#dungeon23 Postmortem

Some would say that the beginning of 2026 is a bit late to post a retrospective on Dungeon '23. I think it has arrived at exactly the right time.

I performed the big task and won the glamorous prize. What on earth did I hope to achieve, and did I succeed?

Motivations

A phenomenon like hashtag Dungeon23 is kind of a weird fad. It's spontaneous and social (let's all do this thing together!) but also antisocial (I don't even know any of these people!) and technologically mediated (everyone being on Twitter seems so quaint, now).

Did I want to fit in with the cool kids? Did I do something because everyone else was doing it? Probably.

But also: I like making dungeons. The discipline of a daily creative exercise, outside of everything else I do, was appealing. And I liked the idea of having something at the end to show for it.

Complications

By the time I had finished my year-long dungeon, my interests in actual play were starting to diverge from the subject of my work. It's pretty difficult to motivate yourself to play your dungeon when you're absolutely sick of dungeon-delvers and would much rather play Lancer or Apocalypse World.

This raises a question that hangs over this whole project, over Dungeon23, and over the entire RPG industry, including (especially) the sort of small-press and 'indie' creators who are interested in projects like this one. Namely: am I working on a form of creative expression, a product, or (material for) a game? Each of these is a different goal with different (and possibly contradictory) requirements.

I never entirely solved this. My explicit goal was that I was making materials for actual play, which might or might not become a product, if and when I thought they were fit and finished. In reality, having burned out on dungeon-crawling about half-way through, I was really just doing a creative writing exercise. It would take a lot of work to turn this into something actually playable; and I think it would be, for want of a better term, artistically and morally irresponsible to turn this into a product without making it fit for play and actually playtesting it. The world doesn't need another artsy game-shaped object.

Lessons Learned

1. I can in fact finish a year-long project made up of short daily entries.
2. Turning said work into something fit for purpose, rather than a form of practice, is an entirely different kettle of fish.
3.  To quote myself at the beginning of the project: Dungeon design is also game design, at least implicitly. [...] I suspect this means that a good dungeon can never be truly system-agnostic. Especially for a really big dungeon, the system that will be used to play the dungeon has a lot of implications for the dungeon itself. I don't think you can design the one without knowing a lot about the other, which throws a huge spanner in the works.
4.  Megadungeons are probably just not a good idea. Writing one up is a big task, and then you have to map, test, and iterate, all without going mad or dying of old age. I'm glad I finished it, but I think any attempt to repurpose this work into something actually playable would have to trim it down considerably.
5. I think I'll probably come back and pillage this project at some point. The fortress of doors, the gardens, and that little shrine of the dark sub-level are all fun ideas I'd like to revisit.