Some Random Resources for the Dungeon 23 Challenge

 

Dungeon23 Logo designed by Lone Archivist and generously made available for free through the CC BY 4.0 licenses.

"Megadungeon for 2023. 12 levels. 365 rooms. One room a day. Keep it all in a journal"

Sean McCoy posted this to Twitter, then to his Win Conditions substack newsletter early in December 2022. I might never have heard about it if Ben from Mazirian's Garden hadn't passed on word of the open challenge, as well as posting an excellent write-up of the Challenge that convinced me join in on this particular bit of nerdery. He is posting periodic Round Ups of Dungeon23 Related Things that I hope will become a regular feature since there are just tons of cool stuff going on all over the place for Dungeon23.

I found the idea of having a simple, daily practice that allowed me to set aside a bit of time each day to just draw/write/create one dungeon room at a time, by hand, in a journal very appealing. After years of my hands getting progressively more painful from chronic pain associated with a really nasty bout of Lyme, I am now mostly symptom-free and I could use the daily practice of this challenge to help get back into things and to get my hands back into working order. I really appreciated Sean's most recent "Slow Down, You're Doing Fine" post over at Win Conditions. This is all about the process, the daily practice. I don't care if I just scribble all over a page, as long as I do something every day. Keep moving forward. 

Sean posted a set of optional Prompts for Dungeon23, Spooky Action at a Distance posted an Alternative Schedule, and soon after Gus L. posted some seriously detailed Dungeon23 Worksheets. Soon there was a Reddit, a group at Facebook, and some excellent articles started to appear such as Narrowing the Focus over at Follow Me and Die, and How to Slay Your Dungeon at Sharktopus Games, among others. I already talked about some of the blog posts/articles/essays I was using to get prepared for the challenge earlier. I'll keep a list of any other articles, essays or whatnot I find particularly useful during the challenge and will post that later.

I started out keeping track of some of this stuff in the right-hand side-bar of the blog, but it quickly grew unwieldy, and besides Duvelmann's Vault of Dungeon23 Resources over at Github has outgrown my effort by a considerable margin. Likewise his collection of Dungeon23 Resources at Itch.io and the Dungeon23 Jam are both very much worth checking out. Speaking of Itch.io, Hexed Press produced a very handy Dungeon23 Helper that I highly recommend as well as the Dungeon 23 Logo that Lone Archivist made available for us all. 

(EDIT)

There is a Directory of Participating Blogs at Reddit, and there is a handy online form for Tracking Dungeon 23 Projects.

Thank you all for doing such great stuff!

RPG Toolset: 12 Word Trick from Ars Ludi

Thanks to Risus Monkey for posting about Microscope (and Corkboard, which looks like another really cool resource!) and thus facilitating our clicking over to the Ars Ludi site and discovering a rather ingenius approach to encapsulating some Mythic Flavor for a setting by boiling it all down to ten or twelve evocative words, weeding-out anything lame or weak, and really getting down to the essence of the setting in a nutshell. What an excellent technique for really, truly getting to the heart and soul of a particular setting. This is a great way to really get things sorted out and to further refine the identity and focus of the campaign, game or setting.

Here's what we came up with for a few of our campaign/setting projects so far:

Ain 4 (Humanspace Empires)
Abandoned, Forgotten, Decayed, Fallow, Horrific, Implications, Consequences, Toxic, Wasteland, Barren, Post-Industrial, Polluted

Riskail
Surreal, Art, Infrastructure, Humanity, Renaissance, Rebirth, Autonomy, Adulthood, Inheritance, Expression, Exploration, Development, Civilization, Networks, Differentiation...

Worldboat at Life's End
Exploration, Mysterious, Collaborative, Technology, Evolving, Independent/Autonomy, Ecology, Vast, Macroscale, Adaptation, Transformation, Survival, (Post Extinction Event)

Bujilli's Sojourn (Zalchis/Labyrinth Lord)
Adventure, Investigation, Experimentation, Sorcery, Journey, Knowledge, Transition, Growing, Experience, Monsters, Exploration, Worlds/Locales (Weird)

Zalchis (Labyrinth Lord/Mutants & Mazes/Mutant Future)
Weird, Post-Cataclysmic, Sorcery, Science, Loss, Entropy, Finality, Endings, Scale, Darkness, Broken/Fragmentary, Challenging, (Transitions)

Tsan Yian (Terminal Space/Swords & Wizardry[White Box]/OD&D)
Degeneration, Corruption, Infection, Mutation, Transformation, Mythos, Hybridization, Rampant, Hubris, Beyond, Outgrowth, Acceleropalypse (Less Tentacles, More Archaia...)

Wermspittle (Labyrinth Lord/*/possibly Savage Worlds)
Exploration, Knowledge, Adventure, Pulp, Crossroads, Bastide, Wilderness, Monsters, Plague, Turmoil, Opportunity, Discovery...Alternate Histories...

Interesting method. We'll try this out with the rest of our efforts and see where it leads.
We've purposefully left-out a few other projects because they're still in the works and need more time to fully ripen before we spring them on anyone outside of our play-testers.

This 12-word method looks like it will be a very useful tool for further refining and developing our various  projects like the Adventure Modules we're building for Zalchis and Wermspittle -- or the Planes of the Paraverse -- or even the Archipelago we've been developing for the Sea of O'sr (Maybe we'll just use 6 or 9 words or less for each island...) -- and this scheme fits nicely into Lester Dent's Master Fiction Plot Formula that he used in developing over a hundred Doc Savage adventures.

Thanks Risus Monkey!