takes place 200 years before the events of the other escape room stories. With such a large gap in years between the games it’ll be clear when characters reappear in other stories that something magickal is afoot.

The game takes place in the aforementioned Caves of Caneen. The caves are forbidden to enter; animals, monstrosities and worse have been rumored to reside in the area. The caves are set in the base of the slagged mountain of Caneen. Geologists claim that parts of the mountain are unnatural, and the earth of Caneen has suffered extreme trauma at a time when the Elder still ruled the land.

Few scholars know of the true purpose behind the destroyed mountain of Caneen. Several millennia ago the extinct race of giants known as the Elder had mined it of all major veins of precious minerals. Caneen was an offshoot spine of a larger supermassive mountain which occupied the land the capital city of Catharsis now resides. Once the mountain had become near-hollow the Elder had started to entomb their growing number of dead. At a certain point in history an catastrophic event occurred, destroying the great mountain of Catharsis, collapsing much of the tunnels in Caneen, and marked the end of the Elder. Historians claim so many differing theories on how the Elder ceased to be that it hardly is the place to start describing them here.

For as long as there have been records kept, Caneen has remained forbidden to enter unless for official state business. In a strange change of mind, the current King of Catharsis orders the caves to be mined of any valuable resources. A report claims that while the Elder had mined the major veins of ore, there remain viable offshoots which could be worth an untold amount of fresh-wrought iron.

The story of Caneen picks up with you, a few weeks later. It seems as though things in the caves have not been going in King Berenso’s favor, and as His loyal blades you must intervene. Quotas have not been met for weeks, and less than a fortnight ago an agent to the King was dispatched but never arrived. This simply will not do for the young lordeling.

As Kingsblades, you are charged to investigate the tunnels and find the missing agent.

You arrive at Caneen to a startling sight. There’s clear signs that the dwarves from the mine had been here at one point, but now they are long gone. As you go deeper into the caves, desperate to find answers, you find more signs of what looks like animal attacks.

You find the only locked door deep in the tunnels, labeled as the administration office. You force the door open, when all your tools fade to dust in your hands. A powerful spell is at work here.

What’s worse, you feel a faint distant rumbling. The light from above goes out, engulfing your group in darkness. Your team's chief geologist looks up and exclaims

The cave, it’s collapsing! By my calculations, we have an hour till we gotta get out of here!

From here players will learn more about the mining operation, the characters that worked there, and more about the sinister plot lurking in the background. 

Next time I’ll talk about specific game mechanics and goals we had for the room!