Dungeon23 Weekly Progress Report 1

 

My January 1 Dungeon 23 entry

Today I made my sixth entry to the journal for Dungeon 23. So far, so good. Above is a quick scan of the entry for January 1st. I've starting out drawing and detailing small sub-sections, mostly because that is how it flowed while I was doing things. Right off the bat I realized that space on the page was going to be at a premium, so I need to get more minimalist in my descriptions. I'm keeping a list of tables and sub-tables I need to get drafted as I go along. The monsters mentioned will be stat-less. The whole thing is going to be pretty-much system agnostic. I want to focus on the cool stuff and the encounters and the factions, etc. I can always stat things out later.

In the past I have had a tendency to over-think stuff, or to get bogged down in details. The Dungeon 23 Challenge has given me a way to just draw/write something every day. I am treating the journal as a prototyping sort of experiment, a sketchbook that I can get messy with, make mistakes, scribble-out stuff that doesn't work, generally focus on getting whatever I'm doing down and then going back later to make it all pretty or presentable. It has been a really good experience so far. It has also been great for getting my hands back into working order as well. 

Some of the other entries this week got a little more detailed, so I added some extra pages from another, similar-sized journal. I'm going to try to keep that sort of thing to a minimum, for the most part. I am aiming for a sort of minimalist approach, at least to start out. We'll see how long that lasts. I want to remain open to whatever strikes my fancy when I start drawing each new section or room. My preliminaries came to a stop when I realized that I was recreating a lot of the background for Clatterdelve all over again, so instead of fighting it, I opted to just go along with the creative impulse and now I am exploring and mapping all the various Known, Unknown, Secret, and False Entrances to this place, as well as the immediate surroundings and all that goes along with it. I will explain in more detail in another post.

So, in a nutshell, everything is proceeding really nicely and I am thoroughly enjoying this process of drawing and detailing one (or more) dungeon rooms/sites each day. I also plan on doing some Wilderness Maps for the surrounding areas as well, so I'm looking forward to that. Might just get a chance to try out the very cool Gygax 75 Challenge for part of that!

Lastly, I am considering doing a series of blog posts that dig into the details a bit more for what I'm building for Clatterdelve. There are going to be a lot of tables needed, as this is a very Procedural Space, and there will be a lot of unique treasure items/looty bits, and numerous spells and what-not. I'm loathe to provide stats right now with the whole Cloud of Unknowing swirling around the OGL (and by extension the possible extinction-level event some see threatening the continued existence of the OSR), but should that constellation of crises somehow be either averted or not turn out to be the apocalyptic undoing of everything we hold dear (tm), then maybe once that's all sorted and settled, I can start posting new monsters and spells again. I do hope thing get straightened out soon. In the meantime I am enjoying reading through a number of non-OGL games.