Dungeon23 Epilogue and Blog Birthday

AI image courtesy of Bing Image Creator

Happy New Year!

Dungeon23 is done!   Ten dungeon levels, a wilderness “sandbox,” a fantasy city, and eight bonus entries with encounters, monsters, and lore!  Not only that, I started a blog that is now one year old and stuffed with (hopefully) useful content for readers.

Therefore, I’d to take some time to reflect on both the project and where this blog is headed.

 

What I liked

This was a fun project!  The pace of one room or entry per day made it pretty easy to write, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easily the ideas started to flow.  Some of these ideas had already been mulling around in my head for a while, such a dungeon inspired on the Mountain of Power from Conan the Barbarian.   I feel the project really took off in April and May with the city and wilderness maps, and I had a great time with the weirder lower levels 7-10.

It was also fun to play around with AI tools.  ChatGPT often took the place of random tables when I would hit a snag, and AI art via NightCafe and later Bing Image Creator helped to add interest to the blog entries and bring my ideas to visual life.  In the span of just one year, I’ve seen these tools improve a great deal, which is both fascinating and a little scary.

I was more than a little gratified to share this stuff on the OSR group on MeWe, even getting a couple of likes or an “atta boy” from bloggers I follow.

In all, I am very happy to have completed this project and look forward to actually running it as a campaign in the near future.

 

What I didn’t like

Practically speaking, publishing the Dungeon23 content as blog entries entailed additional work than went above and beyond single entries per day on a journal.  I had to quickly learn how to format a new blog (still a learning process,) as well as make usable maps in Inkscape for each level or location and not just paste scans of my graph paper doodles.  At least the learning process has been fun.

To paraphrase Kenan Tompson’s character in the David Pumpkins SNL skit: its 365 entries, they’re not all going to be winners!  There were certainly days where I wasn’t feeling my best, ideas wouldn’t flow (even with the aid of tables and tools,) real life got in the way, or the project became a bit of a chore.  This kind of work on an old-school, fantasy RPG campaign would normally flow organically along with the needs of a play group and not necessarily be written all at once.  Some days, I had to just drop what I was doing and double (or triple) up on entries the next few days.  I may have “phoned it in” just to get things done a couple of times, to my everlasting shame.

I also took the holidays off, so there (sadly) will not be any updates for weeks 51-52.  I’m putting the project to bed “as is.”  As a mea culpa to the reader, I decided I will flesh out hex 1815 The Royal Barrows as its own mini-dungeon sometime in the coming year.

 

What I’m embarrassed about

This project coincided with the OGL debacle, and I was unsure as to how to proceed with writing content derived from the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game.  Sure, I’m offering the content for free, but what if one day in the future I put an ad on the blog, start a Patreon, or decide to publish the content on DriveThruRPG or Lulu?  It would be a pain to have to go back and change or remove content, to say the least.

Unfortunately, my solution was probably not the most efficient: going vague or rules-agnostic for the first few months, and later switching to the dubiously safe harbor of the 5.1 SRD and Creative Commons license.  Therefore, I extend my sincere apologies to the reader for any confusion this may have caused.

Although I made this content with Original or Basic and Expert games and their simulacra in mind, the “siren song” of Advanced content (to borrow a phrase from Greg Gillespie of Barrowmaze fame) would often call, and I added, converted, or reskinned what I could with the aid of the SRD.

Finally, there are a few things in the dungeon I’m not happy with such as having exactly 28 rooms in individual levels (a mistake from the way I scheduled my work,) a little bit of sameness with some of the traps, not enough (or too much?) variety in monsters, some uninspiring encounter tables, and lack of more interesting connections between levels (as well a sub-levels.)

Am I going to publish this?

Technically, I already did!  If you enjoy and use the Dungeon23 content I made, then in the words of Bob Bledsaw in his Wilderlands of High Fantasy: feel free to "alter, illuminate, expand, modify, extrapolate, interpolate, shrink, and further manipulate all contained to suit the tenor of your campaign."   I hope this content enriches somebody’s games out there, as I think this kind of sharing of ideas is in the true spirit of the OSR.

At some point, I may revise and consolidate the content into downloadable PDFs.  If I get froggy, I may even include (*gasp*) a 5e conversion.  However, an amateur-to-professional product, with actual (read: not AI) art is probably a long ways off, if ever, so don’t hold your breath (but thanks for the vote of confidence, anyway.)

What’s next for the blog?

Lots of things!  While the pace of past year is probably not sustainable in the long term (without burn-out,) I do want to keep to the schedule of about one blog post per week.  Here are some ideas I have for upcoming posts:

• A series on lessons learned about old school play and GMing, geared at people getting started with old school games (but possibly still useful to more experienced folks.)
• Reviews on some products I've bought (or Kickstarted) during the past year or so, such as the new version of Swords & Wizardry and Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg (spoiler: a must-have for any old school library, in my opinion.)
• More content that fleshes out the Dungeon23/Wilderness23 setting and world (wyrld,) such as mini-dungeons/lairs, wilderness maps, monsters, treasure, and lore.
• Finally, play reports based on the Dungeon23 content, assuming I am able to get a campaign off the ground.

In short, stay tuned this year because the Weregrognard will be “in lair” and writing for you!

Not necessarily an AI self-portrait courtesy of Bing Image Creator