This Post is Over a Decade Late (or just in time for Dungeon23)

Welcome to my blog!  I’ve wanted to write this for a long time as I was bitten and infected (natch) by the bug of the Old School Renaissance (OSR,) but always found an excuse to avoid it.  Fast forward over a decade and a new year and I find myself with both the time and a neat project, the Dungeon23 challenge, to spur regular writing.  Furthermore, the hobbysphere finds itself in a similar situation to a decade ago, with a void between popular and (possibly) unpopular editions of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) where people may be hungry for content outside of the mainstream game, so perhaps this is just the right time for this blog.

 

My original idea for a first post was going to be a biographic manifesto of my gaming history and Old School chops (or lack thereof,) but I’d rather leave that screed for a future time.  You’re likely here for something of substance, so let’s just roll right on with this year’s project de jour: Dungeon23.  But first, some preliminaries:

 

What is this blog about?

Like other OSR blogs, my writings will be focused on older editions of D&D, their retroclones and inspired games, as well as Old School structures of play, so even if you play the current edition of the game, but you appreciate Old School style play, you may still find something of value in this blog. 

 

How often will you post?

The idea is to get one good post per week.  For this year, it will be compilations of the week’s Dungeon23 work.  Depending on my appetite for further writing, expect posts on new, gameable material, as well tips and (opinionated) insights I’ve learned from 32 years of RPG gaming and a decade of exposure to the OSR hobbysphere.  Lastly, some obligatory nostalgic posts from the perspective of a late Gen X, 80s kid who got into RPGs in the early 90s – too late to be truly Old School, but too early to be New School.  This may include occasional posts about other popular RPGs of the late 80s and 90s.

 

Now, without further ado...

 

Dungeon23

For those that don’t know (and really, how did you find this blog, then?) Dungeon23 is a writing challenge where you write one room of a dungeon every day, creating one level of the dungeon every month.  At the end, you should have a 12-level megadungeon with 365 rooms total.  Other OSR bloggers and vloggers have expanded  the concept to creating one bit of RPG material every day such as a detailed hexes in a mapped sandbox, encounters, new monsters, NPCs, magical items, etc.  Some are melding the Dungeon23 project with the Gygax75 challenge, which is another worthy project.

 

For my Dungeon23, I would like to write a campaign following the assumed timeline in the Moldvay/Cook (and later Mentzer) Basic/Expert (BX/BECMI) versions of D&D.  I will begin with the first three levels of a dungeon, followed by a detailed home base with keyed locations, and finally a wilderness sandbox for 4^th-level and higher player characters to adventure in and potentially build future strongholds.  A rough outline of the project’s timeline is as follows: 

 

January: Dungeon Level 1

February: Dungeon Level 2

March: Dungeon Level 3

April: The Home Base 

May: The Wilderness around the Home Base with hexes of interest 

June-December: Additional Dungeon levels and/or detailed locations in the Wilderness

 

I feel this is a pretty good timeline to stick to.  So what is the theme of my dungeon?  Well, being a child of the 80s, my impressionable little brain was filled with tons of fantasy and sci-fi media.  Some of my favorite films were those of the swords and sorcery variety.

 

Pictured: the Holy Trinity of 80s Swords & Sorcery cinema

 

1982’s Conan the Barbarian has a location that is perfect for a campaign’s tent-pole dungeon: Thulsa Doom’s Mountain of Power

 

 

 

Ol Weregrog says: if your classic megadungeon isn’t set under castle (with a color and a noun in the name, of course) then put it in a mountain! 

  

11 out of 18 dwarves recommend mountain dungeons

 

This place has it all: an iconic location, a grand entrance-way, and multiple points of entry in the form of a secret stair to the balcony, a fountain garden exposed to the outside (with a sub-level above,) and a gorge full of caves leading to the inside of the complex.  I plan to shamelessly rip off this location and file down the serial numbers just enough where one may not be absolutely sure that this is *The* Mountain of Power, but you know what’s going on (*wink*.)  I'm looking for gameability rather than originality here.

 

And that's the plan.  Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the first section of Dungeon Level 1 in the Temple of the Snake Cult!