Dungeon23 Roundup #4: Comics Extravaganza!

So, Dungeon23 is rolling along. I haven't posted a second batch myself for reasons I'll mention at the end. But that doesn't mean I haven't been eagerly reading along! There are some really wonderful things, including some real surprises. One of the real joys here is discovering new people and new blogs. 

First up, I think needs to be the fact that Amanda Lee (@annabelle_lee), author of Garbage Barge and Vampire Cruise, made this glorious thing. (This covers the first two weeks.) It makes me kind of dizzy to look at it but I love so much.

Michael at Sheep and Wizardry is off to a rollicking good start with The Sunset Palace of the Starry Sultan, built and rebuilt by each successive monarch, creating an "ever-expanding labyrinth of tangled opulence and pointless pomp." I love the idea that you would start a delve into this megadungeon by sneaking through the tiny occupied portion of the palace. His first post has some neat character backgrounds that deftly build a playable 1001 Nights pastiche. His second post has really great faction play right from the get go including a treasure guarding mummy and his goose, agents of the Gutter Kings (in service of the Crown of Buttons!), a cult of star seekers, and more. This looks like it will be a fun and meaty dungeon. 

Arnold at Goblin Punch did it again. This post details The Flying Birdcage, a whole house inside a flying birdcage located in the complex form week 1. The Flying Birdcage is probably the most interesting and clever form of quick transportation (a staple) around a megadungeon I've ever seen. I would be SO EXCITED to have unlocked the secrets of the birdcage if I were a player. (Since publishing that he's gone on a bender of rapid-fire posts about dwarves, puzzles, and other setting elements like it was 2015. I think we can say now that Goblin Punch is back baby!)

Speaking of ways into and around the dungeon, in his inaugural post, Rowan at Dodecahedron details 100 flavorful dungeon entrances. Many of them are secret entrances or have some kind of gimmick that makes them enjoyable. "A bronze statue of a massive fish, mouth agape, emerges from a river. Ladder rungs within the statue lead down through the stonework cylinder that supports it." It's a real treasure trove of ideas that may be of use.  

Nick at Underworld Adventurer has produced some real gems in their second meaty post about their megadungeon. Probably my favorite bit comes in the very first room of the post, which is a hall of portraits of past head wizards of the Transcendental Congress. Each has an illustration, and a personality, and is ready to bargain their secrets for something from the dungeon! A lot of lore baked into immediately engaging weird NPCs that also manage to point deeper into the dungeon. 

Speaking of Dungeon23 with a comics-vibe, I've been enjoying Tobias Redesäter's (@radesater@dice.camp) stuff on Mastodon. It's a megadungeon where you slip in through a crack in a bear cave and soon find yourself in a room where a blue goddess has been chained up! It's full of neat illustrations and little cool tidbits. 

If you're on Mastodon definitely give him a follow and check it out. If you do, keep an eye out for the Nest Eagle. He seems like someone groovy to meet in a dungeon.

I know I've been highlighting Zedeck's Dungeon23 stuff a lot, but you really have to check this one out in particular. You can see it with an explanation here. If you get bitten by an eel in the previous dungeon, you get transported to the eel's dream here, a kind of dungeon perhaps built out of the traumatic memories of the eel. This one really hits home for me, because I once did a hexcrawl through an area that was contaminated by the "undermind" of the Parapraxis, a Phantamorian vessel that was spilling an NPC's unconscious into a valley. But, of course, it wasn't the mind of a freaking eel! 

A brief roundup of other delightful things. OBVIOUSLY, OBVIOUSLY you need to be following Jonathan Newell's Apocalypse Archive posts, the second set of 6 rooms dropped here. If you want a more classic AD&D vibe location with a map that looks straight out of a TSR module, check out the debased Monastery of St. Amruss at Foot of the Mountain Games Adventure here. 

You might wonder what's happening with the Catacombs of the North Wind, my Dungeon23 project. (The intro post is here, and the first 7 locations are here.) Because of the way I design locations I needed to do some research for inspiration, and also decide on some bigger picture questions, like what the different regions of level 1 of the dungeon will be. Slowly things have been taking shape in mind, but I'm not quite ready to start mapping and keying the next bit yet. I'll share some of the weird research I've slowly been doing for inspiration another time.  

Dungeon23 Roundup #3: What Riches!

 We've reached the end of the first week of #dungeon23! I will be posting the results of my first week on here, on Monday! So stay tuned for that.  This has been an intense work week for me (I also had COVID over the holidays, which didn't help. I'm fully recovered now, thankfully.)  So I'm fearful that dungeon23 activity may have slipped by me that I otherwise would have loved. But even in my rattled state, I saw a whole bunch of things that tickled my fancy. I'm also delighted that the blog sidebar is working how I wanted it to work: as a veritable treasure hoard of Dungeon23 blog material. Remember if you have a blog and are doing Dungeon23 on the regular, shoot me an email at throughultansdoor AT gmail. Let's dive in!

The awesome blog Goblin Punch by Arnold K., another staple of the mid to late OSR, had more less gone dark last year. Arnold announced that he's bringing it back for dungeon23! Not only is he back, but his inaugural post for dungeon23, The Mushroom Garden, is a masterclass in designing dungeons. I myself learned from it. What's really wonderful is that Arnold talks you through what he did in the post, so you can see how he builds in mysteries, faction play, puzzles, hidden areas, all over the span of a tightly connected 7 rooms. Whatever else you read, you really should read this. It does raise the question whether perhaps people might want to do their dungeon design in groups of 7 rather single rooms serially. (That's how I'm doing it.) 

Another blog that the sirens call of dungeon23 has coaxed back to life is Roles, Rules, & Roles, a staple of an even earlier geological period of the OSR that I used to read a fair bit. Roger G-S is doing a bronze age hexcrawl that I've been digging. Check out how much is going on in this single hex, including the "damnation tomb" of Narshish. He's doing one of those a day! 

I was completely BLOWN AWAY by Jonathan Newell's dungeon on Bearded Devil. He has two entries so far. The first is his introduction to the Apocalypse Archives a terrifying science fantasy dungeon that lies beneath his fabulous city of Hex. The Apocalypse Archive is a repository for spells and artifacts the impossibly ancient and powerful Librarians considered reality-endangering. It is also a place where space and time are coming unravelled in maddening ways. He introduces the Apocalypse Archive with a series of tables about the different afflictions--Anacrhonosis, Dreams of the Dead City, and the Melchior Effect--that affect delvers into this perilous dungeon. The tables are a lovely spin on the idea of the dungeon as a hostile space that one finds in the "mythic underworld" conception of early D&D. They're also a nice example of how, for example, you can introduce setting, lore, and atmosphere through random tables. The second entry discusses the first six rooms. The whole thing is suffused with a bleak alien grandeur. It also includes some wonderful terrible lore about the Final Star, a sentient solar deity consuming reality that the librarians opposed. I'll definitely be following this project closely! 

Just look at how pretty this map is so far!

 Here are a few more things that have brought me joy in no particular order. I enjoyed the first 7 rooms of this creative funhouse dungeon at The Viridian Scroll. The truth is that if you want to hew closely to Sean's original vision for  #dungeon23, then a funhouse dungeon like this is probably the way to go. The concept of this Soviet space dungeon for Mothership built to preserve the consciousness of Soviet leaders by Emmy Verte at Spooky Action at a Distance is SO GOOD; I can't wait to see more. The writeup of the first areas above Andrew Devenney's The Great Cuttle, a dungeon inside a giant alien cuttlefish for his Rainy City setting was fantastic: as dungeon entrances go, this one is a great little environment. I also really liked this partially submerged level by Skullboy at Better Legends. I think that dungeon is going to be delightful. 

Stay tuned for my first week of my very own dungeon23, covering the first 7 areas of the Catacombs of the North Wind! I'll be posting it very soon, maybe even tomorrow. [Edit: Here it is! Check out Below the Wall of Cusp detailing areas 1-7 of The Catacomb of the North Wind.]

Dungeon23 Roundup #2: Go!

So here we are on the first day of #dungeon23! 

The energy in the lead up to #dungeon23 is really exciting, but so much is happening so quickly that I don't think I can claim to sum it up here. Take this as one readers report of the things which caught my attention before whirring by as we approached the starting line of #dungeon23. 

One thing I love about dungeon23 is the way it feels like the kind of collective undertaking that was going on during the heady heyday of OSR blogging. So one thing that's brought me special delight is seeing some bloggers who were active in that earlier period throw their hats in the ring for dungeon23. 

James Maliswieski of Grognardia fame announces he'll be doing dungeon23 in this post. He will be documenting the Vaults of sha-Arthan, "deep, ancient labyrinths" that hold "the secrets of the deific Makers" in his developing science fantasy RPG, The Secrets of sha-Arthan. James has long experience running and designing megadungeons. I used to read his Dwimmermount play reports avidly. I've also always loved the way science fantasy lies beneath a swords and sorcery surface in his games, and I expect we'll see that here too.

Another exciting development, James Garrison of the amazing Hereticwerks blog is back in action and doing dungeon23. Hereticwerks was one of my absolute favorite blogs during the mid-OSR, a big source of inspiration for me when I was starting up this blog. The city of Wermspittle was like a labyrinth of glorious posts, each one a rabbit hole of hyperlinks in which one could lose oneself for an afternoon. (I think the first rabbit hole to pull me in was the series of posts about roofcrawling in Wermspittle--table II is my favorite.) Well, James announces that not only that Hereticwerks is back, but that he'll be doing dungeon23 here!

If you can't tell that I'm already vibrating with excitement here, things really kicked into overdrive when Nick K. the DM of the megadungeon campaign I'm currently playing in that's blowing my mind, The Twilight Age,  announced that they will be doing dungeon23 on their blog Underworld Adventurer. Nick is a comic artist and they casually dropped photos of a treasure trove of illustrations and "doodled" megadungeon maps they were sitting on that might get pulled into action here.   

Meanwhile, Zedeck Siew continues to drop whole adventure locations on his tumblr blog Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours with first a city, Queen's Rest, and then the city's lighthouse, home of a clockwork sorcerer, and now the prison of the Moon Maiden! For me the biggest surprise of this isn't the rich imagination in this, and the sense of place that pervades each location, which I've come to expect from everything Zedeck does, but rather that it turns out that Zedeck is, in addition to everything else, a really great cartographer! What a little book of treasures this will be when he's done. 

 Since I enjoyed The Visitor's Guide to the Rainy City and its follow-up, I was delighted to see that Andrew Devenney announces that his dungeon23 megadungeon, The Great Cuttle, will be inside of a giant cuttlefish. Of course it will be. 

I was tickled to see Dyson of Dyson Logos mapping fame announce on Facebook that he would be doing a Tekumel dungeon for dungeon23. He teased this lovely illustration.

In comments to the post, he wrote a little more explaining the idea: "Tumissa is a city dedicated to Vimhula (dark god of fire) in the Empire of the Petal Throne / Tekumel setting. Tekumel cities often have massive underground areas because they are supposed to renovate the whole city every 500 years - adjusting to how the city has changed in that time (tearing down old temples to build new temples, fixing infrastructure, moving clans / temples / etc that have fallen out of favour away from the core of the city to be replaced by those who are currently more powerful, etc)."

Zedeck drew my attention to this little gem by Victor J. Merino. Give him a follow on Twitter or Mastodon. It's a parking garage themed dungeon, with a sacred library of demonic texts in the treads of tires. 

I found this post by Josh McCrowell over at Rise Up Comus both useful and inspiring. It announced two amazing dungeon23 projects, one a 78 room tarot-themed dungeon, maybe a supplement for the megadungeon ruleset His Majesty the Worm that Josh has been working on a for a long time now. The second was a 100 depthcrawl exploring your eccentric halfling uncle's mansion! But, as if that announcement wasn't enough, he gives us 23 dungeon features you can employ when your imagination idles, along with flavorful examples. A great resource for megadungeon stocking. Here's just one to give you a taste:

In more personal news, my son, 13, told me he would be doing dungeon23 with me. So I gave him a journal for Hannukah to do it in. He tells me his megadungeon is going to be called Mons Formicdean: a megadungeon in an anthill of giant ants. It's an idea he had a long time ago, when my wife showed us the images of sculptures created by artists pouring molten lead into ant colonies, which is amazing if the ants are gone, but when they're not an act of horrific destruction. Somehow the artistry of nature bent to cruel purposes seems like fertile ground from thinking about a megadungeon. I'm excited to see where he takes it!

My frequent collaborator Gus threw me a lovely illustration of the approach to the Catacombs of the North Wind that I'll be using for the first week of entries. So I'm excited about that. As usual his illustration pushed me to imagine the place more fully. I'll be sittting down today to work on it along with my son.

One last observation. Something Zedeck wrote struck a chord in me. He points out that since a lot of authors who publish are doing #dungeon23 (like Zedeck or me) it can seem not a DIY communal outpouring, but a grindy race to publication that only the most productive will win. To hold this specter at bay, here's what Zedeck is doing: "I’m keeping my #dungeon23 with no plan and no outline. I’m keeping it in my notebook. I am not digitising the text. It must remain uneditable. It must remain as sketches and notes.This way it doesn’t trigger my brain to go: “Okay, you are writing (ie: working) now." For now, it remains un-instrumentalisable. Unseen and unable to serve the market. Once I’m done with it, who knows? But while I do it it remains play, a way for me to serve myself."

I probably will put mine in cleaner form up on my blog, but I have similar thoughts. I know that a "daily challenge" is not everyone's cup of tea. Speaking for myself, it's actually not my cup of tea either! I've literally never done a daily challenge. What is my cup of tea is doing something with his hobby I love in solidarity with many others. Seeing the collective brilliance, feeling the comaradie of it all. So I'm going to focus on that, rather than "hitting challenges". For folks who aren't interested in "doing" the challenge, but would like to contribute, I would recommend dipping in and out of it when the fancy strikes. Just share some dungeon keys or maps, or other ephemera that fits - anytime. That's probably, speaking realistically, is what I'll be doing when all is said and done. 

I'm taking the opportunity to put the material I create up on my blog to share, for free with everyone, rather than locking it away in published zines as I have for a while now. Publishing stuff about Zyan has been a double-edged sword for me, because it's felt at times like it's made it so that I share less on my blog. Well, dungeon23 for me is an opportunity to break that cycle. Whatever I end up making, and I imagine I'll veer between a couple of dungeons before all is said and done, it'll be a bit of Zyan from me to you without the mediary of the market.

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.