#dungeon23
Dungeon23 logos by Lone Archivist CC-BY 4.0
Maybe it is just surviving the nadir of the “long dark” but the new year and the associated idea of beginnings (self-improvement and otherwise) have always brought a sense of wonder. It makes me a sucker for New Year’s resolutions. Endless possibilities. It is the same emotional impact as walking down a well-stocked office supply aisle. Pens all in a row ready to mark your ideas, bound journals there to capture them, and binders that are begging to be filled with the collated secrets of your favorite RPGs.
This is, of course, how I wind up with several unfilled Moleskin knockoffs, empty binders, and just reams of paper stacked around my houses. I am a sucker for it.
In the certainly-but-maybe-not death throes of Twitter, I caught wind of the #dungeon23 project. The premise is you create a “dungeon room” every day for a year, and at the end, you have your MEGA DUNGEON.
And there it is, coming out of the long dark, combined with a realization that I spend too much time consuming meta content when I could actually be doing something, I am delivered a quest that instructs the opposite. It’s time to build instead of watching a YouTube video.
I am still sorting this out, but I know I will not build a mega-dungeon: that just isn’t the game we play. I might shoot for doing 52 weekly 5-7 room dungeons. I got a lot of mileage out of the 4th Ed Dungeon Delve book and I wouldn’t mind making one myself. Might even have enough to publish something when I am done.
The problem is that this is a huge undertaking. The implicit lie in all this is the minimal commitment. “It’s just one room a day, you can even just do an empty room”. Drawing a single room is one thing, putting together a room that makes sense, follows a narrative, and creates meaning is something else entirely. All that planning happens outside your one-room-a-day routine. Not to mention my life is radically different than it was 3 years ago.
Hopefully, this will lead to more posting here, and not wind up in the empty journal stack. Good luck, to all of us.
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