Dungeon23 Roundup #1

We're still in December 2022, but dungeon23 is already popping! If you've been under a rock and somehow missed dungeon23, then read about Sean's challenge here. Basically, it's a journalling challenge where everyone is working on a megadungeon, one room a day, for a year. I posted here about the Catacombs of the North Wind, the dreamlands dungeon I'll be doing. Here's the roundup of stuff that's caught my attention so far. 

TOOLS

First folks have been putting together some significant resources. A lot of people are using this as an excuse to buy a fancy planner (*guilty*). But @sivads_sanctum pointed out that a likely more effective technology may already exist for almost $0. To wit, 

Truth bomb

People have also been pulling together digital assets, which could be printed out and put into a binder like that or printed and bound in some more fancy way. Or even left digital. First up is Gus L's contribution, The Dungeon23 Workbook. Which you can find FREE on All Dead Generations here. It's a google doc, so it's easily customizable. Just duplicate it and you can alter the text as you see fit. It's got a groovy cover, which Gus says is a reworked WPA poster with an adventuring party snuck in. 

This looks amazing

The pages of the workbook are neat. There are periodic pages for maps of whole levels and encounter tables. But then you get one page for each room, so less cramped and more organized than Sean's teeny tiny planner. The rooms have the dungeon name, your name, the level, a room map, info on the lighting (crucial for dungeon crawling), a description, and then a spot for a couple of features to be listed OSE style. Monsters and treasure too. This is a perfect system for digitally sharing, i.e. tweeting rooms, if that's your thing btw. It's a neat little package:

 In a similar spirit Pandion Games has put together a Dungeon Year Design Journal on itch for PWW here. It's pretty groovy. You can download it in a bunch of different formats, including landscape and portrait and different sized paper. It's got big double-page dot map spreads, and single pages for rooms like Gus's but with less structure: encounters, notes, connections, and maps. There's also an alternative minimalist version that replicates the structure of Sean's planner. 

Lone Archivist has a really groovy dungeon23 asset pack with some very nice looking logos that you can download here and slap onto thing. It looks like Lone Archivist is going to have stickers soon too, STICKERS. I mean look at how good this looks:

This is just one of several gorgeous variations

In general, it looks like a great place to go for the accumulating resources on itch.io will be Andrew Duvall's page, which you can go to here. Poke around there to find some more stuff. But now, into the dungeon itself.

ADVICE

People have begun doing some good posts about advice. Of course, the OSR in the heyday of the blogosphere produced tons of relevant stuff. The best collection of links by far that I know of is this one by Ava Islam at Permanent Cranial Damage. If you want a reading list, Ava's got you covered. 

My favorite blogpost with advice so far is Kyana's post at the always wonderful Noise San Signal blog. You should read the whole thing for her process and thoughts. Kyana is approaching dungeon23 as an opportunity to work up a bunch of small, 7-room locations, rather than a megadungeon. She's got a lovely scrap-booking approach, which people should really think about doing. There's no reason we can't integrate collage, stapled maps, even painted swatches in Kyana's case.  

I also enjoyed the first in a series on megadungeon design by Dave McGrogan. He helpfully distinguishes 3 themes to think about in designing your megadungeon: historical, structural, and aesthetic that can guide your creation. 

DUNGEONS! 

To find lots of stuff on either Mastodon or Twitter, just search the #dungeon23. So far, my favorite specimen by far is Zedeck Siew's  Last Voyage of the Sea-Queen Lessa, which you can see here. It's a funky vertical shrine housing a ghost ship. Thematically, it vibes with the dungeon I'm working on. Zedeck's adventure is a lovely tidbit that you could run pretty much as is. Go to his Tumblr blog now and check it out.  

I'm also enjoying watching Gus' early efforts take shape, which you can follow @RatkingRpgs on twitter and probably eventually on his blog All Dead Generations. But I mean, just look at this thing:

Finally, I've been enjoying the posts by Chris Bissette on Mastodon (@loottheroom@dice.camp) who has been posting about the first rooms of his new megadungeon, and @goblin_archives on twitter. Goblin Archive's project looks fun:

The Feed

My offer still stands to include your #dungeon23 stuff in my occasional roundups, especially if you have a blog. If you send me a blog (throughultansdoor AT gmail) that's doing #dungeon23 stuff on the semi-regular, I'll probably drop it into #dungeon23 bloglist on the right here. But whether or not I do that, I'll certainly put it into my own RSS feed and draw attention here to anything I find that's neat on here. Also tag me on Twitter or Mastodon if you see something neat. 

 

DUNGEON23

 So Sean McCoy posted this on Twitter. 

He wrote about it more on his substack here. Sean is calling the challenge #Dungeon23. The challenge is to write one room a day, one level a month, for a total of 365 rooms spread over 12 levels. I'm going to be doing a version of it (more on what I'll be mapping in a minute). A lot of other people on Twitter also said they were in. If enough of us do it, this could be the first REALLY big collective event in the OSR since the heady days of Google plus. I mean sure, there have been lovely game jams and a lot of collective projects around particular game communities (Mothership, Mörk Borg, Mausritter, etc). But this hobbyist, let's-do-a-thing-together project sure would be a lot of fun. 

Now I know there's a certain sort of person (OK, it's me) who is perhaps inappropriately motivated to begin a project by the thought of getting a fancy journal. Luckily Sean has us covered because he is rocking a Hobonichi Techo Weeks 2023. As he explains, they're nice because they have graph paper and a facing space for a key broken down by each day of the week. I think one minor challenge will be that the map for each level will be spread across a bunch of 7-room page spreads, but I think we can figure it out. The monthly spread looks like a good place to do a big d30 encounter table for the entire level. 

You can get the Hobonichi Techo Weeks on Amazon and on Jet Pens for about $25. I got the one in light purple because it is well known among all opium dreaming wizards that lavender is the true color of dreams. Sean's yellow looks real nice too, a sort of rich ochre. Or just do it on your tablet or a Mead notebook or whatever will be convenient and easy.

What will this amount to? Well, I think if enough people do it, we can share our scribbles around in whatever form we feel comfortable. Scans, photos, little PDFs, word docs, whatever it is. Sure, you could post them in Twitter threads or on Mastodon, or (heaven help you) on Reddit. But I would humbly suggest that you consider posting them on a blog. Don't have a blog? This is a golden opportunity to start one! Make it about going through this process. Write one post every week just sharing the results of your journalling. If you blog about this, reach out to me on Twitter or by email (throughultansdoor AT gmail DOT com) and I will put your blog in my RSS feed and do megadungeon roundups on my blog or social media accounts.  

What might come of this in the broader sense? Imagine if we got to a place where you could mix and match from a whole host of little bit sized megadungeon bits that people were passing around. For one thing, it might get a whole bunch of people actually playing megadungeon campaigns, and so thinking and talking about them. I think there's a lot of innovation to be had in the wild space of the megadungeon. It has that fun double quality of being a strange old form that was left behind early in the hobby, and also a space of innovation in a certain phase of OSR design. It would be fun to bring it back to life now and see what new places we could collectively go with it.

In my journalling, I will mainly be focusing on The Catacombs of the North Wind. It's one of three large dungeons in Zyan. I'll write about it more soon. But here's the gist. The Sky Singers were the settlers of Zyan. For centuries they were explorer merchants, princely conquerors, nomads of the Endless Azure Sea, famous for sailing aboard a fleet of flying galleons. The Sky Singers received from the spirts of the air a title over Zyan and a new-founded glittering monarchy. In exchange, they agreed to ground forevermore their ships. The six of the great flagships of the fleet served as butchered hecatombs to this treaty, their remains interred with mystical rites of remembrance in the whistling catacombs that riddle the cliff face of the rock of Zyan. The lower levels of these catacombs are open to the Endless Azure Sea and were once a sacred playground of the spirits of the air. Here lie the Chambers of Audience, the long slumbering meeting grounds for the ambassadors of Zyan and the Court of the North Wind. When I run out of steam on the Catacombs of the North Wind, as I surely will, I will likely to something more straightforward, perhaps a classic sword and sorcery megadungeon. 

 My Hobonichi Techo Weeks is on its way even as we speak. It starts in January, so I'll be beginning Sean's challenge on New Year's Day. I hope you join us!