Hey everyone!
We heard about what Sean McCoy was doing with #dungeon23, and are very excited to join along!
This past year, Drew focused on finishing The Epic of Dreams: Basilisk Edition, which is now en route to print!
Which means we’re going to be making a lot more content this year than last year, including weekly Dungeon23 nuggets!
Each week, I’ll be going over my favorite 1-2 rooms I made that week, and share not just what I learned about design, storytelling, random table hacking (which I suppose is ALSO design), art, notebooks, etc…
But I’ll also be featuring some of the coolest rooms of the folks in our #dungeon-23-cult channel in The Cult of The Muse Discord Server!
About two weeks before 2023 began, we’ve had a good rotation of friends from across the globe share their cool ideas, and we’re having a lot of fun!!
This week, I’ll be sharing on Week 1 and Week 2’s discoveries, but today I’m just going to go over “the rules” of my journal, and the highlights from week 1!
Welcome to Our Dungeon23 Saga!
For my dungeon23, I decided to use it as a means to explore the lore and expand the random tables in my underworld setting, The World Without Skies.
Instead of trying to finagle a true brick & mortar megadungeon, with tiles and intersecting hallways, each room is just a random tunnel segment, cavern, or large hollow system, with a random amount of exits.
The hollows continually shift, so the paths don’t even necessarily stay the same.
Because this subterranean hellscape is so bizarre and diverse, being able to just randomly flip through a literal d365 journal of plug-and-play point crawl locations sound AMAZING to me.
So that’s the idea!
Week One: Procedure Hackathon
For my first week, I strictly followed the random table protocols I had in my personal setting book notes, and it’s been so much fun.
My “Traversing the Hollows” procedure contains the following random tables:
Tunnel Segment Form (Invoke 20)
Lay of the Cave (Invoke 11)
How Long To Traverse? (Invoke 10)
How Many Portals/Paths Away? (Invoke 10)
Composition (Invoke 40)
Features and Markers (Invoke 40)
Common Encounters (Invoke 21)
Traveling Sufferings (Invoke 21)
I did have other fields I found myself omitting off the bat, just because I wanted to keep the process simple.
I use this in tandem with prompts, and occasionally also use my “A Scourge Finds You Wanting” (Big hell monster), “You Come Upon a Denizen” (decrepit NPCs), “Parasites” (they’re pretty detailed), and “Strongest Song” (music is both magic and timekeeping down here) procedures, as well as reference some named monsters from the bestiary sections.
One interesting thing I found was how often I’d use these random tables to resolve other prompts the tables weren’t designed for; for instance, the Denizen procedure has a d20 Faction Alliance invocation table, which I have used like every other day to figure out which factions are present in this particular cave, fighting over lost souls and piles of dung.
These prompts were all shared from friends in our discord server!
Sean McCoy’s List of Weekly Themes (I switched between them each day)
Spooky Rusty’s d50 Tables to Generate Adventures from the Knife-Shaped Sphere
Blog of Holding’s 5E Hexcrawl-Style d12 Random Encounter Chart (Thanks Doom and Apathy!)
Best Room Week 1: Iwa Harbex the Envious
This was a hard toss between Day 4 and 7, but we had to land on the lair of Iwa Harbex the Envious.
In the end, I found this page that used the random tables less strictly produced my favorite result.
Here, the stag monster scourge Iwa Harbex grinds an ancient ‘axe’ of dark magics, biding their time and growing their power, before unleashing an imminent attack on the River King. This BBEG was straight out of the Scourge generator!
There’s also other stuff ‘going on’, if the party finds it!
Week 1 Discord Cult Highlight:
Aislefives’ DIY Journal Tables!
Ian was telling us that he used some random word generators online (as well as his own noggin’) to fill out the calendar at the front of the journal he was using to build a prompt generator! Pretty Sick!
I’m pretty sure jury rigging all the design space you have into a mean RPG idea machine is the soul of this whole challenge, and Ian’s been showing up with some stone cold killer rooms.
Discoveries of the Week: Tables & Discipline
At the end of Week 1, I was really excited, because my rooms kinda made themselves. It felt like I was playing something like Dwarf Fortress or Delve, instead of “journalling” or doing “campaign preparation”.
The first week I learned two big things:
1. Your random tables can make or break your experience. This first week really felt just like solo-RPG gameplay, but with the benefits of journalling. Likewise, if you use #dungeon23 as a source of inspiration, this experience will make your random table design amazing. Spend time developing random tables that give you exactly what you need to make this fun for you.
At the end of week 1, I officially hacked my tables. I also hacked up my own “Cavern Focus Table”, a d20 hack of that Blog of Holding table, perfectly tuned for The World Without Skies…
I also updated my “How Long to Traverse” table to include more information with less rolling. I predict in the future, more of this sort of design will wiggle its way into my procedures…
2. The magic of discipline has no ceiling if you understand how to use what you have gained. I am extremely excited for what days 100, 200, 300, and 365 reveal. The sheer amount of potential for innovation and self-improvement that this kind of committed focus entails is a recipe for something amazing to happen. I don't know what that would exactly be, but I know that it's worth doing, and everyone who commits to going the distance will not regret it. The flip side of this equation is making this challenge something that's additive to your regular life instead of a chore.
For me, this is a committed half hour or so I get to just steep myself in imagining my underworld setting, and it's so much fun.
Join Us for Dungeon23!
The best part about dungeon23 is that there’s no real way to lose. It’s for fun! Interact with it as much or as little as you’d like. If you’re looking for a fun place to geek out about dungeon23, come on down to The Cult of The Muse Discord Server!
We’d love to see what you’ve come up with!
Housekeeping
Friday we’ll have another post up about how Week 2 went, and we should have a video coming out this Thursday!
Keep your eyes (& inboxes) peeled!
This year, our goal is to have some kind of content for you here 3 times a week or so. It might take us a little bit to get started, but there’s a lot going on around here to cover, so get your nerd vibes ready.