I love a big project. I rarely finish a big project, but I try not to let that stop me from trying again. Love Sean’s idea for Dungeon23, so I’m gonna give it a go. Got my stuff (love an excuse to by a slightly too fancy notebook) and there is a certain accountability in dropping 25 bucks on something that makes me wanna follow through.
DISCOVERY! At least half of those pens don’t work, I hadn’t tested them yet.
I think leading up to the first of January I’ll flesh out a bit of the castle that sits on top of the the dungeon, but I don’t want to jump the gun too much. I spent some time while I was out of the studio last week doing some hectic chart and table making. (in a different notebook, the new one hadn’t come yet) It all looks like the scribblings of a madman, but that’s kind of what this whole project is.
Here’s what those scribblings look like. I like showing off really ugly sketchbook pages sometimes. It reminds people that sketchbooks aren’t pretty places that are supposed to be curated for instagram. They are for the people that use them and everything else is bonus content, whether or not you use it for anything else is irrelevant. Anyways.
literally just the od&d dungeon creation but worse, near a slightly alphabetical list I copied from an excel document of “types of rooms” probably stolen but it said I made the excel doc so-
I’m leaning into a certain amount of random generation stuff for “biomes” and treating it a bit like the random seeds at the start of a new game of Valheim or Terraria. I like putting video games in my tabletop games, because its fun and it makes people mad.
I also like the idea of a dungeon having a few different biomes, a la depthcrawl/hexcrawl style. It’s fun.
I’m not gonna follow any of the rules I’m setting up for myself, this is gonna be a disaster.
working through wandering monster tables, fixing the things that are stupid, like how there are no severed demon hands.
I am currently writing something that probably will be thought of as a “fantasy heartbreaker” but the main focus of this game is going to be making monsters, spells and dungeon generation interesting and easy to do on the fly. It also is only going to be about dungeon crawling so this is a good project to do in tandem.
deciding what kobolds look like is really the only important thing. also, goblins are fairies.
we were honing on something here for sure. for the days I cant decide if I want spinning blades or acid jets.
part of this is just workshopping new monsters for a game system I’m making, so no one has to fight a spider in a dungeon ever again. Also, altars
Elementals are underserved in TTRPGs. THERE I SAID IT. I think there are cooler ways of doing things than just walking around piles of rocks okay.
I’m thinking that the rooms should be like, really hard to describe, shape wise. I like just giving players the map and uncovering as they go. I’ve never liked the specifics of describing a map.
monsters have pubes.