Dungeon23 Challenge - Beginning

Like everyone in the online TTRPG space right now, I'm embarking on the #Dungeon23 challenge. As originally proposed by Sean McCoy, the challenge says to create a megadungeon by plotting one room a day for a whole year, ending with a 365-room monstrosity to inflict on your hapless players. While Sean's advice is to focus on making one room per day without worrying too much about a grand plan, I had some quiet time over the holidays and can't stop the grand plans from coming even if I wanted to. Rather than fight myself, I'm going into this with a bit of a roadmap sketched out:

First, as soon as I saw the Dungeon23 challenge, my mind went to "make one  5-room dungeon per week." I rely heavily on the 5-room dungeon format for my drop-in store games - they're a reliable way to get a satisfying adventure crammed into a 3-hour session with people who may or may not have played together before. In brief, the 5-room dungeon format says to make a dungeon with five rooms (shocking), where each room satisfies one of the following purposes/themes:

• Entrance and guardian
• Puzzle or role-playing opportunity
• Red herring or optional content
• Climactic encounter
• Twist or payoff 

This provides a nice variety of encounters and lets each session feel like it's achieved something, which is essential for drop-in games (where someone might only be playing that one evening) but also nice to have in a longer game as well.

Second, I've always wondered what would happen if a megadungeon was itself made up of connected 5-room dungeons, each with several paths leading between them to "break" the structure a little bit. Each dungeon should be thematically distinct from the others, giving players a sense of where each dungeon is. This is important for player-driven goal-setting: if their goal is to find the ghost haunting the Glistermarsh, it's important for them to know (or be able to discover) where the Glistermarsh is and isn't. However, having a bunch of interconnected areas also means that if the players have previously cleared the Mallow Groves, they can use that as a safe-ish retreat and shortcut in and out of the adjacent Glistermarsh.

With those two goals in mind, here is my modified Dungeon23 plan for 2023:

• Each week, create a 5-room dungeon, one room per day
• On the two extra days, work on some overarching connection elements (fleshing out a faction hinted at by that week's dungeon, working on some secrets the party can discover, etc.).
• As needed, use a random dungeon generator to create the larger dungeon map and partition it up into discrete 5-room dungeons

Dungeon Level 1

With all that preamble out of the way, here's the current (messy) draft of the first dungeon level, partitioned up into eight 5-room dungeons to get me through January and February

If you can't read my annotations for some reason, the first eight dungeons are:

1. False Priory
2. Nowhere Market
3. The Mistfall
4. Glistermarsh
5. Mallow Grove
6. Pumice Rapids
7. The Bubble Mill
8. Deepcrossing

At this stage, those are little more than evocative titles, but in the weeks to come, they'll each become a proper 5-room dungeon, and we can start to uncover the hidden secrets of this place.

Happy New Year, and happy delving!