I've never been much of a "joiner," but I like a collective mental exercise now and then. It's what motivated me recently to enter my adventure, Bergummo's Tower, in Prince of Nothing's back-to-basics "No Artpunk 2" contest. With both my current campaigns running along on content I've already baked, I need a new outlet for some non-work-related creative energy (which has accumulated as a result of being cooped up inside with no yard projects to do and caring for a very sick dog).
Like a lot of DMs, I came across Sean McCoy's recent tweet about Dungeon 23, announcing a personal goal of writing one room a day over the course of a year in order to create a 12-level, 365-room megadungeon. The spark for doing this sort of thing had already been fired by Zenopus Archive's superlative expansion of the sample dungeon from the Holmes Basic rulebook, and I've been mulling doing a similar thing with several of my longtime dungeons-in-progress that I can never seem to complete.
My campaign world already contains a megadungeon environment—a series of
ever-changing catacombs beneath the capital city of the land of
Remedios. I've only fleshed out the top two levels, however, and my
players have only visited the first level. I've considered
developing a campaign around the catacombs, but on the players' few
excursions there, they never seemed to bite down on the concept and I never did much else with it. I love the idea, though.
A formal effort like this—and one that seems to be attracting a lot of participants—is the perfect thing I need to roll into the long winter months until spring. I'm curious if I have the stamina to do it. I write for a living, but do I have the juice to take a massive concept and flesh it out in a way that is cogent and feels satisfying? A little bit each day sounds easy, until you hit Day-160 and realize you're out of ideas and aren't even at the halfway point yet. I have a feeling this is going to be way harder than I think, and I'm already a pessimist.
I will say that I completely disagree with this guideline from Sean on his Dungeon23 substack: "If you can’t think of what to write that day just write “Empty Room,” see how easy that is?"
I'm of the opinion that if you're going to write a room, then write a room. My dungeon levels will have plenty of empty rooms, but the rooms I'm writing will have something interesting in them to see/do/fight/take. That definitely ramps up the difficulty level of this project, so it will be interesting to see what techniques I can develop to stick to this commitment.
I'm also wondering if I can make something interesting to other DMs out there. I ended up in the middle of the pack in Prince's contest, but I like to believe that was more a function of scope than content (some of the winning entries were just really cool concept pieces, whereas mine was a starter dungeon for newbie players and sort of vanilla). I know what flavors I like, and everything I make is some combination of those flavors, but how strong is my palate?
I'm not on Twitter or any other social media, so I'll post everything to my blog. I'm abiding by the guideline to write the rooms in a physical journal, which I think is a neat limitation. Committing ink to paper takes a leap of faith that your hand can keep up with your brain. It's a skill that has atrophied for me in favor of keyboards and typing. I'm not sure I can post every day, though, so I'm shooting for a once-per-week post of the previous week's work. I'll see how it goes.
I feel like I'm off to a good start. I've cracked what I want to do
thematically, and I have an initial bubble sketch of the first month's
work. I've also outlined the rest of the dungeon levels all the way to
the bottom. Now I just need to start writing the rooms on Sunday. My goal is to pay homage to the foundational works of the game, but I intend to get weird as we go down.
I'll be following the OSRIC system as the overall ruleset for this dungeon, and I'm limiting myself to monsters from the AD&D trilogy (MM, MMII, FF), Chasoium's All the World's Monsters I-III, and some home-brewed but thematic creatures. As much as possible, I want to pick monsters I've rarely/never used before, but I definitely want some classic creatures in there as well. Also a dragon. In 40 years of gaming, I've only had ONE dragon fight with my players.
I've named my megadungeon "
Tunnels Beneath the Earth" (TuBE for short). The first level (January) I am calling "The Upper Works" as a shout-out to Castle Greyhawk.
Level 1 consists of the surface ruins (which will be detailed in Week 1). The ruins lead to three sub-surface "mini-dungeons" (Weeks 2-4). Each of those areas will have seven detailed areas (one per day). From the surface level and the mini-dungeons, various tunnels lead down to the first proper megadungeon level (February)—and some tunnels descend even deeper.
I've purchased a simple graph-ruled composition notebook to record everything, so here's to a new year of D&D and, hopefully, this time next year I'll have filled this bad boy up with lots of good stuff. Fingers crossed...
