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.

What is Realism?

What have I told you about not tracking your equipment properly?

Or, if you prefer, ‘naturalism’, in a literary sense. I sometimes feel there is still in the hobby a pervasive sense that ‘more detailed’ means ‘more realistic’, or somehow closer to the hobby’s roots in wargames, in opposition to more impressionistic approaches, which are gamey or, heaven forfend, for ‘storygames’. I have absolutely been guilty of this.

For example: measuring encumbrance as gross weight is an abstraction, something that was explicitly addressed in early editions of D&D, where encumbrance ‘weight’ was an artificial amalgam of mass and apparent ease of transport. If you’ve ever packed a bag, you already know this—yet somehow, it’s easy to take it for granted that measuring equipment in pounds is realistic, and measuring it in slots is gamey and artificial.

Likewise, if you have ever played a team sport, or been in a stressful or chaotic situation, you probably know that it is very difficult for people to coordinate, especially if there is time pressure and some people have incomplete information or are afraid—and yet, common sense (or at least, gaming common sense) suggests that perfectly choreographed fights where everyone gets a turn, and can act according to the latest information, are normal; while asynchronous or dynamic methods of turn-taking are ‘cinematic’ or artificial.

In fact, when D&D was at its most ‘wargamey’, in the earliest editions, it was common to require players to declare actions before initiative was rolled. That was a wargame rule, because wargames are often concerned with problems of knowledge and communication. What we think of as traditional initiative is really more like a boardgame, or some genre of its own (as an aside, I think it sucks; removed from the requirement to declare actions ahead of time, it seems kind of vestigial and pointless).

I think this also applies to our position on things like players’ authorial control over the fiction. I’m currently working on a game with a ‘backwards’ inventory system. I wanted what characters are carrying to be important to play, but I didn’t want to include lots of book-keeping. One solution to this is to give each character a certain number of slots to fit supplies and equipment, which players can fill in as they play. On the one hand, this might seem like cheating, even immersion-breaking—isn’t it a bit too convenient if my character can pull out just the item they need, when they need it, and I can say it was there all along?

Actually, it’s equally cheaty, gamey, or arbitrary to say that I can and must decide, ahead of time, what my character brings on an adventure. How does my character know that they will need holy water, just because I suspect there will be undead? For that matter, how do I know that my character doesn’t know that they will need holy water? If I envision a competent adventurer who knows how and what to pack, why can’t they have planned for a contingency I didn’t anticipate?

In this case, I think what we are dealing with is less about realism, and more about player ‘stance’ (to borrow the old Forge term) relative to their character. If your character is a ‘pawn’, a piece you move around the game board in order to win, then it might make sense that you have to choose their equipment ahead of time, as part of the game’s challenge. If the character is a role you play, or an actor you direct, there is no reason to assume you should care about what they are carrying until it matters.
I actually find it more interesting to upend some of these pawn-pushing assumptions about how traditional games should be played. I also hesitate to say this is strictly about the distinction between games as competitive or ‘system-mastery’ exercises, versus other type of play, because I think you can e.g. use my reverse inventory in a game in which deciding when to use up an item slot is an important strategic decision.