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#Dungeon23

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#Dungeon23

A dungeon room a day for all of 2023.

Sean McCoy
Dec 6, 2022
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#Dungeon23

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💭 Sean McCoy @seanmccoy
Megadungeon for 2023. 12 levels. 365 rooms. One room a day. Keep it all in a journal. ⁦@LukeGearing⁩ let’s do this.
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4:56 PM ∙ Dec 5, 2022
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The other day I posted on twitter about a cool little project I’m working on for 2023. Essentially, I’m doing a dungeon room a day, every day, and keeping track of it in a little weekly calendar.

Why?

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Well, I love dungeons and megadungeon play, but writing a megadungeon is difficult! It takes a lot of energy and it’s hard to know when to work on it and for how long. This simplifies things.

A dungeon room a day, every day, for 2023. That’s 365 rooms. I’ll do a level a month, so 12 levels. Every week is a little area of 7 rooms, so I can keep my focus small.

I’m using the amazing Hobonichi Weeks which if you don’t know is a great little notebook designed by the writer of the Earthbound/Mother game series. It’s got great paper, and the Weeks version is the smaller more portable notebook. Essentially on a single spread you’ve got seven days on the left and then an open piece of graph paper on the right. That’s perfect for a key of seven rooms and a map. Here’s another one that ship’s from the US. Got a worldbuilder’s notebook you’ve been dying to use? Now’s the time.

You don’t have to use this notebook, don’t get hung up on the details here. Any old notebook will do. I just happen to have an addiction to Japanese stationery and no real need to journal, so this is what I’m doing, dungeon as journal.

There’s some great things you can do here too: instead of room numbers, you can number them with the date. This makes rooms pretty easy to find and reference within your notebook. Don’t need a megadungeon? Try twelve small dungeons! The point is to do a little bit of writing a day. Some tips:

  • Don’t overthink it. Don’t make a grand plan, just sit down each day and focus on writing a good dungeon room.

  • Generators are your friend. The point isn’t to get stuck writing the perfect room, the point is to write a room. Randomize the monster, treasure, whatever items you need. Use “Tricks, Traps, and Empty Rooms,” by Courtney Campbell. There’s a billion d100 lists on Elfmaids & Octopi. Take rooms from dungeons you love. Just get the rooms down on paper.

  • If you can’t think of what to write that day just write “Empty Room,” see how easy that is?

  • 365 rooms written like “3 orcs, 25 gold pieces.” is better than 5 rooms written like “In this beautiful hand carved obsidian room sit 3 orcs arguing over a dice game. 25gp sit on the table, each of them…” See what I’m getting at? The goal is the finish line. Just get to the finish line. Trust me.

If you want to keep up with my progress on Twitter, mastodon, or cohost, use the hashtag #dungeon23. Post your results too! Post a room a day on twitter so other people can steal it and put it in their journals! Become a collector of rooms, you don’t have to be the well.

The greatest creative advice I ever got was “have something to show for your time.” I’ve found a lot of success on always shipping projects every year. This is one of those projects, once you realize you can create a dungeon of this magnitude, your whole world opens up with what you can do. And it’s insanely fun too!

#dungeon23, I’ll see you on the other side.

P.S.

Need a weekly prompt to carry you through? Here’s 52 prompts to keep you motivated:

  1. Ancient

  2. Death

  3. Sunken

  4. Love

  5. Empire

  6. Heavy

  7. Rural

  8. Darkness

  9. Bloom

  10. Rust

  11. Noise

  12. Childhood

  13. Time

  14. Excess

  15. Decay

  16. City

  17. Factory

  18. Flood

  19. Sleep

  20. Cold

  21. Ash

  22. Touch

  23. Meat

  24. Solitude

  25. Growth

  26. Greed

  27. Luck

  28. Fall

  29. Pit

  30. Chaos

  31. Laughter

  32. Smoke

  33. Forgotten

  34. Library

  35. Ocean

  36. Song

  37. Roots

  38. Bones

  39. Hangman

  40. Blood

  41. Prophet

  42. Idol

  43. Door

  44. Light

  45. Stars

  46. Bridge

  47. Mask

  48. Cut

  49. Sacrifice

  50. Incense

  51. Rise

  52. Gold

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39 Comments
Matt Price
Dec 7, 2022Liked by Sean McCoy

Love it! My Worldbuilder's Notebook will indeed finally see some use.

I think I'll be posting my excerpts on my blog rather than to a Twitteralike - hope others do as well! As Ben L said in his post about this project, this could be a really cool collective OSR project for 2023!

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Ray Otus
Writes Plundergrounds
Dec 7, 2022Liked by Sean McCoy

Weeks notebook ordered. Creative juices flowing. Now I just have to find a 52 sided die.

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