Day One of Dungeon 23, so here is my room. First, the hand drawn and written versions, then the digital ones.
If your eyes have not bled out after seeing that, here is a typed description and digital rendering(NOTE: I won’t always make a digital rendering, it will just be as time allows). You can see it does not have doors, this is on purpose, you can read why here.
So I have decided to partake in the Dungeon 23 project (learn more here). However, I do have some preemptive thoughts about the project as a whole and what I plan to get out of it. The project states that by the end of this year, any participant who finishes it will have created a twelve level mega-dungeon with 365 rooms. This is a noble goal and well worth attempting, however, I feel that the challenge as written will not produce gameable content very consistently.
Comments are live! I finally found a commenting software that strikes a balance between ease of use and privacy to my users. The software is commento. I am using a self-hosted instance, which means your comments will only ever been seen by me on the backend.
Mother,
I hope this letter finds you well. The months since my last letter have passed quickly for me, though I am sure they have been slow for you and the rest of Calencia. Perhaps I shall be able to make the trip back home soon, it would be good to see everyone again. I hope to have a semi permanent address soon, that you may write back to tell me of happenings back home.
The original map I created for Wavestone Keep certainly isn’t great. The main issue is that it had absolutely no distinction between levels, which lead to it feeling more like a single level of natural caves, as opposed to a crudely carved hideout below and open air areas above. Secondly, the layout is sort of ludicrous. Both of these things I chalk up to inexperience. There is a large difference in designing adventures for my usual players and making dungeons that are fit for wider consumption.
Setting Parameters So, I have a fair bit of work to do it seems, If I am to whip this module into shape. But first, let’s set some parameters for “improvement.” Firstly, I am going to work within the bounds of Bryce’s contest guidelines, I.E. that the adventure features nine rooms, and fits on 8 or less pages. This is despite my intense desire to say “screw you, it’s my module and I’ll do what I want” and make it ten times bigger than the original.
The last few weeks have been interesting, I’ve been involved in the excellent No Artpunk II contest, ran by Prince of Nothing (more here). While I don’t expect to actually win the contest, I’m happy for the feedback. There are some extremely good entries this year, and I honored to even be able to compete against them. However, as an unintended consequence of this I learned that the excellent Bryce of TenFootPole actually reviewed my first ever adventure, Wavestone Keep, and eviscerated it completely.
Here is a quick adventure that I threw together to introduce some players into my Homebrew OSE campaign, using one of Dyson’s creative commons maps. It fit nicely with an existing location on my island of Salmeaus location i.e. the abandoned “lighthouse” on the coast about a days journey west of the city of Falsmouth. That location was always just an abandoned tower, clearly of pre-flood architecture. Locals call it a lighthouse, though it’s original purpose has long been lost.
Mother,
I know it has been a few weeks since I left Calencia with those strangers who
visited in search of the amphora that drove Lindin mad. How are things back
home? Is Inga still sticking her nose in everyone’s business under the pretext
of oracle work? Have there been any other strangers in town? I trust you are
doing well, probably worrying needlessly about my marital status again. I hope
I recently ran across a twitter thread from a disgruntled player whose paladin
had been made to fall, due to them not preventing their party from killing a
child. The player had protested both in and out of character, but ultimately
failed to prevent the act. Their contention was that since:
Their paladin had objected
and They had not participated
That they should not fall, since the sin was not theirs.
In an attempt to make some use out of the notes I’ve been taking in the
excellent Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborean campaign I’ve had
the pleasure of playing in, I am going to translate the notes into a series of
letters from my character to his mother in Cape Calencia. His name is Chexi
Gooch, he is the lone Cleric of Kraken from his hometown. He left seeking
And there it was, a stone tower jutting crookedly from a small sandbar. The captain swore under his breath and called for a full stop alongside, once again planning to put the adventurers in his care to use. He had a bad feeling about this, as the tower was new, and new things in the ocean were invariably bad news. This tower appeared to have once been part of a larger structure, snapped off and placed ungracefully upon the sandbar.