#Dungeon23

A nice #dungeon23 graphic from Rise Up Comus right here on blogspot

 A new TTRPG craze is sweeping the twitterverse, and I decided to throw my lot in and have a go. I'll post weekly updates here to consolidate my work and begin drawing it all together into a more cohesive reading experience. Twitter's bitty; I prefer a longer read. Also, with the daily nature of the work, I'll want to tweak and revise bits as I go along.

 So what is #dungeon23?

 First suggested (I think) in early December 2022 by Sean McCoy on Twitter, #dungeon23 is a challenge which entails writing a single dungeon room per day for the whole year, with the idea to create a 365-room megadungeon by the end. But there are no hard-and-fast rules about the challenge. Do a dungeon, a city, a world, a hexcrawl. No pressure to create beautifully crafted, print-ready play experiences. Keep it scrappy and rough. The point is to just do it. Just one room per day. Simple, neat, and a great way to encourage a new creative habit. I love the idea, so I'm going to give it my best shot. I think this will help me to curb my habit of making everything too big right from the beginning so that I start feeling a lot of pressure to keep up the bigness of it all, something that often makes me feel disillusioned or daunted by the projects I begin. I've even started my own page on the blue bird website so that I can join in with all the talented people on there and pretend that's where I belong too.

 There are loads of resources out there to help generate dungeons, loads of really excellent tools to draw isometric maps and whatnot, but I think I'd like to keep it simple and just use my own imagination and my own writing/drawing. Like so:

 

I didn't even finish this dungeon properly- it was just a bit of practice on new year's eve before starting the challenge the next day. It was fun though. It helped me to get some ideas down that I'd just had clogging my head for a while. And I managed to try a few new drawing tips from Map Crow on YouTube- one of my recent favourite channels.

 
To get myself started, I just grabbed this list of weekly prompts and started with number 1:

 I don't know if I'm going to make a single megadungeon, or a series of smaller dungeons. Perhaps they'll be connected- a series of adventures leading from one to the next. So far, all I've done is a page or two of practice, one 'room' and a sketch of the next one. I have a vague idea of where it might go, but that's it. I'm going to take it one step at a time and see how it evolves over time. Here's what I've got so far:

It's not even a whole page of writing. Not even a room, strictly speaking. Just an old piece of paper, a hook to draw players to the dungeon in the first place. We'll see where it leads...

Peace,

O