Back in early December 2022, Sean McCoy, one of the game developers from Tuesday Knight Games, who made the sci-fi horror TTRPG Mothership, created a design challenge for himself and encouraged aficionados of RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to take it up as well. This Dungeon23 challenge, where participants create a simple dungeon map for DnD style TTRPGs every day until the end 2023, has led to an outpouring of dungeon concepts posted on social media sites like Twitter, design spaces like SubStack, and game sale sites like Itch.io. Many of these dungeon rooms are free for Game Masters to use in their next session. Furthermore, Dungeon Masters who study these dungeon maps can learn a lot about TTRPG campaign designs.
The concept of dungeon-crawling – i.e., a group of fantasy adventures delving into ruins in search of treasure and secrets – is as old as role-playing games themselves. Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson established the concept of the RPG dungeon-crawl in his Blackmoor campaign, challenging the players of his experimental fantasy war-games to portray characters in a medieval fantasy setting and explore labyrinthine dungeons with multiple levels of monsters, magic, and loot. Gary Gygax, who codified the core rules of early DnD, also popularized the idea of fantasy dungeons as full of traps, puzzles, and secrets, a concept very much at the heart of the Dungeon23 challenge.
The Dungeon23 Challenge Can Teach Dungeon Masters How To Make Better Dungeon Crawls
In the Win Conditions Substack newsletter where the Dungeon23 challenge was outlined, McCoy included a list of useful tips for Dungeon Masters and game designers interested in creating a 365-room mega dungeon for DnD and other such games. He talked about certain kinds of notebooks that are great for sketching out dungeon concepts, and he also included links to helpful digital resources that can jumpstart a dungeon maker’s creativity. The most important resource the Dungeon23 Substack page offers to builders of D&D-style dungeons, however, might just be the following advice: “Don’t overthink it. Don’t make a grand plan, just sit down each day and focus on writing a good dungeon room.”
This piece of advice is a godsend for Dungeon Masters or RPG designers who feel intimidated by the “one dungeon room a day” challenge that is Dungeon23. Participants in this challenge (and DMs in general) don’t need to pump out a volume-size magnum opus of intricate labyrinth designs or scene descriptions on the level of a Critical Role campaign. They merely need to sketch a room, list the stuff inside that room, and maybe add a line about or doodle about doorways or passages to the next room – that’s it. By detaching themselves from the anxiety of creating something groundbreaking, Dungeon23 participants can create detailed dungeon-crawling scenarios to entertain players.
The Dungeon23 Challenge Encourage Dungeon Masters To Make Novel Dungeon Concepts
The Dungeon 23 Substack page, besides linking to useful online resources, also has a list of 52 single-word prompts for Dungeon Masters or RPG designers interested in designing one dungeon room a day for 365 days. Some of these single-word prompts are familiar parts of classic fantasy RPG dungeons: “Ancient, Sunken, Death, Decay, Darkness.” Other single-word prompts in this list evoke settings different from the “tomb” or “maze” motif of dungeons in games like DnD: “Library, Factory, Bloom, Flood.” A few of these single-word prompts – “Meat, Ash, Ocean, Mask” – are downright surreal and seem to invoke the themes of deconstructive fantasy TTRPGs such as Heart: The City Beneath.
As mentioned before, the Dungeon23 design challenge encourages participants to whip up dungeon room concepts without worrying about whether they’re original or avant-garde. At the same time, the sheet density of dungeon levels created over the course of this one-year challenge naturally encourages designers or Dungeons & Dragons DMs to expand their personal definition of what a dungeon can be in a fantasy RPG. Instead of an underground ruin or cave system, players crawling through a Dungeon23 megadungeon might delve through an abandoned space station (a la McCoy’s own Mothership sci-fi horror tabletop RPG), a person’s vivid dreams, the mummified corpse of a giant, or concepts even more wondrous.
Source: Win Conditions/Substack
