Dungeon23: Week 8, A Small Library, In Memoriam & Another Poem

This week feels sparse when I look at it on the page. But I think the giant book room is one of my favorites. I just like the idea of a big stupid trap in a room like that.

I’m leaning into the idea of “Vault Rooms” Basically a puzzle door that leads to a treasure hoard. I think it’s fun and it supports West Marches dungeon play nicely. I think for this puzzle I would accept solutions along the lines of a fireball spell that was made to last longer than usual by doing something clever like pouring oil on the door first, or maybe using some sort of permanence spell in conjunction with it? Also just building a bonfire around the door would probably work after a while if the fire was big enough. I would also probably let a clever player that cast an illusion on the door to make it “glow red” through because I’m a big softy and that’s the kind of shit I’m always trying to pull.

Room 24 is a direct reaction to losing my Hardcore WoW classic character to an orc ambush on Thursday night. It was brutal. She was only level 17. She had her whole life ahead of her. RIP Skulfa-

We also have another poem this week! Deborah the Chicken Wizard graces us once again!

Dungeon 4

One of mine

Dungeon of the compromised vegetables

Not the beet first. But a sulky lime

And a wavering carrot on its long feet.

This is the friendly dungeon, full of friends, tubers

And squash with their rotund green bellies.

You could like it here, hanging out with corn in the damp warm morning

Caressing its silky silk. Little round tomatoes scurry

About, with little faces that are round and red

And maybe only a little sly. What peace might you find here, in crumbly warm dirt

With the eyes of potatoes looking up at you from their frosty beds.

Yeah we’re here, see us, while the brussel sprouts, a crowded den family

Waft around on their big stems, wait until the end of the season they say

All the crackling golden stalks. The moptops of carrots, the

Tiny cucumbers curled like puppies , the glorious rainbow of peppers.

Dungeon23: Week 7, Frozen Labyrinth

It was time for an ice level. Been thinking about lock and key style dungeon making and ultimately just leads to me making the players buy winter coats to explore down here effectively. Probably special spiked boots too to negate a lot of slipping. I think I just like the idea of characters having multiple “looks” but that’s definitely the character designer in me.

Really excited to see where that portal leads, and if it’s where all the snow and ice came from, because I think this place started not so frozen. The Young Blue Dragon from the last section would have come from someplace more desert like if we’re going by classic D&D dragon logic, but a tundra is ALSO a kind of desert right? RIGHT?

The Minotaur definitely doesn’t know about any of that though because he’s been hard at work making an ice labyrinth that isn’t even really that impressive of a labyrinth (I ran out of room to do it justice and just blamed it on the minotaur, what a jerk.) I like the idea that Minotaur’s are the ones that are building these labyrinths, and I always think of it as them making a quiet place for themselves to think. I imagine they are plagued by intrusive thoughts and frustrating dreams.

Quick shoutout to anyone who gets the reference to the chain demon swinging a chain at the top of the waterfall. I just had to do it.

The frozen merchant with a really useful dungeon “key” might be the most Zelda thing I’ve put in the entire dungeon so far, and I stand by it. I imagine it’s stacked in a big pile of other frozen treasure/junk though so you need to be the curious sort to get it. I like reward the curious sort though so that’s okay I think.

How many severed wind duke heads are there? well I think it depends on whether or not I run out of ways to make that puzzle more annoying. So probably a couple more at least.

Bye for now,

Skullboy

Dungeon23: Week 6, The Glittering Halls and The Young Dragon + A Poem

Another week down! The more I do this the more I want to go back and REFINE. Which eventually, I will do. I think forcing myself to work within these very small spaces is keeping me safe from burnout and actually excited to revisit some of these spaces later. They all need more specific treasures and wandering tables blah blah blah. In much more exciting news (to me at least) my mother-in-law, who is a very kind and supportive follower of my work and who plays Deborah The Chicken Wizard in the city-crawl game I’m running for my wife’s family, took an interest in Dungeon 23 based on what she saw and decided to write a poem about it (she is in fact a poet so she does that from time to time). I absolutely adore it, Enjoy.

Dungeon 23

Not one of mine

They are plump and seem harmless

These denizens

With their fat spears and humming

Bows

With metal painted snouts and

Pretty dresses

This is the fashion dungeon

Where they don’t have to threaten

But waddle around picturesquely

And look soft. They aren’t really

Cuddly, being difficult creatures

Of imagination, wily, and

Unpredictable. They would as

Soon skewer you as hold you

And the empty frames on

The walls just wait for 

Trophies. They are satisfying

In their menace. They wait.

Fortles. In. Spaaaaaaace

Friend of the blog and sometimes collaborator Bad Quail is doing a very cool thing with Dungeon 23 and instead of a Dungeon is doing a solar system full of planets using Night Tripper. Today’s entry included Fortles!

Check it out!

Dungeon23: Week 5, The Inverted Ziggurat

This week was the first that I felt I truly had no plan for what this space was, most evident in how many times I crossed things out on Monday the 30th.

I came at each room with the intention of simply writing what floated to the top of my head first. I also came the closest to missing a day this week, as Saturday night at 11pm was when I finished the second to last room. I like for dungeon23 to be a morning routine- enjoyed with a cup of coffee and a loose mind, but it’s interesting to see where the mind goes after a day of activity- apparently lost in the tall grass.

I’m starting to think about the form a bit more. I might start introducing empty rooms as something outside the scope of written rooms. What I mean is that I like the exercise of writing SOMETHING every day, and EMPTY is by definition the opposite of that. On one hand Empty rooms are critical to the tension and scale of a megadungeon, while on the other hand I think I tend to lean in an “emptier” direction with so many of my mild puzzle rooms, which tend to be more atmosphere than anything else. What is right? Neither, as we must not burden ourselves with the idea of being correct in an exercise like this. What will I do? Probably add more rooms, 30 is too few for a whole level of a megadungeon- but I also think 12 is too many levels so perhaps their will be some kind of reorganization later.

Oh and before I forget I do plan on piecing together more finalized maps of the completed floors but for now this is the cut and paste version of level 1.

I am charmed by its roughness.

PS. Sorry I haven’t managed to send any of these posts out as emails yet, I have to set up a P.O box to do it properly and I have been dragging my feet. I promise we’ll all be solidly living in 2002 era internet communique soon enough.

Keep turning left-

Skullboy

Dungeon23: Week 4, GOBLIN WEEK

It’s GOBLIN WEEK. So I decided to celebrate by making the 4th wing of the first floor goblin-centric.

I also decided that these goblins were like, vinegar/fermentation goblins with a scoby queen. Not much else to say right now, I’m currently writing this on my friends floor as we spent the weekend marathon watching Lord of the Rings. I plan on putting together a stitched up map of the first floor with some more details based on everything I’ve made so far. Happy first dungeon month everyone!

The Garden of Mazirian The Magician

Been re-reading The Dying Earth, and couldn’t help but make some art about it. Shoutout to Nick over at Underworld Adventurer for reminding me how good it is! If you’d like to buy a print of this piece, you can!

Dungeon23: Week 3, Crypt Halls

Another week completed!

This week features a very annoying hallway of grasping zombies that can’t bite you because they have no heads, but can cling to you and slow you down, making travel through the crypt halls pretty miserable and a genuine resource drain. There’s also the briefest hint of GOBLINS.

Did you know that GOBLIN WEEK starts today? Time to start doing goblin things and drawing goblin pictures and putting goblins in the dungeon. I think the goblins here are going to be hive-minded and sprout from a big weird kombucha mother goblin. Terrible for adventures and really beneficial to gut health.

Looking forward to the end of this month. I think I’m gonna do a big post where I smash the maps all together and square away some things like a full wandering monster table, which is something I’ve been pretty lax about. I mostly just care about the outline here, because the key to maintaining a project this long is not overinvesting in it. My dungeon is far from detailed right now, but I could run it with about 20 minutes of prep ahead of time and that’s really all I’m ever willing to do.

Time-Dilating Staircase was a last minute idea, and I really love it. Thanks Super Mario 64, couldn’t have done it without you.

How to free yourself from the mind prison of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (and engage in the rest of the hobby that has been there all along.)

-Decide you would like to try something new, because new things are fun and this is a big hobby, full of wonderful things.

-Start a new campaign using a free game that you find on itch.io or a cheap used game that you find at a crusty bookstore with a roleplaying game section. Print the rules out on your printer or at a library if the game you found only has digital copies. No recommendations for games will be provided in this post because finding the game you want to play is a game unto itself and any help would be a spoiler, learn to spend long hours steeped in the hobby of looking for games as a source of nourishment.

-Run your game once a week, regardless of who shows up. Do this online or in real life. Have a large pool of players, and never play with anyone you wouldn’t want to take a 3 hour car trip with. Never play for more than 2 hours over discord or more than three hours sitting around a real table in the real world. Try to keep people off their phones and keep track of things on large quantities of scrap paper that you are constantly losing track of. Understand that conflict may arise between the people at your table and try to treat those situations as if it were a dinner party and don’t expect a games rulebook to help with these conflicts.

-Talk to your group of gaming friends about the kind of game they want to play. LISTEN TO THEM. What parts of RPGs do they like, and which ones do they not care about? Do they like to be partially in control of story beats, or do they like the thrill of exploring an established world? Find out the things that you all find fun, and build your homebrew rules around those things as you go, cutting away the parts you collectively don’t need. 

-Be a hype machine for free game stuff. There are a million and a half things that folks have made to make your life as a Game Enjoyer easier, use as much of them as you need, and leave nice reviews of things in your wake.

-Ignore the majority of the rules of that game you printed out, it's only really there as a mascot for the activity and something for people to thumb through while they talk about a different game that they have been meaning to play. Consult it around once per session to see how much a bottle of holy water costs.

-Only play with people you trust to not lie about their dice rolls, and if they do lie about their dice rolls, understand that maybe they really need this, and just let it slide. 

-Start a blog to keep track of everything going on in your campaign in between sessions and for players to submit reports of their adventures from their characters perspectives.

-Be excellent to each other. This is a hobby, not life or death.

Dagamoor Residents

Some additional Dungeon23 illustrations, from level 1 of Dagamoor

Dungeon23: Week 2, The Cemetery Gardens and Appendix N of Dungeon Media

The second full week! We find ourselves traveling west, through the room of masks and ending up in a big weird graveyard, where the tombstones grow like crooked teeth. I’ve been thinking about that room for a while now, and I’m glad to have it somewhere on paper. Having a graveyard in a setting is a very Zelda-like thing to do and I am a sucker for a Zelda. I think I might do a few sketches to augment some of the things I made for this one, Candlejacks are something I had lying around for ages and I really enjoy them as a low level, easy puzzle enemy.

About part way through the week here I was made aware of the book Piranesi which takes place almost entirely in a dungeon. I read the whole thing on Saturday in rapt attention, and I highly recommend it to anyone else doing this project.

It’s a bit unusual to have a whole work set in a dungeon, or otherwise similarly enclosed underworld location, there are some stand out examples in my mind, which I’m compiling into an appendix N for this particular project. I am loosely categorizing a “dungeon” work as something that takes place most of the time in an enclosed, maze like otherworldly location. I’ve found that there are lots of movies that give me that fantasy RPG feeling, but fewer that take place in that ur-setting of the d u n g e o n. Shout out your favorites that I missed (this list is obviously very incomplete) in the comments or make your own list!

Big Trouble in Little China

Dungeon Meshi

Cube

Labyrinth 

Made in Abyss

Lair of the White Worm

Conan the Destroyer

Alien

Haunting of Hill House

Dave Made a Maze

Mortal Kombat (a shocking amount of this movie takes place in a dungeon)

Piranesi

The House of Asterion

The Descent

Dungeon23: Week 1, The Flooded Halls.

The first FULL week of D23 for me.It was nice to wake up, drink some coffee and have something to chew on in the way that I imagine some people use a crossword puzzle. I took the tact of just writing rooms throughout the week and waiting until today to do my map. I just couldn’t commit to the random room placement, but perhaps I will relinquish control as the project goes on.

Go Bills!

I’m very much looking forward to finding out where the underwater secret passage in that treasure chest goes.

I’m playing it kind of ambiguous with the treasure, but I imagine some of the paintings might still be worth a bit of money to a collector, and that crystal is probably the kind of thing an enterprising group of psychopaths would try to remove and carry off to the surface. I know if I were playing my dwarf Bludoon here he would be gathering samples of the vines for cooking and would probably want to see what Fire Beetle tasted like.

I’m feeling confident about the pace of this being fairly easy to maintain at the moment, but it is after all the first week of January and they say that everyone gives up on their resolutions by the end of this month. Here’s to trying to get a bit farther than that!

Commissions Open!

Need some art?

Isle of Dreading the Imminent Change of My Workflow

(jk it’s a good change)

I’ve been messing around in Procreate! I was lucky enough to inherit an iPad from my sister, who apparently had no use for it. Thanks kid!

I’m really, really, really enjoying the freedom that drawing on a tablet provides. I have been using the same Wacom intuos 4 for exactly 14 years now* and I have long been a curmudgeon about making any sort of change. If you developed a workflow on a screenless tablet you might understand how I feel. It is a steep learning curve to detach your eye from your hand like that- akin to doing gesture drawings at first. So when you develop a sturdy practice with it you might be hesitant to throw away those hard spent hours. 

* only a slight exaggeration as my original died 2 years ago and I replaced it with a used one of the same make and model.

I had briefly tried one of those exceedingly fancy Cintiqs that you see all the pros using, but either by virtue of my brief time spent with it (an archeologist friend lent me the one he had convinced the university to buy for him) I never warmed to the way it felt. Though it’s possible with some setting changes and not using Photoshop (cursed slow lumbering waste of money that it is) I would have found comfort in it.

Procreate is much more lightweight and the workflow of sitting curled up with a tablet is extremely cozy and a nice change of pace from sitting in an office chair all day. The program is lightweight enough that learning its quirks has been fairly easy and there are only a few aspects of it that annoy me. But mostly I just need to get used to looking at a reference image on my phone while I draw instead of having a second monitor to pull things up on.

That all being said I’ve been fiddling around with it a lot and forcing myself to do some non commission based work to stretch my legs in the new year. I started this piece as a quick sketch of a marching order of adventurers in a tunnel and it quickly evolved into a large scale poster sized piece set on an island. I was thinking about making it a bit of Isle of Dread fanart, but we’ll see how that goes. I’m flirting with the idea of making a series of old module “movie posters”- is that something people would like? I think I would like it. I tend to enjoy the ephemera of a lot of the old school stuff more than the content. Don’t get me wrong there’s some charm there, but much of it is badly laid out sub par writing hiding the barest nugget of a good idea. The spirit of the thing is what’s important, and there’s plenty of people full of it these days making much better stuff.

Isle of Dread is one that I haven’t read through the entirety of, despite having I think multiple copies do to a shipping mistake long ago. HOWEVER it reminds me of one of my favorite films of all time, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which is old school d&d down to its bones. And there are plenty of bones in it.

I like the idea of a big weird island full of stuff. I also like that the bad guy in 7th Voyage is a wizard with a captive dragon and there’s a big cyclops and they fight. 

My sketch is coming along nicely for it. I’m playing with some worldbuilding things that I have come to think of as canonically old school. One of them is befriending monsters to hang out with you, which is why that Ogre is carrying stuff. The other is the scale of Dwarves, which I like being actually not that small and instead they just have these big heads and otherwise strangely proportioned bodies. Also there is a cat because if someone asks to be a cat in a game of d&d you can just say yes to them and let them play Puss and Boots because who cares. Final will also most likely have a giant bird because the whole plot of the crew eats the baby Rocs and then the Roc eats them is some solid gold, A plus old school adventuring nonsense.

Here’s the poster sized version that I’m working on now.

So probably it will find it’s way to completion in the coming weeks. If you like it when I post things like that, and then explain them like this, you might consider subscribing to my Patreon. It REALLY helps to have a steady income for making art when you’re a scrappy freelancer living job to job. 

Anyhoo things for reading, more to come.

Kiss Kiss, 

Skullboy

Dungeon23: Day 1, Descent.

The beginning and ending of the first week. I think I’ll keep to a Sunday posting schedule so the first post is just a day! I like a meditative descent into an underworld.

Mapping will begin next week, which I’ll call week 1.

gonna make it through this year if it kills me

End of the year feelings. Amazingly the mountain goats always fit the bill. Also Zelda. Anyways I’m excited to make a lot of art next year and hopefully refill some of those hearts along the way.

Dungeon23: Dagamoor

For a thousand years people have told tales of the mystical dungeon of Dagamoor, the twisting vault that holds the many treasures of Varta, Demon Lord of Thieves, built from bricks stolen from God's own church. 

A nightmarish web of tunnels spiced with traps and fiends from a thousand terrible lands and tomb of the demon-thief himself. Varta himself is long thought to be dead, and the monument he built to his life of thieving and treachery is overgrown and wild. Those who brave the many hazards will be rewarded with an untold fortune of stolen goods from every corner of the known universe.

Long thought to be lost, an entrance has been found hidden beneath an overgrown fountain at the center of a long forgotten, ruined town that sits just off the edge of most mainstream maps.

Descend the staircase and test yourself against the deadly Dagamoor, King of Dungeons. 

What I have done for myself here:

Dungeon23 is an opportunity to connect with the roots of the TTRPG hobby. It’s an exercise in both creativity and longevity. To best facilitate that I want to give myself an easy prompt- The dungeon-maze of the greatest thief of all time. 

By doing this I have given myself

1. The easiest prompt for a dungeon in the history of dungeon-making.

2. An excuse (an imperative even) to steal as much as I want from published works because this is NOT something I’m planning to publish myself and in fact I’m looking at it as a way to incorporate pieces of published games that I love and want to fit into a campaign.

3. A setting that can encompass material from all sorts of genres and settings and fit them all together in a beautifully haphazard collage of below-ground nonsense.

4. A solid motive for treasure-hunting adventurers (who DOESN’T want to steal from the Demon Lord of Thieves?)

5. A setting that would obviously be replete with traps, treasure, monsters and all of the other things that a good megadungeon has to offer.

6. An easy place to insert any ideas I’m thinking about workshopping for publishing myself- this project is a sketchbook, and some pages of a sketchbook turn into paintings and others are shopping lists.

2022 Project Roundup

I am terrible at remembering when stuff happened, so it’s important for me to take a little time at the end of the year to be able to sit down and remember what I got up to. I keep writing more things for this intro and then erasing them, so maybe let’s just get down to a big list of stuff I did.

Projects that I was part of that came out this year! I’m sure I’m missing some, I’m sorry if I’m missing yours and you’re reading this.

Knock 3

Barkeep on the Borderlands

Wyvern Songs

Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos

Noofutura

Brian! The Cataclysmic Engine

Fruit Merchants

Land of Eem

Fantastic Medieval Campaigns

Streaming!!

I did a lot more streaming in 2022 than I realized. From February to August I streamed about 400 hours. The thing that really kept me trucking on that funnily enough was drawing Pokemon. Both my stream and Pokemon drawings tapered off after a while, but I’m thinking about ways to get back to doing a more manageable amount of streaming for 2023. 

Pokemon!!

I had SO MUCH fun doing this. I started just about every stream in 2022 by warming up with a pokemon drawing. It was a good way to start the day. I found that having a definite plan for at least the beginning of the stream was a sure fire way to keep up consistency. Here are a few of my favorites-

Adventure Game In Need of Translation!!

My silly little zine written in a made up language about a game that doesn’t really exist got the physical copy treatment in February courtesy of the fine folks over at Exalted Funeral. Feel free to pick up a copy if you haven’t yet! It’s funny and stupid! What a combination!

Beyond Random!!

For a couple of months I was on a real random generation kick with the Patreon and I was using D&D Beyond to roll up some 5e characters that I proceeded to give backstories to and illustrate. This was a classic example of a fun project that started small and then spiraled into something a biiiiit to big for me to realistically deliver on. I think if I were to do it again I would have just kept it simple and left the “playability” aspect out of it. Though I did produce a solid repertoire of ready to play 5th edition characters, and enough hot hair from ranting about all the problems 5th edition has to power a balloon around the world at least twice.

I also have at least one fully edited episode of this ready to drop on youtube and I just haven’t done it yet. I really should do that, and probably more youtube stuff. I’m terrible at youtube, someone do it for me please.

Merchandise! 

I relocated my shirt store after finding that the print on demand sites I was previously using were pumping out some pretty mediocre quality shit. I’m much happier with The Cotton Bureau and I hope you are too! I’m planning on doing A LOT more merch in 2023, from stickers to enamel pins to shirts and risograph prints. LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU WANT, I’m open to ideas.

Patreon!!

An always fluctuating, many headed beast of my own indecision I finally solidified the patreon into something I think I can maintain and is of value (in my eyes) If you haven’t ever looked at my patreon here’s what it gets you:

The Free Tier: This is not actually a tier, but a lot of things on my patreon are free for anyone to just go and look at. I’ve recently made this a bit easier by making my Blog an easy way of viewing free patreon content. You are reading this on that blog so uh, congratulations for finding your way here.

The $5 Tier: With this monthly donation you get a digital copy of any books I make, and you also get thanked in the text for being a supporter. In donating you’re also supporting my ability to continue to make art & games! It’s like, hard to be a freelancer, man. 

The $10 Tier: 18+ SPICE. I make erotic art now, as of this year. It’s been a wild ride and extremely fun, so if you want to get in on seeing elves and orcs and whatever having sex and being sexy and whatever you gotta go here. 

Dungeon23: A Town With No Name.

A good megadungeon should have a place to call home base. I also like the idea that that place is somewhere the players can customize to meet their needs through downtime gameplay. NPCs from around the area and also ones who are lost or trapped in the dungeon can live and work within the micro economy created by the players excavating treasure.

Dungeon23 Hirelings

I have been doing a little bit of backend work for dungeon23, but it’s been sporadic. I’ll end up releasing some of these as things go along during the new year. Here’s a crew of hirelings that are hanging out around the dungeon, looking for work.

The leader of these folks is an old character I used to play in a megadungeon game.

i’m building this dungeon with the new system I’m working on, so if you’re confused by what a polymath is, it’s okay. A polymath is a non religious, cleric like character who can fight and cast spells (no turn undead though) they can use bladed weapons, but not magic swords with egos.