Beginging Dungeon23

I’m going to try and run a Dungeons and Dragons project in 2023; namely #Dungeon23.

The idea is to create a mega-dungeon; 1 room per day, 1 area a week 1 level per month and end up with a 365 room mega-dungeon made up of 52 small areas and 12 levels.

Here are some links to some blogs explaining the pretty straight-forward concept.

I’m going to have a go but with a few changes to the default procedure of designing a room a day.

Firstly up I think dungeons are better if they are

Jacquayed – having several routes through the dungeon with meaningful choices

Factionalised – having many, active factions with their own agenda experience in media res in their own story

Encounter Area driven – rather than having static rooms experienced in sequence, group the rooms as clusters of rooms in which a multi-room rolling encounter can take place. Encounters should be based on faction rosters with probabilities of specific encounters and which react to stimulus rather than a monster plonked in a room waiting for the player characters to arrive.

Dynamic – firstly the status quo of the dungeon should be one of change as the existing factions interact, secondly player and characters should be able to interact with this dynamic status quo and influence and thirdly, dungeon areas should restock in response to stimulus.

Does this clash with the classic concept of a mega-dungeon as a series of static vignettes waiting for the PC’s to kick the door down and murderhobo their way through 365 rooms of mad-house fun? Is that even the classic concept of a mega-dungeon? Let’s play to find out?

I think this requires a little more holistic an approach than producing 1 room a day.

Secondly, I am working on a procedural generator for another project so I’d like to use largely procedural generation as a content prompt.

Thirdly, I have been having some fun with the ChatGPT tool with some Dungeons and Dragons.

Fourthly and lastly, I was really impressed with this simple but very clear and useful  cyclic dungeon generator

So what I’m going to do is to do one level of 4 clusters of 7 rooms a month. I’ll use some procedural tools to generate content and to act as prompts for content generation and I’ll describe the rooms in a weekly cluster. I don’t intend to try and keep to a posting schedule but if I can get a bit ahead in the content generation, I’ll schedule weekly posts.

For the cluster I’m going to use the 6-Room-Bite-Sized Dungeon in this blog. I’ll pick a layout of 6 rooms, pick some general features and content, such as the faction or factions inhabiting the cluster and some themes in the cluster. Room 7 will be a room that links to another cluster. I may need to go back and revise previous clusters if they get an additional link to them.

Once a month I’ll refine the existing levels with some Jacquaying of the current dungeon, some holistic faction management and I’ll look for opportunities to apply some of the generic cyclic dungeon structures.

Why am I doing this?

I need a home for all the little ideas that bubble up to the surface of my brain whilst I’m reading or thinking about role-playing games.

I want to complete some creativity by turning it in to a thing that exists that other people can see.

I want to document and critically reflect on a process (my process I suppose) for creating rpg content. I want to create that process through by using it in to existence and then seeing what worked for me. That’s going to involve some practical thinking about rpg design philosophy. It’s also going to involve rolling some dice and looking at some random tables.

I also have an eye on a second project developing a procedural generator for an urban-crawl. This is a practice for creating and documenting a procedural generation tookkit.

So I’ll be discussing the content and how I generated it and the design choices I made in parallel to the release of the actual content.