A Multiversal #dungeon23
I really admire the people who’ve known exactly what they want to do for #dungeon23 for weeks, and have already made battle plans. I only have the vaguest of idea of what I’m going to do at this stage, but I’ll share it anyway. If nothing else, it’ll give me some space to think it all over.
Adventure of the Month / The Meta Dungeon
I do not trust myself to keep working on the same dungeon, setting, and atmosphere all year long. My brain’s much too fickle for that. I think I can keep it interested for a month though, so the plan is to make twelve connected dungeons, each one for a game/setting/genre.
They will of course be usable separately, and I’ll definitely run them like this. I’d like it to be possible to run a multiversal campaign with characters plucked from alternate dimensions, or as some weird-ass evolving dungeon. I’m thinking that a lot of us are itching to run these games we’ve read and put back on their shelf. One-shots aren’t always easy to sell to players, but what if you started with a game they liked and gave them a choice of settings to explore without having to make new characters and getting infodumped on?
Big List of Dungeon Ideas
In no particular order, here are some possible games/universes and ideas for each of them. I might incorporate seasonal themes or use some of the spark words lists out there.
- CY_borg: corp execs apocalypse bunker, abandoned offshore resort, nanocult slum
- Death in Space: abandoned research station, forgotten asteroid gem mine
- OD&D Blackmoor-like: sunk spaceship, haunted military camp around a wizard’s abode
- GOZR: sorcerer’s tower which is also a tactical missile, Angry Sun cult ziggurat
- Secret ‘Perpendicular Dungeon’ project: underworld prison/mine, take back the dwarf fortress!
- Dungeon, Inc: (aka Donjon & Cie) test level gone wrong, admin section taken over by residents, hostage situation
- Under the Lost City: temple of Zargon in Cynidicea, the whole underground city, module B4 after Zargon’s demise
- Folklore Bestiary Land: (using only monsters from AFB) a valley crawl in Pyrenean folklore, caves of the laminak, castle of the immortal Cathars
- Mörk Borg: (possibly somewhat parodic) cemetary or catacomb, twisted two-headed archangel cult, Bläck Mëtäl Cïtÿ
- Black Sword Hack/Storm Kingdoms: haunted fortress-ship, Dominion of Might palace, sea elemental iceberg or shell palace, pirate town under siege
- Mousquetaires X: (Golden Century with superpowers) ballroom crawl, battlefield at La Rochelle
- 1920s Occult Paris: opium den or absinthe distillery run by devil worshippers fighting off Something Worse, fallen angels run anarchist hideout
- Into the Odd: underground slum quasi-dungeon, impossible building made of mirrors, mockery factory
- Feng Shui 1: The Prof’s Netherworld hideout, 1850 temple/training camp, 69 AD ghost forest
- Rêve de Dragon (oneiric fantasy): nightmare vineyard village, volcano of the human milk cheese-making sheeple, dream-logic classic dungeon
- Dreamlands: Ghoultown, Kadath something something, or I could steal from Ben L ;)
- Dungeonville: rework my die-drop-and-trace template for a more easy to use format (keep for a low energy month ;)
- Goblinburg: make an encounter or place from some of the 70-odd illustrations Didier Balicevic kindly drew for me in 2020 and I could never use
- Under the Palace of the Vampire Queen for some. What if there were a seventh level under the queen’s tomb? Twould be a fun way to experiment with randomly stocked rooms.
And who knows what game or adventure released next year will inspire me? Some of these are oviously easier to imagine, while others would need research and extra work which I probably won’t be able to do. Feel free to be inspired by any of these ideas!
As I did for Dungeonville, I’m hoping I’ll be able to reuse/rework/update some of my old dungeon design templates and procedures ideas. I might write about these next.
Afterthought: I will of course allow myself to keep working on projects from previous months if I it needs more detail. Or skip ahead to something else. The idea is to make it easier for my foggy brain with options and creative contraints, not to create more hassle.
Downtime gigs for #CY_borg
I’ve made these instead of prepping the next missions. The gigs are heavily inspired (and sometimes stolen from) Augmented Reality Plus. This free supplement has way more details though. And buy the original Augmented Reality book, it’s an invaluable ressource for any cyberpunk game.
CY_BORG downtime procedure
I use the old timey rule that says that campaign and real world time flow at the same speed. The ref can also roll two or more d6s for the time spent between missions. Your character must pay a survival expenses upkeep of 10¤ per day of downtime - junk food, someone to watch the van they sleep in, drugs to numb the cold and silence the voices. You recover 1 HP a day in these ‘normal’ conditions. To recover the regular d6 per night, you need a safe place to stay, which is 1d4 x 100¤ per night.
- To pay for your daily expenses and negate the upkeep, take a gig from one of the zillion EZ-w¤rk sites and apps. You can either play it safe(ish) and roll 2d10 or be willing to do illegal/harmful/profitable shit by rolling 1d20.
- If you don’t want to do the job, You can get ONE other offer, rolling 1d12. If you don’t like that one either, you’re on your own and your options are:
- Sell your shit for 25% of its listed or purchase price.
- Beg for a roof. It is not unconceivable that people you worked for in exchange of little or no pay let you stay with them for a while - if they have the space. Make sure they don’t become friends though. A roof over your head isn’t worth the trouble friends will always drag you into.
- Go sleepless and hungry. Your HP is halved and your rolls are done at +2 DR for the session. (This also happens if your pay is docked or your gig contract voided.) Note that if a gig results in no pay, you must use one of the options above. Also note that the referee may make your life interesting by having your gig end a day or two into the mission.
Gigs table (2d10 or 1d20)
- Lab Contractor - roll 1d4
- Organ Donation Partner: Lose 1 Strength or Toughness (double the loss for every organ you’re already missing) - compensation 1d6 x 100¤ and some boosting of your socialnets profile.
- Organ Rental Associate: They only need it for a few days. As above, but only for this session. Medical fees deducted from pay - you’re left with 2d6 x 10¤.
- Organ Surrogate: Get a fresh cloned organ, hooked to a major artery - 3d6 x 10¤ after medical expenses. 10% chance of infection resulting in no pay and blacklisting.
- CyberImplant QA Team: Alpha test for some non-combat cyberware. Roll PRE or major psychological event: no pay and lose 1 PRE for the session.
- Gangwar Muscle: Very legal, and ammo is reimbursed upon presentation of receipts and killcam pics - make 2d6 x 100¤. On a double, lose that amount of HP at beginning of session.
- Physical Penetration Tester: Break in a small business or housing unit to test security measures - lose 1d6 HP (result x 100 ¤ in insurance shutup money).
- Riot Rentacop: Stand by to help overworked SecOps. Most of the shift spent in cramped armoured vehicle. Riot gear and zapbaton provided - lose 1d4 HP, make 1d6 x 100¤.
- Drone Repo: Recover lost delivery drones. Roll Knowledge to recover some payload, resulting in 1d4 x 100 ¤ bonus pay.
- Gig Groomer: Find a number of rubes to sign up for a gig-app. $ELL-IT Personality Software provided (effect lingers for 1d4 days).
- Hygiene Dispenser: spray public areas with disinfectant mist in trendy branded paper coverall. Provide handwashing liquid on demand while delivering a catchy slogan. 10% chance of being publicly flagged as contagious.
- Holo-Ads WalkNode: carry a bulky adplayer backpack around. You have 1d3-1 days left when session starts. Get fined 100 ¤ if you stay in one place more than 7 cumulative hours a day.
- Ambulatory CCTV: allow a backdoor into your RCD, sign an NDA. 1d20 hours left when session starts.
- AI Supervision Operator: Boring, underpaid, WFH friendly. Roll d8:
- Social Media Scraper: delete banned and disturbing content.
- Box Office Streamer: watch several shows simultaneously. Post about them on socialnets.
- Flash Influencer: go to places, post hashtags, get into online arguments.
- Hashtag Spam Coordinator: manage uncooperative botnet AIs.
- Facial Recognition Debugger: comb through images for low grade persons of interest.
- Map Update Verification Operator: walk around highways while checking maps.
- Algorithm Data Processor: crunch numbers. So many numbers.
- Live SocialFeeds Sub-Editor: make infliuencer idiots look less dumb.
- Substrate Fairy: Pick up recyclable trash with mechanical grippers, throw it in the mobile 3D-printer that follows you everywhere.
- Brand Street Ambassador: spam people about client brand, products, and/or ideology. Data chip with sales scripts provided (you can even keep it).
- Backend Efficiency Operator: act as a fake AI pretending to be a person. Do-anything concierge, shopping assistant, schedule meetings, etc. 1-hour contract for 1d100 continuous hours. NDA not especially enforced.
- AR Efficiency Techie. Not really legal in many SecOps jurisdictions. Roll d6 - 10% chance of being flagged by local SecOps and the agency vanishing (no pay).
- DDOS Zombie Horde Relay Carrier - all Net-related rolls around you are at +2 DR.
- Cookies Inoculation Prober - stay in busy areas for the next d12 hours.
- Adbomb Planting Specialist - 20% chance of being flagged by SecOps.
- #WAKEUPSHEEPLE. Help hack RCDs for a political or conspiracy group.
- Weather Data Collection - stay outside for the next d12 hours.
- Wild Net Events Gathering - 5% chance of discovering a new sentient AI who takes a keen interest in you.
- Legacy Dataterm Genius: remove gum and graffiti, bodily fluids and biohazards from public net access terminals. Do basic repair (replace screen/keyboard or reboot). Roll Tougness or lose 1 in a random stat for the session because of disease.
- VR/AR Habit Controller: Spy on people’s buying habits and advertisement exposure with heavily encrypted back door key. 10% chance of ad-virus infection (+2 DC on Net-related rolls until cleansed).
- Meds Angel: Bring and administer treatment to patients. Expensive consequences in case of any mishap. 20% chance of incident or difficult customer (roll Presence or no pay).
- GuineaChip: Test a neural chip loaded with a very niche skill. Log all mood fluctuations online. Roll Presence or lose 1 in a random attribute for the session.
- Meastpace Troll: A target political entity or person must be verbally attacked at regular intervals. Unavoidable violence costs you 1d3 HP.
- Crisis Extra: Pretend to be injured, traumatised, or killed on politically motivated livefeed fake news - during the session, 25% chance of being recognised by someone hostile. 3d6 x 100¤ bonus at end of session if no leak had occured.
#CY_borg second-hand gear/cyberware
Why would you pay for your shit upfront when there are so many shades of grey market options?
- 1-2. Nope, sold out everywhere.
- 3-4. Maybe soon, roll again in 1d20 hours.
- 5-6. In bad shape. Pay 50%, take 1d4 damage (or by weapon) on a fumble.
- Free! Take 1d8 damage (or by weapon) on a fumble.
- Hacked and tracked. 75% off. On a fumble, pay a 50% update fee or it powers down and calls a repo team (2 hungry gig workers).
- Hacked and tracked. 75% off. On a fumble, pay a 50% update fee or it powers down and calls a repo team (2 hungry gig workers).
- Rental. Pay 10% of the price before each use. 50% deposit required.
- Shop warranty. 50% off, breaks on a fumble. Roll again for a replacement.
- Strings attached. Pay 50% and owe a favour to your creditor.
- Lightly used, 50% off retail. Looks like crap but fully refurbished.
dungeon23 tools
Let’s talk about how I’m going to work on this #dungeon23 project.
I was very tempted to use that Hobonichi Weeks Sean recommends. I have been using a Hobonichi Techo planner from them for a couple of years now and I love the feel of their products.
That said, I think something that I can import to digital easier would make it easier and ultimately more successful.
So, I’ve been thinking about the Rocket book notebooks — they’re made of reusable paper that you can scan and upload wherever you like with an app. I’ve used them for years (I actually backed the first ever Rocketbook Kickstarter). I use two different sized notebooks, and also their very handy index cards. All of these live in the Hobonichi drawer pouches I carry around.
And I recently found out that you can easily scan any piece of paper with the Rocketbook app. So I think that’s what I’m going to do.
That, and possibly type or even dictate rooms directly into Obsidian and onto theisblog. Gotta make this as frictionless (meaning, lazy) as I can.
That’s definitely what I’m going to do with the maps. It’s easy to erase and redraw in a Rocketbook notebook, and then you can scan them again! So definitely a less messy solution.
Only thing is, I won’t have a beautiful object as a memento of 2023. Sadface, but I do think it’s the price I have to pay for a decent chance of making something useful next year.
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.
Hello World
I’m trying out blot with a view to blogging with fewer hurdles. Wordpress is great, unless you only use it occasionally, in which case keeping up with updates and security is too much. With this, I can just write into Obsidian and baem! it’s online. Let’s see where this goes. 
Old blog archives
Most of my old posts from multiple past blogs are still on dragons.ie. I do plan to archive them somewhere when I get rid of the hosting.