My #dungeon23 Method

Goals & Practical Approach

First of all, there's no way I'm writing this thing in a notebook as originally intended. Physical writing is difficult for me, and I want everything in a digital format I can easily rework. I'm not interested in creating this dungeon merely as a writing exercise: I want to use it in my own games at least, and possibly publish it as well. In either case, the work will need to be revised, and I will treat everything I jot down as provisional.

For the same reason, I will be taking a leaf out of Gus L.'s book and doing the actual mapping later. I've learned the hard way that I draw the map first at my peril.

Finally, blogging my progress has the advantage (aside from crass exhibitionism and self-promotion) of forcing me to show my progress, and (hopefully) getting a little feedback now and then.

 

Aesthetic Approach

Among dungeon writers, I'm in an odd situation, in that I actually like a lot of traditional dungeon tropes and aesthetics, but only when they feel 'alive' and are presented in an interesting way. While I admire the creativity of a lot that came out of the former 'OSR', the really gonzo stuff tends to leave me cold (and has probably become its own kind of stale genre, at this point).

On the other hand, I rediscovered 'boomer shooters' over the pandemic, particularly Quake. For purely contingent historical reasons, Quake marries fantasy and science fiction elements in a way I find oddly coherent and compelling. I've also always wanted to do a sort of 'doom dungeon crawler', but I'm not completely committed to the idea right now, so making a sort of 'hellish techno-magical' dungeon would let me keep the broader setting assumptions usefully vague.

It would also let me draw on an interesting well of influences -- Book of the New Sun, Dune, Dark Sun, the short stories of Clarke Ashton Smith -- without completely abandoning traditional delving environments.

The actual physical layout I've settled on is an abandoned city in a desert wasteland (the first 'level'). The city is composed of multiple walled 'tiers',  with the outermost 'level' being the city proper, and each rising inner tier a unique (and progressively more difficult) environment. There will also be a couple of underground levels that function as sublevels or alternate paths.

Technical Approach

Dungeon design is also game design, at least implicitly. A massive crawl implies game design elements that are worth examining. For example: how often are resources like food and water encountered, if at all? How far is a party expected to progress before it should turn back?

If the idea is that characters are progressing through a massive complex while expending resources, then the rhythm of the game's 'exploration economy' may need to be incorporated into the dungeon. I suspect this means that a good dungeon can never be truly system-agnostic. The actual system I settle on will probably be my own, with an eye toward compatibility with something like Knave or Basic-type retroclone like OSE.

Finally, I want to make the relevance of information in the keyed entries immediately obvious. I will probably tinker a bit more before I find a method I'm completely satisfied with, but I want to use symbols to denote different types of information, viz.

👁 or (o) General description.

⚠ or (!) Hazards or other important information.

✋ or (?) Additional detail, evident upon examination or interaction.

🔍 or (??) Obscure information; generally requires a successful search.