So, #dungeon23…
… I’m tempted.
(If you’re not aware of this project, here’s the tl;dr: Sean ‘Mothership’ McCoy came up with the idea of making a megadungeon in 2023, one room at a time.)
It’s a great idea. Everyone seems very enthusiastic about it and I’ve seen a lot of cool ideas. Problem is, I know I won’t write a room a day. Even if it’s just empty rooms or corridors, I get busy, and on any given week I can’t trust my energy levels to do the urgent work.
For Inktober this year, I took one of Daniel Sell’s little Pocket Dimension booklets with the idea of using every day’s drawing to illustrate a location or inhabitant. I also drew some maps, of course. It worked for a couple of weeks — I was on holidays — and then I lost momentum. Here are some photos.
the regional map
one of the dungeons
My Inktober required more work than just drawing, and I’m worried that #dungeon23 will be the same. Writing a room, along with a quick sketch, is easy. But how does it relate to the other rooms? In my experience, you can’t write a dungeon one room at a time (not if you want it to be any good). And you can’t really draw the map before you know what each room contains. It might be just me, but when I’m designing a dungeon I go back and forth, rewriting rooms, adding passageways, making sure the ecosystem makes sense and the map fills the page. And everything I’ve ever done is like 20 rooms. I can’t even fathom the amount of work a 365-room dungeon would be.
So I’d have to plan a little in advance and expect to have to scrap some stuff alont the way. Maybe take the time to plan the week ahead every Sunday. Which is fine, I guess. Back when I started writing fiction, I did NaNoWriMo a few years in a row. No one expects to write 1,600 words a day for a month and have a publishable novel on the 1st of December. You have a first draft that’ll take work to shape into something readable.
Our #dungeon23 efforts will be just that, efforts. But even the unfinished projects will certainly contain ideas worth using — at the table, as short published dungeons, as blog posts, or in that OSR magazine that publishes blog posts, maybe? Now it’s starting to look like failing at the challenge wouldn’t be a failure at all…
Another concern is monotony and boredom. I might do a planar dungeon, or some kind of collided worlds or planar clusterfuck that forces me to change themes and tone every month. (Funnily enough, my first NaNoWriMo was a pulp novel that switched setting from one week to the next.) Maybe I’ll write each level made for a different game, and you’ll have to switch systems to explore the whole thing… (insert thinking face emoji)
Anyway. It looks like I’ve written myself into joining the damn thing!
Edit: Andrew Duvall has a great list of resources on itch.