What is a monster?
In some hoity-toity psychological sense, a monster is an entity of chaos that bears a large amount of potential to create negative situations and outcomes.
In an even bolder Jungian sense, the image of a monster is the thing that informs the fragility of mortal strength - consider the now-cliché great Grizzly Bear of North America.
It’s a truck that runs on meat. It runs faster than people, and can hear and smell everything in its greater vicinity. If it’s around you, it knows where you are, exactly what state you are in, and if it was so inclined, could destroy your makeshift camp, eat all your food, and play house in your house with you - but you’re the toy doll.
It obviously can also just y’know, eat you alive.
Okay, so what is a “god monster”?
For our purposes here, a god monster isn’t necessarily a physical kaiju a la Godzilla, but instead symbols of natural law, forces beyond human comprehension, divine intelligences, et cetera… Manifested in its raw, primordial, yet glorified form.
Those things you “cannot escape”, no matter how hard you rage against them; time, aging, death, taxes, depression, tyrants, inflation, the dying of the light, the snow in New York…
This week, not by my intention, but instead by the simple process of “wandering into the dark”, I met again and seemingly for the first time, the true god monsters who inhabit the World Without Skies.
And there in the dark they strangled me without ceasing.
Strap in, y’all. This week we’re going long.
Some Context: For my dungeon23 challenge, I’m making a random “d365” tunnel/cavern segment “table” inside my cosmic underworld setting, “The World Without Skies”.
Week Three: All God Monsters
Here we will be literally spoiling the end of the book series that I am leveraging my entire budding RPG career to produce and market. Don’t worry, i’m not confident that it’s at all legible, we’ll both probably forget about it for a few years - it’ll be great!
Above is pictured Demogorgon the Gross, the recently-usurped ruler of The World Without Skies. He resides now in the abyss of our own cosmos as the ‘Demiurge of Despair’, and is survived below by his two “Elderbairn” brothers (you’ll meet one more this week, and we’re saving the littlest brother for next).
Last week we gave you the guts, this week we’re giving you the diamonds found in the basilisk’s gizzard.
One mother, three brothers. Two brothers, many fathers. One son, innumerable dotters. One servant, one beast below all.
For our first specimen, we’ll begin with the aforementioned demiurge above;
In this room, you get eaten by Demogorgon, and experience each phase of becoming reborn as one of his misshapen children. It’s very dreary.
I’ve found myself using this journal challenge as an actual means to journal out the negative emotions of the day, and it’s turned out to actually be a really positive, cathartic experience!
This entry was one of my more procedural ones of the week.
Everything here came from the random prompts in The Gray Orphan’s book, but as it came together I found that this cave wasn’t just a random place among the cosmic darkness soup, but is actually one of the extremely important locations in the lore.
This is where the Fathers, the big bad council of tyrant ghosts, are creating their divine simulacrums out of the golden bodies of these trapped gods.
The ‘Ancor’ mentioned in the notes are a classification of monster/entity that’s been buried within the matter of this realm, and their spirit/body is so massive, that it creates a false sense of gravity and other miasmic effects in the area.
There’s been a lot of anchors this week!
I had another really cool room to show you, but this article is getting hella long, so it’ll have to just remain among the discord deep cuts, lol. If you want to see it, you’ll have to join our discord server!
However, all in all, the biggest entry of the week was the revealing of the worst of the god monsters - whose name I shan’t even type;
Three brothers. Demogorgon the Gross, Belourgon the Blessed, and [REDACTED].
This drawing is not just a cool godzilla monster, but instead an image that contains all of reality. Really, the whole multi-giga-meta-verse, sitting on top of this gnarly alligator snapper dragon.
[REDACTED] is the turtle all the way down, the ender of all ends, the mountain that engulfs the cosmos, to whom Yggdrasil and all her fruits are but a flower tossed inside his winds. He is slow, but will surely devour all things, for he cannot be stopped. The World Without Skies is simply the lowest layer of sludge at the bottom of the dirt below Yggdrasil’s roots.
In our play-by-post game in the discord server, one of our players rolled a “That You You Lost” death transmutation result that was extreme to the nines.
Their lifelong Dream was to uncover ‘The Truth Beneath Truth’. Unfortunately, their Dream was the personal article they rolled to lose.
Their “Mode of Loss” was the following;
Would their stated Dream have been different, or if the personal article lost would have been something else, and they then rolled The Shame of Knowledge result, the ensuing transformation would have been much different!
But instead, the small hobbit Kaszu Teasong met the Blind Mother of Fate, and was shewn her first and worst son, the [REDACTED].
Honestly, this event was single-handedly the most legendary moment to transpire in a game of The Epic of Dreams. He basically ascended by having his conception of reality shattered, including the presuppositions that drove the whole ethos of his life. Because he saw “a turtle”.
Best Room Week 3: “In Dire Counsel”
The funniest entry among all of them thus far was the best of Week 2, which I discovered after the fact belonged to the theme of Week 3.
I didn’t start out with the idea of 3 impossibly-ancient primordial monsters, each buried next to each other, with awkward mutual relationships, endlessly arguing about random topics they torture out of captured mortals.
My favorite part is that they each have these aeon-old petty insecurities surrounding each other. Hilarious.
Probably the best podcast never made.
I really like these guys, and we may even do some kind of sunday comic strip thing following their silly stories - keep yer eyes peeled!
Discord Highlight: Ray Otus’ Beneath the Sea of Dust
Through this past few weeks, we’ve been blessed to have the mind of Ray Otus bopping around our #dungeon23 party, and we’ve had a lot of fun!
Our week 3 discord highlight were some of the tidbits of a dungeon zine he’s releasing - “Beneath the Sea of Dust”.
Can you say “Minotaur Death Poems???”
Ray’s dungeon also features a chieftain with this super sick Psychic Arena spell - check out the possibilities this one spell could have on an encounter:
You can learn more about what Ray’s cooking on The Viridian Scroll!
How is Dungeon23 going for you?
Please let us know in the comments or join our Discord server, where we’re posting about #dungeon23 every day!
Discovery of the Week: Empty Rooms are Dank!
In one of the first few days of #dungeon23, one of my favorite RPG YouTubers started livestreaming again after a 2-year hiatus.
His stream, titled “The #Dungeon23 Challenge is a Lie (and that’s a Good Thing)” contained some musings about empty rooms that really stuck with me.
Extremely paraphrased; “There are no real empty rooms. There’s always something that gives the empty room character, that makes it so much more than just a 'blank space free parking’ excuse to NOT write for that day.”
And honestly, in weeks 2 & 3, I found myself at the end of the day, around 10pm or later, trying to rub the last two dendrites in my skull together to make magic.
And then, EVERY TIME I would go to make a really short, small ‘empty room’ prompt, I would just start scribbling the dankest dungeons and dragons special sauce room entries, just because I let my imagination lead and fill in the blank page.
So really, the lesson is to not overthink anything and just channel your instinct.
Eagles learn to fly by getting pushed out of the nest, not by analyzing Carl Jung, Moldvay & Cook, this that or the other. ;)
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!
Join us next week, whence Drew’s mind has been invaded by gremlins, goblins, and all manner of snatching tricksters… including the True Heir of the World Without Skies.
P.S. literally the snow in New York this week has kept me from finishing that YouTube video I keep talking about. I’m going to try and get it out today, if not this weekend, or even… This next Wednesday.
Thanks for BEARing with me.