The #dungeon23 blog challenge has been making the rounds and it intrigues me. Each day, you create a dungeon room. It doesn’t need to be fully developed, it might only be a sentence or two, but if you manage to do this even five or six days a week all year, you should end up with 250-300 rooms ready for a megadungeon. Much like NaNoWriMo, this is really intended to develop a habit of daily writing, or near-daily writing.
- Gizmodo has a more detailed description, but at its base this is a simple routine.
- r/Dungeon23 is a subreddit focused on #dungeon23, with links to blogs and helpful resources.
Even though I’ve got a node-based megadungeon outlined, I’m following a suggestion in the Gizmodo post.
I am to create one pantheon a month, for a year. An icosahedral or dodecahedral pantheon (i.e. using d20 or d12) has 32 sites, Even if I describe only 25-30 deities in each pantheon I should end up with 300-360 deities.
When I’m in the groove, and I have the domain sets and a theme, I’ve found I can draft a deity (stat block and 150-200 words) in 10-15 minutes. I think once I get back into the habit of writing, getting the words out won’t be a challenge. I think the bigger challenge will lie in keeping the pantheons distinct and avoiding falling into patterns.
Let’s see how this turns out.