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 What is this thing? Dungeon23's a low-pressure writing/design challenge started on twitter but doable anywhere: quote:write one RPG thing—one dungeon room, one magic item, one cyberpunk city block, one island etc.—every day of 2023 (edit: you can start whenever you want, there's no such thing as "missing the start" of this challenge—if you read this thread in e.g. June and you think it looks interesting then you can start in June) People've come up with variations on the dungeoncrawl theme, for anyone who's not into that. Here's what I've seen so far:
Personally I'm doing Archipelago23. Where can I talk about this stuff? This thread here, but if you're on twitter you can use any of the hashtags (just the name of the challenge, so #dungeon23 or #space23 or whatever) and there's a Dungeon23 Jam on itch.io, where you make a project for your whole year, enter it into the jam, and add to it every day/week/month. That jam's also got a bunch of tools and planners and stuff people have made and shared for the challenge. There's really no pressure. A bunch of people on twitter have already gone overboard and already started the challenge in late 2022 or started doing in-depth art and stuff, but the point isn't to compare what you're doing to anyone else, just to your own goal. If you write something really in-depth or that you feel's really inspired one day and the next you write some basic 1-sentence thing, you still met the challenge both those days. The point is that at the end of 2023 you can look back and see (up to) 365 individual things you made, some of which will probably be pretty good. This thread's for posting daily/weekly/monthly entries, sharing tools, and talking about the challenge. Who else is doing it?
UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Jan 20, 2023 |
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Jan 1, 2023 13:53
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I've seen worldbuilding23 and hex23 used frequently online, if we're looking for more to add to the OP. Archipelago23 or NPC23 would fit my project best, because I'm using npcs as anchors to explore different facets of an archipelago world. I probably won't be posting it here because I'm not writing it to use for a tabletop game. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone else's though!
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Jan 1, 2023 16:01
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I'm choosing to view my hubris as ambition and use the Dungeon23 approach to help me hammer out the skeletons of 12 adventures for 6 game systems over the year. Then I'm hoping to flesh out and revise what I have at the end to see which, if any, might be good enough to publish. I did some prep work to get some themes, general settings, and structures for each adventure, and each day I aim to write something like an area, an encounter, an NPC, etc. to add to one of them. The systems I'm trying this for are:
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Jan 1, 2023 16:20
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This is a really fun idea, I'd love to give it a try - there's something great about achieving a lot by little steps. Why 23 though? A lot of indie wargames use 28 because that's the scale.
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Jan 1, 2023 17:23
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moths posted:Why 23 though?
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Jan 1, 2023 17:38
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stellae posted:I've seen worldbuilding23 and hex23 used frequently online, if we're looking for more to add to the OP.
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Jan 1, 2023 18:42
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So I'm doing islands (Archipelago23), but with a twist: I'm making the islands with a WIP generator game I have called Stone Words Walk, which is normally for exploring (post?-)post-apocalyptic monuments. I'm gonna make an island a day, and every week I'm gonna update the rules, hopefully making the game better (flow easier and help me make more interesting stuff). If I get to a point where I'm satisfied with the rules I might move on to another small game I've got going on. Day 1: Plough Island  (top: Northern aspect; bottom: Eastern aspect)
Reasons to return: to climb the wall and recover the flag (if it is a flag); check the camp for logbooks; and scour the island for marks, excavations, or other leftovers from whoever landed here.
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Jan 1, 2023 20:39
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https://twitter.com/SkeletonHero/status/1609644924408066048?s=20 I'm using the Dungeon Year Design Journal by Pandion Games and seeing what I can pull together by using random tables. Trying to remain system agnostic and don't have a specific concept in mind so this will either turn out totally gonzo or surprisingly unified. We'll see. I'm rolling a specific theme for each week and then rolling up a handful of subthemes, appropriate room feature, and room type. This week's theme is cold. Today I rolled up the subthemes electrical, paranormal, and 90s Los Angeles with a horror room feature screeching spider and the room type holding cells. This actually makes for a great starting room for a dungeon, since it gives the adventurers a reason to come together right away. They wake up in an industrial metal prison with electrified bars on the cells. The walkway outside is patrolled by a large mechanical spider kept active by an electric rail in the ceiling. The center of the room opens into a yawning black pit. There is a room at the back housing a large console and some generators that could be sabotaged to depower the spider and cell doors. A stairway on the other end of the room leads down. Mechanical Spider An arachnoid automaton the size of a large dog skitters along the ceiling, its old metal joints scraping and screeching as it moves. Sparks fly down every now and then from where a long cable connects it to an electric rail above. 3 HD automaton 24 HP AC 14 (ascending) or 2 (descending) Claw attack 1d6 and attempts to grab Taser web (save vs. paralysis) Patrols the ceiling in a clockwise route. Has no sensory input except sight directly in front of it but moves quite quickly - sneaking around it is difficult but very possible. When faced with unauthorized personnel it engages them directly, attempting to capture them and put them in a cell rather than kill. It relies on the electric rail above it for power. If the power is cut, it becomes a useless hunk of junk.
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Jan 1, 2023 21:37
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I don't know if I see myself doing the whole Dungeon23, but I have to put together a dungeon for the end of January, so let's go. I abstracted out a 10 room section of a dungeon using the cyclic generation algorithm. The itch page by Sersa Victory really helped outline the dungeon, a node graph editor helped me organize the rooms spatially, and the Mork Borg dungeon generation charts helped me populate ideas for rooms pretty quick.  code:https://sersavictory.itch.io/cyclic-dungeon-generation https://csacademy.com/app/graph_editor/
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Jan 2, 2023 05:10
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I'm trying Dungeon23. Haven't finalized all the proper nouns yet.My Notes posted:Millenia ago, the Ancients harnessed the ground itself in their greatest and most terrible way. They converted their home, the Holy Peak, into a mobile weapon powerful enough to finally slay the Smiling Colossi. I've jotted down some general area ideas for levels and a possible node map to connect the levels, but I'm trying not to plan too much. Might try out that cyclic generation thing, it seems neat. I'll do a little bit of worldbuilding each week using question prompts from The Ground Itself to help inform the place's history and give me lore details to hint at in the room designs. This week, I learned that Queen Stalis ruled the Walking Kingdom through divine right and fear of the enemy; time to discover how that shapes the design of the Lava Exhaust Tunnel. edit: added an itch page Detective Eyestorm fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 2, 2023 07:26
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Day 2: Seamstress Island (top: Northern aspect; bottom: Eastern aspect)
Reasons to return: To ease their pain. To translate them. To know what the people here once knew. Maybe it'll be useful.
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Jan 2, 2023 12:12
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stellae posted:The 23 is because it's happening in 2023. That seems incredibly obvious. Turnip28 and Necropolis28 had me in a different space. I gave this some thought yesterday, and it seems wild to just do a traditional mega-dungeon, but I think that's where most of my ideas were headed. System agnostic, but with the aesthetics of Zork's Great Underground Empire, the Dark Tower-verse, or Wizard of Oz. So everything is a little familiar but kinda wrong. There might be a payphone or a giant mechanical World's Fair display. Some areas may be in black and white.
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Jan 2, 2023 20:03
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I think I'm going to revisit a setting I was planning to use for one of the solo monthly things. It was going to be a Souls-esque thing. Oddly enough I guess it's now a bit Elden Ringy? Here's the intro dug up from the depths of my HDD. quote:
So basically a series of dungeons and overland areas. Probably a point crawl layout linking dungeons.
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Jan 2, 2023 22:17
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I've added everyone's start points to the OP—they all look great so far, feel free to let me know what name/description you want.anothergod posted:The next steps will be to flesh out the particulars, write encounter tables, and draw a map. Are there good tools to use to do this all digitally? I'm currently just working with a google doc, but that seems to be especially bad for map drawing. - Day 3: Anastrophe Island  (top: Northern aspect; bottom: Eastern aspect)
Reasons to return: To take biological samples. To set up a warning to ward off intruders with more violent intentions.
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Jan 3, 2023 13:33
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1/3: Settled on an overarching theme - the dungeon is a "world of the future" settlement / shelter / planned community from a long-dead civilization. An IKEA showroom left by ancient aliens, a prefab cradle of civilization. Left on standby low power for millennia.
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Jan 3, 2023 14:25
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Oh, so literally anything goes as far as creation?
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Jan 3, 2023 23:16
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I've been reading 'The Monster Overhaul' by Skerples, and at the back it's got a map of a 'Generic Megadungeon' - not the whole thing, obviously, but many interconnected zones. Might be worth a look if you want to do a dungeon but are lacking inspiration.
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Jan 4, 2023 00:48
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Agent Rush posted:Oh, so literally anything goes as far as creation?
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Jan 4, 2023 02:11
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Is anyone interested in a prompt-swap or other interactive stuff like that? For instance, on one day, giving another person a prompt (round-robin style maybe), or answering a question someone asks about what you're making, or even literally doing an entry for someone else's thing (to take or leave as you like). Day 4: Preacher Island  (top: Northern aspect; bottom: Eastern aspect)
Reasons to return: To scale the tower and see the view. To try and determine whether anyone left this place alive.
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Jan 4, 2023 15:51
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Prompts might be a neat idea, but post-a-day design is already a pretty huge commitment and adding to that seems like an invitation to burnout. 1/4/23: I want the dungeon to exist in a lateral time-space, which is obviously impractical for an interactive game BUT an opportunity for "narrative slight of hand." So a lot of glimpsing the future and past, while avoiding railroading. I also want the characters to become acclimated to this space, with it becoming more normal and mundane the longer they spend there. So initially everything is illegible and bizarre, but eventually mundane and normal. Derro and gibbering mouthers seem like ideal NPCs to populate this with, where their nonsense speech eventually gives way to normal speech. This also means the PCs are getting weird.
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Jan 4, 2023 16:18
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moths posted:Prompts might be a neat idea, but post-a-day design is already a pretty huge commitment and adding to that seems like an invitation to burnout. Day 5: Verbal Island 
Reasons to return: To find what was atop the spire. To determine whether the giant, abnormal species is still extant. UnCO3 fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Jan 5, 2023 |
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Jan 5, 2023 12:08
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Day 6: Redemption Island
Reasons to return: To make a proper contact. To determine how the whole system receives its power.
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Jan 6, 2023 13:56
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Day 7: Fort Sundog
Reasons to return: Get in through one of the gun ports. Uncover what was hidden here. Be wary of the dog. - From here on I'm gonna do weekly posts on my itch page for this challenge, then link that here.
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Jan 7, 2023 22:39
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First week down: Various thoughts:
-I'm not exactly sure the level of technology I'm working with; lava levels always conjure images of metal grates and industry for me, so I need to figure out if I wanna commit to that. -I also want to collapse some doorways. This thing might be too easy to get around.
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Jan 8, 2023 01:04
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I just put together a dungeon crawl in 2 hours using watabou's dungeon generator. We played for 5 hours. I'm pretty sure it's not really the dungeon layout that matters. I think the most important thing going forward is generating things in the dungeon that can interact with things you bring into the dungeon and things over ~30 to ~60min of game time away in the dungeon. Hmmm.... One room a night is silly, but like... An area + generators + small refinements + cyclic loops seems like the ticket so far
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Jan 8, 2023 07:56
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Oh nice, I hadn't seen this thread until it got posted in the Old-School Games thread. I've been using this as a chance to build a tiny hex zone--not one big megadungeon but one small region (probably less than 6x6 hexes) with a bunch of related dungeons. January's dungeon has been The Palace of the Immortal Queen--the ancient red dragon specializing in polymorphing magic who rules these lands. The rest of the dungeons are going to be a mix of fallout from her misrule and locations holding tools the PCs can use to weaken and eventually overthrow her. Here's what I've got so far:   Notable features are a rotating throne room, so the door out only goes where the queen wants it to, and an artificial farcical dungeon the queen forces visiting adventurers to go through for her amusement. I've been populating this dungeon primarily through a bunch of random tables. I made a big list of 'possible final bosses' and rolled Dragon, then made a list of all the ways I could imagine making a dragon interesting and rolled twice--"Collects artists" and "Is sick and spreads her sickness". I combined the two into a queen who collects artists but has terrible taste and ruins all the art she touches. I've also got a bunch of other tables in progress I use to give me prompts each day to reduce mental load. I have them all listed as csv on Github if people are interested, but here's a sample:  I've also been documenting it on my blog a bit: Talking about my plans More details on room generation A table of hazards, zoomed out Talking about how to make dragons not-boring The core technique I use when keying dungeons
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Jan 10, 2023 20:10
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I'm working on a game. I'm not really sticking to the format of creating a specific discrete thing for each day, but damned if this doesn't encourage me to work on my writing each day. Trying to hammer out a rule, or how the text of a rule works. And yeah, also weapons and magic items and stuff. I'm staying away from creating rooms and maps at this point.
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Jan 11, 2023 19:03
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I’m working on a thing. I started with the concept of a magical school with an attached training dungeon. I used a Troika book about magical schools (Academies of the Arcane, it’s great) to generate the info about the school, and then from there I’m using other generators etc as needed. I started out thinking it’d be something reasonably chill with a nice scholastic environment upstairs, and annoying group projects into the dungeon for homework. The tables had a different idea: I’m building the Dragonthirst Reformatorium of the Mind and its Mastery, built by an ogre mage out of the hollowed-out skull of an unnamed, demonic titan mounted atop a giant lava-driven furnace.  Like others I’m not worrying too much about ‘one room per day’ and instead I’m just taking it as a cue to work on it and achieve some measurable progress. I’ve got the first level basically mapped out and have about a quarter of it keyed, which leaves lots of opportunities for shenanigans.
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Jan 11, 2023 21:09
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Archipelago23 week 2 report   That's Cornucopia Island, Mayday Station, and Grudge Island; all the details for them and the other 4 islands this week are in this itch devlog.
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Jan 14, 2023 11:24
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Got a bit of a late start on this after falling ill at the beginning of the year, followed by all this nonsense with the OGL (souring me on making a 5e dungeon), but I'm finally back in the saddle with a system neutral, OSR-adjacent first draft in progress. The first floor's a good ol' fashioned crypt, and a relatively self-contained lockbox puzzle. The whole thing's a false positive for the actual dungeon, buried just below, though I suppose you could also just run it as its own thing. I used to design all my dungeons as "Real" locations first, you know, feasible architecture, but I've gradually come around to allowing myself to be a little more gamey. Aside from a few things I stole from other sources, I think my favorite thing I've come up with is a furtive, ceiling-dwelling monster that mostly leaves the party alone, but if they engage with another monster in its presence, it tries to reach down and steal their weapons as they swing them or hold them aloft.
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Jan 14, 2023 16:41
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Week 2 of The Walking Kingdom expands the residential area of this workplace, creating something of a "company town" environment. A cafeteria, a company store, a rec room, and a chapel of sorts. If I had a weird idea this week, I tried not to second guess myself. So now there's a talking lute who wants to see the world, and a statue possessed by nature spirits who hate that they're possessing the statue. So that's fun. I want to think about who lives here now, not just who once lived here. Who the hell would live in a megadungeon? How do they understand the religious relics that remain?
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Jan 14, 2023 18:16
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ive been writing Prominent Characters for a setting where the laws of magic are subject to constant revision to try and stop people getting too powerful and breaking the world. so the really powerful wizards are pathological secret hoarding obsessives, like people who find exploits in software or loopholes in financial law. When they finally hit on something good they try to use what they found to accrue as much power as fast as possible before someone finds out about it. but i think this guy im posting today kinda works in other settings too, he'd be pretty easy to adapt to like any of the d&d settings or whatever Lord Fex, Archmage of the Abattoir There is a well-established pipeline between the elite mage colleges of the northern states and prestigious institutions the world over. It's a rare graduate that hasn't already secured a position with a government, research university, or even an arms dealer, by the time they actually attain their diploma. So when a promising young mage had announced that he would be pursuing a career making and selling slaughterhouse equipment after his graduation, it provoked some controversy. It was viewed as a great waste of his talents, and a great waste of the education the citystate had provided to him. It was true that in raw power terms the kid was no archmage, but he had a keen mind and a very good grasp of the more theoretical topics; the underpinnings of spell design, the finer points of enchantment, reverse engineering of rituals. There was just no reason for him to take a such a.. low fantasy job. The controversy proved a boon to his sales, though. Just the novelty alone of being able to buy something a real mage had enchanted drew in a considerable number of buyers, most minimally-magical items were hammered out in bulk by hedge enchanters. His tools were good, too; hypnotic guideposts that could make cattle sleepwalk to the chopping block, cattleguns that could settle the most exotic of livestock, abattoir tiles that drank up stray splatters of blood. His early success, even with the attention, was modest, but enough for him to parlay into designing his first full slaughterhouse complex (just outside a river delta town called Foulwater, on account of its being downstream from ranchland and upstream from the sea). And then from there, his own slaughterhouse business, then a chain of them, then an empire. His designs, combining mundane mechanisms with magical enhancements, had revolutionized the industry, and meat safety in general. It was at his head office in Foulwater (now a bustling city known as Redwater), during a board meeting, that he abruptly ascended to something approaching godhood. This surprised everyone, but the cause became clear very soon. Not least because Lord Fex was happy to explain it, now that it was too late to really do anything about it. All of his designs, from the very start, had been built with additional, unlisted enchantments, hidden in plain sight. The way the mundane enchantments had been constructed hid within themselves the others, like an optical illusion or a coded cipher. Fex had built an entire mystic language, rigorously consistent and known only to himself. He'd constructed countless rituals, words of power, incantations, and hidden them in the designs of his slaughterhouses. The words required to start and stop the steam wands, the refrigeration boxes, the lightning baths, all phoenetic doubles of chants and invocations in Fex's name. The workers were his priesthood, butcher his ritual practice, and the livestock his sacrifices. The soul of a beast might be worth little, but enough raindrops can drown the world. The majority of great mages attained their power with great rapidity, for fear of vengeful gods, and the accelerated process was often mentally and spiritually scarring. Fex's transformation had built for decades, fed by a steady (albeit ever-growing) trickle. He'd actually intended to ascend from his mortal form a week later than he actually did, on a more portentous astronomical occassion, but business had actually exceeded his expectations. It became a case of being unable to prevent the transformation more than reaching the minimum threshold to achieve it. The vast strides in food safety and transport that had been incidental to his rise had also transformed the world around him. The regional population had skyrocketed, supported by an endless glut of meat. Fex was the de-facto ruler of a significant port city (as the largest employer and taxpayer in the region), despite holding no official station. He was popular with the people, and generally regarded as a good employer, despite the grim nature of the work, in large part due to a desire to avoid scrutiny that might expose his great project. He's retained this status as a prominent citizen and philanthropist following his transformation, perhaps also to prove that he has not secretly become a world-threatening monster. He's also played his exact level of strength very close to his chest since 'going public', though the few incidents where he has exercised a larger measure of his power have proven him a force to be reckoned with, at least on the regional scale. FEX FACTS AND RUMORS - the ugly source of his power taints his form, regardless of what shape he takes he will exhibit some sign of butcher. low powered manifestations might only have a couple of bloodstains, or butcher's knives hanging from a belt, but at the Siege of Redwater he manifested as a colossal robed figure, constructed from the butchered carcasses of countless animals. - within his slaughterhouses, the first spurt of blood from a neck wound is imbued with healing power. The phenomenon and the collected blood are both known as Sanguinostrum, and provided free of charge for the health of workers and workers families. It is said that Redwater locals get their ruddy complexion and iron constitutions from the amount of Sanguinostrum that ends up in the drinking water one way or another. - Fex is introverted and extremely direct in his speech, which makes him a poor diplomat. he can come off as arrogant and rude, but it is largely because his social skills aren't great. diplomats tend to assume his manner means he wants them to flatter him, which irritates him. the best way to get his attention is to engage him on any of the topics he's interested in, and to be direct with him. he prefers the company of practical, skilled people, so teaching him or demonstrating to him some skill or technique he's not seen before will also get him to open up. He also finds himself lacking in purpose; what attracted him to his scheme was not a lust for power, but a kind of myopic obsession with whether it could be done. - a small cult devoted to him has sprung up in a couple of his larger slaughterhouse locations. it's largely benign but an isolated coven of them intends to begin slaughtering people with Fex's branded equipment. they believe this will provide him with a meaningful power boost, and thus favour, but it would be a drop in an ocean in power terms. it would also further taint Fex's nature, so Fex is likely to want to employ adventurers to root out such a coven. They could also have got the idea from a rival power to Fex, who wishes to corrupt Fex to justify taking action against him. - Fex can provide a great deal of useful stuff for adventurers, from butchery equipment (make the most of that dragon carcass) and refrigerated storage, to healing potions and spells that have devastating alternate uses. I am not good at stats but here are some spell names like Fex's Fell Degustation and Field Dress, Mass or even Knacker's Recitation of Stunning idk ive been struggling to write lately because nothing seems to come out right so this might all suck rear end. I need to rewrite it a bunch but i wanted to get something out somewhere before my brain popped.
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Jan 15, 2023 06:00
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Bad Seafood posted:I used to design all my dungeons as "Real" locations first, you know, feasible architecture, but I've gradually come around to allowing myself to be a little more gamey. Occasionally it'll result in something better, a bit more of a "dungeon ecosystem" feel where there's a logic evident. But usually, it just means I spend way too much time on each addition and still end up with something about the same quality as my first or second thought. Thankfully I'm not getting stuck yet, just looking for a way to short-circuit my confidence so I can shorten the time between "that's a cool idea" and "yeah, that's good enough," to speed up the process.
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Jan 16, 2023 16:11
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I like megadungeons. I think I might do something with this.
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Jan 16, 2023 22:33
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I'm kind of behind - up to #12/17 Doing a mix of locations stuff, rules notes etc. Very sketchy, with the idea being that maybe the last week of each month I'll tidy up and make that month's thing coherent.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:35
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I have my first 2 weeks mostly done, but I came down with a bad case of RSV last Wednesday and have been out of commission, too tired and hosed up to want to scribble in a notebook. I'm hoping to make up the missed time when I feel better, and maybe get some advice on keying from you all, since I've never done anything OSR style before and sorta don't know what I'm doing.
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Jan 18, 2023 08:40
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Okay, I have thoughts. I started having a think on this and part of what I’d like to do for this challenge in specific is to build dungeon rooms in a tactile way. I have a bunch of wooden cubes that I glued together that I can use to assemble encounter zones and take pictures of and some placeholder undead minis that I started painting up last year. I’ll see where that goes in greater detail. I wrote about it in the old megadungeon thread but I drafted 100 levels of the Megastrata previously by segmenting it into ten zones with ten areas each. Each zone dictated the broad theme of a place and each area had its own specific themes which followed suit. This helped with procedurally generating those things when I needed them but didn’t get down to the granular encounter zone and encounter room design that classic megadungeons are known and loved for. Using that framework though I can start designing some encounters and rooms and combining it with physical things that I can take pictures of. Diving deeper into the intent of the low stakes nature of the challenge, the idea of having something to do every day helps to build a good creative habit. Creating something every day means that you get into the habit of thinking creatively every day even if you might be pressed for time, energy, and resources. I was watching a livestream from the Hexed Press Youtube channel that talks about some of the potential design pitfalls in greater detail. I’m going to go on a short ramble about this then but designing the broad structures first and then the specific structures afterwards should help accelerate and focus the creative process. The original notes for Dungeon23 appear to suggest this, but there’s an interesting omission that probably should be explicitly stated: “Not all ideas need to be used that you create in the year”. The intent, I feel like, is to get used to the habit of creating without worrying about if you’re creating the right thing. One of the additional notes that comes from the original challenge is “using a physical notebook”. This is completely optional but I think there’s something to using a physical medium to harness ideas since it’s slower but has different constraints than a digital one. Digital mediums allow for replication, saving, scaling, and whatnot like UNcO3’s archipelago generation thing, and they can also help out quite a bit for idea generation, especially if you use something like Donjon.bin.sh or another procedural generation site for ideas to mine. Committing those ideas to a physical medium in some way has some interesting effects on par with comparing digital versus analog journaling, something I’ve also been exploring the past few months. I think for me I want to leverage that analog medium for daily creation by making rooms and situations and then maybe revisiting them and reinterpreting or improving those ideas in some way. Maybe I can get more craft supplies and start creating other objects to use for this kind of creative process and indulge in that terrain building itch I’ve always had. I love the idea of megadungeons especially having a lot of verticality and so I want to include things like archways, gang planks, temporary structures built on top or on the side of more chunkier works. I also love the idea of creating zones and then doing something destructive to them, like building a huge room out of loose and glued together wooden blocks then knocking it over or throwing a small ball at it so that there’s not just a structured room, but also a ‘destroyed’ room as well. Another consideration that I didn’t see in the original challenge notes but could be a good suggestion for the creative process for this is to “take someone else’s idea and incorporate it into your own”. Even if it’s the exact same idea as someone else who’s openly putting out their dungeon23 thing, when recontextualized into whatever you’re working on you can find some pretty interesting results. Last point is a video that I unfortunately can’t find right now but someone made the very interesting observation that unless this is purely a creative exercise, megadungeons are meant to be played and evolve over time, so taking your first few weeks or first month of creation and then populating it via play with a gaming group will not only allow for new ideas to flow, but also provide as great inspiration (hopefully) and motivation to keep going and creating new things.
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Jan 20, 2023 03:21
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By way of example, I’m defining and/or reusing these larger zones and some ideas that came to my head lying in bed after a very long week. These will be the twelve primary zones that will have encounter areas or ‘rooms’ associated with them. They are not ordered and are not strictly constrained into a megadungeon format, this could potentially be a point crawl or a hex crawl instead. I think it’s interesting though to consider that these could be potentially stacked on top of one another. - Burning Sands - Primeval Forest - Frozen Hell Pit - Undead Metropolis - Shifting Maze - Steel Sword Ocean - Exploding Magma Sea - Lost Bastion - Demonic Breaches - Cavernous Jungle Underworld - Ancient Technology Factory - Apocalypse Catastrophe Summit A key note about naming these places. I chose mostly simple but evocative names that have unique acronyms. This helps set up a specific structure for when noting connectors from one place to another and generally keeping things nice and organized. The first ones that come to mind are the “elemental” or “classic” places. The next set comes from meditating briefly on Dwarf Fortress and its very specific kind of setting that comes with that. The last three extend into much more abstract mythical types of places that have significantly more evocative naming conventions that could be interpreted multiple ways. Will I stick with these as names in-fiction? Maybe, because I like the idea that villagers and lorekeepers in the game world can talk about some or all of these places and they could have all manner of opinions, facts, lies, and rumors about them. Each of these names represent a larger idea that I feel reasonably confident I could further zoom in on and then make several areas or encounter groups out of. A brief note on how long it took for me to generate this list. I did not use any procedural generation methods, I just started writing down words in a Notes file while thinking on the topic. This kind of free association is fast and since Dungeon23 has started taking cycles in my brain this is a good opportunity to crack open the filing cabinet of older ideas and suggestions to start making something here. All told it took about maybe five to ten minutes. I feel like setting this structure (which is reflected in other musings about Dungeon23, I’m late to the party, as it were) set a very distinct thematic tone for each of the 12 zones. I might take instead the approach some are doing and divide the time up a little differently. I should think about two or three of these zones that I want to make playable for a starting party of adventurers in some rules system like Old School Essentials. Then, I should work on developing some encounter groups, architecture, and ideas for those specific areas. Why do multiple zones at once? I want there to be a high level of interconnectivity in this megadungeon, and part of that are unexpected routes from one place to another different and alien area. This also allows for ‘transition areas’ so that you can get some interesting mixes of encounters and environments there. What happens when someone approaches a transition area between the Burning Sands and the Steel Sword Ocean? Is it possible that the Primeval Forest is connected to the Apocalypse Catastrophe Summit? These kinds of questions come up from a very shortly thrown together set of words. You can further extend this and add more broad and specific structures to each of these places explicitly in different ways. Burning Sands, for example, might have key words associated with it like “Well-traveled, Populated by Nomads, Mummy Lords, Death Valley, Mission Architecture”. Those further give more ideas that if you gave someone that still-broad but focused list of prompts, someone would be able to take that and begin generating ideas. I think part of the concept of Dungeon23 is to get comfortable with ‘tabula rasa design’ - an empty page is scary, but it doesn’t have to be. Just start putting ideas out and see what happens. Other ways I could think about this are to listen to losts of my favorite music and bands and think about what kinds of zones those would create. I could take a picture of the sky and then use cloud formations as the inspiration for these kinds of zones as well. There’s a lot you can do out there! I’ll probably sleep on it and then come back to this tomorrow or the next day and then start roughing out more ideas as I start picking some of the zones to develop into short term play and organize the work stream more.
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Jan 20, 2023 05:54
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JMBosch posted:In a similar vein, I enjoy more of the weird, "gonzo" stuff, and yet I definitely have a problem with forcing myself to justify the additions to a dungeon/encounter, trying way too hard to figure out "Why would X be here?" which, obviously, makes throwing in unexpected left turns for the players much tougher. The tomb itself is hidden beyond an underground water reservoir, so I've started using water to accent the flow of things. Flooded rooms hiding secret passages, puzzles involving changing the water level, that sorta thing. I'll probably share the first floor when I'm done, alongside a generous helping of self-critique. EDIT: Since some people are titling their dungeons, my current working title is "Down the Well." Bad Seafood fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jan 20, 2023 |
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Jan 20, 2023 15:11
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I almost never put locked doors in my dungeons. That's something I'm glad the hobby discarded early on, having to roll to open every door, roll to break open stuck doors... But then, if there aren't any locked doors at all, there's nothing for the thief to do, so that guy will wish he had just played another class. And it's cool to discover an important key that unlocks a brand new area to explore. And now that I think about it, having some locked doors is a good explanation for why the monsters roaming the dungeon haven't already picked up all the magic weapons, items and treasure just lying around.
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Jan 20, 2023 20:29
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