Failure States

A combination of personal and professional circumstances over the past 8 months forced me to put blogging on hiatus back in the Spring, but I continued to game on a regular basis during that time. I hope to get back to posting regularly.

I failed the Dungeon23 challenge. It was purely a matter of time-availability and not a lack of creativity, which is comforting despite the disappointment. My chief problems were the scope of the project I laid out and my inability to keep things simple. As the ideas started to flow, I found myself building so many layers of complexity into the concept that I struggled under the challenge's daily demand, making it difficult to get things done in a timely manner. 

Writing by hand was an obstacle as well, and I became frustrated at not being able to go back and edit in order to fix some of the complexity errors that crept in. Then, having to transcribe the daily hand-written installments into a weekly blog post just added to the load. I thought writing the daily posts by hand would take me back to the days when I filled notebooks with material, but it turned out to be a far-more time-consuming experience that wasn't worth the nostalgia (and cramped fingers).

As my freelance writing projects accelerated in April and other things in my personal life required attention, something had to give. The Dungeon23 challenge and this blog were the obvious "somethings."

Were I to do the challenge again, I would probably just draw some simple maps or adapt a few Dungeon Geomorphs, and then populate them according to stocking guidelines, adding my own personal flavor to the results. That sounds way more achievable than what I ended up doing. I have a ton of great notes, however, so Tunnels Beneath the Earth will live on in a more-manageable and less frustrating way.

I also brought Keep on the Badlands—my weekly 5e Roll20 campaign with my long-time gaming buddies—to a close. This was another major disappointment, as I did a ton of work on the campaign and frankly think it's some of the best material I've ever written in over 40 years of DMing. My players never quite grasped how a true sandbox campaign works and kept looking for me to drop obvious adventure hooks in their path, rather than develop their own ideas for what they wanted to do.

They also rejected the survival mode of the campaign, which was baked into every aspect of the setting. I really think a lot of it was laziness brought on by videogames, where they can just press a button or mouse-over a highlighted feature to "do the thing" necessary to advance. 5e also encourages this kind of behavior in the way that it has removed risk and complexity, and dumbed everything down to idiot-level gameplay.

Sessions would invariably boil down to conversations like (actual exchange)...

Player: "I want to capture that wild horse." (a random encounter)

Me: "Okay, sure...how do you want to go about doing it?"

Player: "I use Animal Handling."

Me: "Yes, but what do you do specifically?"

Player: "I handle the animal." [Clicks "Animal Handling" skill on character sheet.]

Me: *sigh*

We played 81 sessions of this nonsense and the party still had difficulty figuring out what to do or where to go, to the point that 7th and 8th level characters decided the best course of action was to continue plundering a nearby cairn field for loose coins and burial goods (an activity they began at level 2). They never even made it to the Caves of Chaos and I just couldn't take it anymore, so I ended things. I have not resumed running the Monday campaign (another player is trying their hand at being DM)—and I'm not sure I will.

If I do run for them again, it certainly won't be with 5e. During Covid, I dove into the OSR (10 years after the fact), and fell in love with Basic D&D (and 1e to a lesser extent) all over again. I think 5e's core game engine is good...it's fast, intuitive, and easy to explain to others. But the power creep and ever-stacking abilities create a lot of decision paralysis, even for experienced players. This tends to result in the same character "builds" appearing over and over again with the same set of optimal choices. 

I enjoyed 5e when it first came out, but the longer I run it, the more the flaws keep appearing and the harder it is to ignore them. I won't even get into the problems I have with WotC adopting Forgotten Realms as the default setting for the rulebooks(!), or their constant editorializing and virtue signaling, or their pervasive efforts to make the game a "safe" and uniform experience for a category of player psychology I don't relate to at all. 

I appreciate 5e for bringing me back into the game, and I think someone could take the core engine and skin it with an AD&D ethos, but man that seems like a lot of work.

On a positive note, I brought my 5e Heroes of Brackleborn campaign to a satisfying conclusion for my neophyte players. When I started it during the lockdowns, it was just to show a few friends what D&D was all about. I wasn't expecting them to fall in love with the game and turn a few sessions into a multi-year campaign. We concluded with the girls having reached 6th level and their characters becoming notable leaders in the town of Brackleborn.

We may return to this campaign in the future, as there were some loose-ends that could rear their ugly heads once more. For now, the girls were interested in my stories about Basic/AD&D and wanted to try it out, so I started a new campaign with them using Old School Essentials as the ruleset. I kitbashed three classic adventures, along with an OSR sequel to one of those classics and some personal modifications / additions. 

I've named it The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower, combining and adapting S1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh with the sample dungeon from Dr. Holmes' Basic D&D Rulebook (commonly referred to as The Tower of Zenopus), and inserting the superb Forgotten Smugglers' Caves by Zenopus Archives' Zach Howard and the dungeon portion of N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God as additional levels.

We've played 3 sessions and, so far, there have been 5 character deaths among 4 players...it's glorious. The girls have had a great time dying, and I try to turn each death into an hilarious moment by cranking up the gruesome details. They also appreciate how streamlined and simple the rules are, given how often they struggled to cope with all the choices in mid-level 5e. I'm adjusting well to running OSE, I think, but realigning my brain to the different procedures in BX has been harder than I anticipated.

On a final note, I had the great privilege over the summer to help a friend catalog and value a humongous collection of vintage D&D materials and other gaming products he purchased recently.

Flipping through a copy of the tournament version of Lost Caverns of Tsojconth, and seeing Erol Otus' foundational artwork in actual copies of Booty and the Beasts and The Necronomican (among many other rare pieces) was a huge thrill.

I'm happy to start blogging again—something I've been shooting for since August. I intend to start posting material from all these campaigns and other adventures / settings I've created over the years. 

I'll share pics and details of the vintage D&D collection in coming posts as well. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at left (for you Batman fans, that's Dennis O'Neil's desk in the background).

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 10 (#Dungeon23)

So, my goal to catch up posting new material by the weekend failed miserably. I think I've decided—starting in April—to reconfigure my "publishing" schedule to move away from calendar weeks (my original goal was a weekly Sunday post). Now, I'll post whenever I complete a level section (7 rooms) so the sections don't keep getting broken up by the vagaries of the calendar.

I've also stopped putting future connecting level/room #s into the current keys. It's easy to figure out what section a level connector goes in, but stating the destination room# ahead of time has caused me a few problems once I get to that level/section and have to make the connections line up. Leaving them blank and backfilling them later makes my job easier.

This week's posting provides additional info on the nature and use of crystals and crystal devices found in the dungeon (much of which I ported over and adapted from my Deep Vaults concept).

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"The Palace"
Level 3 (MAR) – The City of the Ancients
Section 1, Cont. (03/01 – 03/07)

Scale: Each square = 20x20 ft.

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 9 (#Dungeon23)

As I feared, the most difficult part of the #Dungeon23 project (for me) isn't writing a room every day, it's posting the work on a timely basis. 

Between spring landscaping projects, freelance writing projects, and running two D&D campaigns (one weekly campaign online and one bi-weekly campaign irl), most of my free time is spent creating the D23 content. The content is done, I just haven't had much extra time to post it to the blog.

This posting (for week #9) still puts me a full week (#10) behind, which becomes two weeks if I don't post again by this weekend (the current week is #11). My goal is to finish this week's rooms, take pictures of my completed pages, transcribe the pages into a doc, and then post the last two weeks by this weekend (or early next week). That will completely catch me up. I predict falling behind again, though.

I'm fairly pleased with the development of the dungeon so far (one-fifth of the total). It's holding my daily creative interest, and I've sketched out the entire thing in broad strokes, so that's a great sign for being able to complete it.

I was trying to create Tunnels Beneath the Earth completely from scratch (stealing just a few unused ideas from old notebooks which seemed to fit the theme), but elements from my Deep Vaults megadungeon concept began bleeding heavily into TuBE. I finally came to terms with the fact that I will likely never get around to finishing DV, so I may as well just merge the two concepts together.

It's not a wholesale union; the factions are all different, for example, and TuBE's scale utterly dwarfs DV's, but I'm stealing many of the sci-fantasy elements I liked from DV (particularly the crystals and some of the weird technology). I introduced a bit of that material in Level 3 (starting this week), and I started calling the "impervious blue metal" by its new, super-obvious name: impervium.

I have some regrets about how I structured the dungeon at the beginning. I wasn't thinking about the calendar dates; I was looking at the project as 7 rooms per section, with 52 sections total over 12 levels. I did not take into account that each month doesn't have 28 days (only one does, in fact...who knew??).  I don't want to just switch over to the calendar-less format because I like the conceit of having a monthly level theme.

This isn't that big a deal, structurally, but it means most of the weekly blog postings will cover pieces of two different sections, instead of one clean section at a time. Then at the end of the month, I have to add 2-3 "bonus" rooms to close out the calendar month/dungeon level.

If I could do it over, I would key my rooms to the calendar date. I think a lot of people did it that way, but I am dumb and took a weird approach to the structure. I may try to fix that situation here shortly.

On to Week 9. Fingers crossed I can get everything else posted by the weekend...

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"The Upper Caves"
Level 2 (FEB) – The Caves Between
Section 4, Cont. (02/22 – 02/28)

Scale: Each square = 20x20 ft.

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 7 (#Dungeon23)

"The Lower Caves"
Level 2 (FEB) – The Caves Between
Section 2, Cont. (02/08 – 02/14)

Scale: Each square = 20x20 ft.

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 6 (#Dungeon23)

"The Waterworks"
Level 2 (FEB) – The Caves Between
Section 1, Cont. (2/1 – 2/7)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 5 (#Dungeon23)

"Bonus Rooms (The Crypts)"
Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works
Addition to Section 4 (1/29 – 1/31)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 4 (#Dungeon23)

"The Crypts"
Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works
Section 4 (1/22 – 1/28)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 3 (#Dungeon23)

"The Storerooms"
Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works
Section 3 (1/15 – 1/21)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 2 (#Dungeon23)

"The Sewers"

Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works

Section 2 (1/8 – 1/14)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 1 (#Dungeon23)

First week's work is complete, and I'm relatively satisfied with what I have so far. Section 1 is the environs immediately over the dungeon. Multiple entrances lead to different levels, and some areas are deadly for low-level characters. Experienced adventurers who overcome these tougher areas can access deeper dungeon levels by skipping the upper sections.

I experienced an unusual amount of anxiety about writing in pen on paper, rather than from the safety of a keyboard. I made a few errors which I mostly managed to cover (i.e., I incorporated the mistakes into the dungeon's reality) and I dripped coffee on it—but by Day 5 I finally came to terms that I'm writing this for myself first, so mistakes don't matter...just scratch it out or make a side-note and move on.

I also need to break my habit of continuing to develop ideas once they're on paper, which is sometimes complicating the writeup if I don't have the extra space to squeeze extra material in legibly. I want these surface pieces to have a lot of expansion potential, though, because they carry so much weight in setting up the rest of the dungeon. Some of them (the Necropolis or the Colossal Head, for example) could be fleshed out into mini-adventure areas of their own if gameplay develops in that direction. I anticipate my dungeon keys being much briefer for most rooms, however.

Here is the (slightly-edited) key if my chicken scratch is too hard to read. To save valuable page space, I only statted monsters that are unique to a location; monsters without stats are written up elsewhere.

__________

 

"The Surface"

Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works

Section 1 (1/1 – 1/7)

#Dungeon23 — Tunnels Beneath the Earth (Day 1)

Below is the first day's work for my Dungeon23 project: Tunnels Beneath the Earth. I don't intend to post every day, but I wanted to get the initial progress posted. Day 1 consists of an unscaled map of the surface ruins and seven numerically keyed locations (which will be my daily pieces). The first piece is the city ruins, which is mostly an open area for the party to encounter wandering monsters on their way to one of the many entrances to the dungeon proper. I cheated a little and added six alphabetically-keyed locations to define the important areas of the main site. 

The remaining six numeric locations comprise the first weekly section (one-quarter of the 1st level). The other three sections for January will detail several areas just below the surface, each accessed via one of the keyed locations in section 1. All together, these four sections will comprise level 1, titled: The Upper Works. The numbered locations are...

1. The Ruined City
2. The Pile
3. The Culvert
4. The Necropolis
5. The Colossal Head
6. The Quarry
7. The Metal Cave
   

My numbering scheme is based on level/section/room (area), so The Ruined City is keyed at 1.1.1, The Pile is 1.1.2, The Culvert is 1.1.3, etc. Other that that, I don't exactly have a strategy for how I will format the sections (which I think is kind of the point...to not have one), but my initial thought was to have a section map on the left page, with the key on the right page. 

I knew the initial descriptions for the ruins were a little beefy, since this is a lot of establishing material, but it's pretty clear I won't get all seven surface locations on these two pages. I'm not too worried about that...I believe I can accomplish that for later levels, but I definitely need to work on my editing and keep the dungeon room descriptions as brief as possible.

It's also been challenging not to think too far ahead. The organizer in me wants to get everything mapped out and tidied up, but I think that's where a lot of my projects fail to launch. I'm trying to keep this process organic and free-form, without a lot of preconceived ideas about where it will all go. That said, I laid down quite a few threads for future dungeon development in the first set of keyed areas.

I feel good about the start of this project, so far. I'm even lining up a group to start playtesting it in a few months once I get a couple of levels complete. I will likely post the first completed section this coming weekend, but I may have another post or two about the process if I have any interesting insights.

#Dungeon23 — Session 0

 It's as D&D as I could make it...

#Dungeon23 — Tunnels Beneath the Earth

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...