#dungeon23 Should be a Metacampaign
I wasn’t there in the 70s, but from what I read, original D&D was a game of dungeons. Big dungeons. What we now call megadungeons. At the time, no one was really thinking about settings or game worlds. People would bring their character who’d been exploring someone’s dungeon to another DM’s table when the opportunity presented itself. Not everyone was ready for the huge effort designing and constantly updated a dungeon represented.
Fast forward to 2013 or so, on Google Plus, some OSR afficionados deciced to take advantage of the critical mass of creators present, along with the ease of document sharing, videoconferencing, and other tools the Google ecosystem offered to launch a permanent convention - I’d call it a metacampaign - called FLAILSNAILS (I’ll refer your tothis post by Jeff Rients if you want to know the details and what the acronym stands for).
People would play for a couple of hours, their characters jumping from world to world with little focus on believability. Rules differences were handwaved, and people just played. That’s another thing I missed but I did experiment with the format circa 2016 - I even did a series of actual play videos with some other designers to help bring the OSR word to French gamers. And I still have a folder of FLAISNAILS ready characters in my gDrive who would love nothing more than dungeon delving again.
As I’m struggling with a bad case of the flu and thinking about the huge impact Sean’s #dungeon23 idea is making, it’s just hitting me. Why don’t we run our dungeons, hexcrawls, space stations, and cities online, whenever there’s enough players to do so? This might just be fever-induced, enthusiastic dreams, but I’m putting it out there.
The word is getting out, far and wide, and I’m expecting things to get organised with websites and ressource lists. So let’s talk about it once we all have a few rooms to explore?
edit 11-2-23: the first game of this ilk I’m aware of is happening this Monday. We’re using the hashtag #meta23 on Mastodon.