If you haven’t heard, a lot of folks in the RPG space are taking part in the #Dungeon23 challenge. Recently started by Sean Mccoy on Twitter the idea is that if you key a single room a day starting on January 1st in a dungeon complex you’ll have a detailed 365 room dungeon at the end of 2023.
It provides a framework for easy, gradual, but constant progress where you have a huge complete thing at the end of the year! There’s tons of other resources and variations on the idea folks have posted. There’s even a subreddit now! You should totally do it.
I’ve been laying the groundwork for my Cinderstrom volcano megadungeon and the surrounding wilderness sandbox of the Steaming Basin for around a year now and it’s got a lot left to go, mostly in specific keying of rooms. Doing Dungeon 23 should help with that.
I thought I’d share my own messy, slow, process so far in making a connected sandbox region/megadungeon for eventual publication at Silverarm and see if it’s helpful for anyone.
Joel’s Method for Megadungeon Sandbox Design So Far:
- Pick Concept and Theme. Just write down the cool ideas that get you stoked in a not super organized way that you want in this megadungeon sandbox. This part is easy dopamine and the least work of any project for me but provides the loose core that the entire project will metastasize and pick up other influences over time.
- (Read The Hobbit, Dying Earth, and Conan Red Nails story. Volcano megadungeon. Andalusian Islamic architecture. Metro style podway and science fantasy. Abandoned dwarf hold sorta like Moria. Dragon with berserker cultists.)
- Lightly key and name Wilderness Sandbox locations, deciding on scope (7×7 hexes with 49 locations of interest. Procedurally generate hex contents to speed the process up using Hex Describe, replacing bad ones with completly different ideas and tweaking and twisting and stealing from good ones to create new version of contents that fits the setting.
- Rough level layout of the megadungeon using Scapple to create flow chart style map. (~300 rooms divided into levels ringing central lava chamber of volcano in three tiers connected vertically and horizontally metro style ancient podway system that also connects to some other dungeons in sandbox outside)
- Come up with lots of great room concepts rapidly using this brainstorming method from GFC D&D.
- Detail and name other dungeons/settlements around the region and establish size, lightly key whichever you have energy for. (12 other dungeons, average of 10 rooms each)
- Detail the factions that are already in head with a more detailed treatment, decide how everyone feels about each other, where they’re based, and what their goals are.
- Create Sub Regional Encounter Tables and other Random Tables (Campaign events, merchants, rival NPCs)
- Jaquays your wilderness sandbox for interesting navigation and meaningful choices because the wilderness is a dungeon. Create a variety of specific detailed paths between locations.
- Start Actually Playing with players in an unfinished setting! Build out based on organic play needs helping you create and tweak setting to be better.
- Have three different games in the setting sporadically end and start over a year period.
- Read too many OSR RPG blogs and books for good design ideas to bookmark and steal ideas and procrastinate on the hard part of actually writing the specific detail of every keyed location slowly.
- Transfer everything from a huge Google Doc to OneNote because organizing different areas and topics into folders is easier to parse.
- Settle on a dungeon level and room key format that provides a high level of usability at the table and provides a clear framework for work ahead. Acknowledge this will likely change some when I find a format I think is even better.
- Nail down the loose history already in head and then simplify the huge historical timeline to no more than 50 short events. These must be referenced in actual things the players engage with for organic discovery in the world Dark Souls style. All history must connect to actual play and be load bearing lore the players can interact with.
- Create World Anchors or themes and content that reoccurs throughout the sandbox for an organic sense of congruence and cohesiveness outside of a railroaded narrative. Plan that every dungeon or hex must have some link to one of these ~1d10 anchors to build these themes up.
- Pass back through Step 4 again and make things more cohesive with a new understanding of the setting’s context and history .
- Plant 1d4 hooks in each hex or dungeon leading to other hexes or dungeons to better interconnect sandboxes. (Still not done, takes a lot of work)
- Use a version of the Basic D&D Dungeon Room Stocking procedure but adapting to wilderness hex versions to add more stuff in a good ratio of types, continuing to treat the wilderness as a single overworld dungeon with other dungeons fractally inside.
- Decide roughly how much total gold there is in the sandbox (Lots) based on how many levels that would get the average party that found all of it (From Level 1 to at least Level 10 for a party of four Fighters in OSE). Once there’s this budget of total treasure, distribute it around the setting with more of it being found in higher level places of danger. Figure out how many significant magic items will be in the sandbox (At least 46 in the Cinderstrom megadungeon, 23 elsewhere.) Distribute these across the various dungeons)
- Get sucked deep into Metroidvania and Zelda style game design for the megadungeon and setting and creating a series of soft “locks” for accessing difficult and lucrative levels and areas and discovered “keys” in other locations in dungeon or sandbox that would help bypass these (Keeping in mind player ingenuity allows for tons of other ways to sequence break through locks and limits of video game design applied to tactical infinity of the tabletop rpg sandbox).
- Tweak things more
- Today. I have~420 total rooms to key in the megadungeon and surrounding sandbox. So far I’ve at least named and lightly keyed ~100. but only have a handful of detailed keys.
How I Plan on Using the Dungeon 23 Challenge:
I have my scope already established which helps me see that there is light coming at the end of the tunnel. Starting in January I’ll attempt to key at least a single room for every day of the week. However, knowing my brain and the way I work I think it’s most likely I’ll achieve these 7 rooms in a single day or two over the course of the week and do nothing towards it on most days. I read about someone starting an accountability Discord server for folks working on Dungeon 23 and I think that’s a great idea. It’s like having gym buddies to keep you making progress except with more hunching over a laptop looking at a screen.
The specific granular work of detailed keying and refining of every single room and wilderness location is never the fun part for me. It is, however, incredibly necessary to produce a megadungeon sandbox worth playing for others instead of a collection of cool ideas on a blog. Feeling inspired and producing neat ideas is awesome but it’s being willing to commit to the grind of implementing these things in a playable form instead of tweaking format and high level design that will let me publish a megadungeon in a yearish instead of have a series of cool blog posts about the design I would use in a hypothetical awesome sandbox that I never made.
Do you plan on participating in Dungeon 23?