Right Back Where We Started

Nothing new is new again

Hi friends, and welcome (back?!)  After enjoying the simplicity and convenience of Substack, I've made a change! You can do a quick web search and find out why a number of folks have left Substack in the last six months. I've wavered on the issue and perhaps reacted too hastily, but it was way too much work to repost everything here, and I already did it.  So fuck it, let's go!

With that out of the way...I'm back on Blogspot/Blogger.  This is where it all started, in early 2023. I have painstakingly migrated all the Substack stuff back over here and I've integrated this blog with Buttondown for a newsletter/subscription option, which was one of the appeals of Substack in the first place.  You should see a nice little form to the right and at the bottom of this post. I'd love it if you'd subscribe so you can see all these juicy maps and read my ramblings right there in your inbox.  It may take a me a little while to get everything working properly (it did,) so bear with me.  Expect the email experience to be as basic and bare bones as the blog, but it should serve its purpose. If you are still subscribed to my Substack, you should have already received this. Check that spam folder!

If you've been following along, you're probably wondering what happened with my Dungeon23 project.  I did it, I finished!  Yes, I was already behind on sharing maps, and by the time I was finished (only about a week late!) I was too tired of it to blog and the transition over here was something I procrastinated for a while.  But, here we are!  I've got ten weeks of maps left to share, so let's get right to it. I've got five for you here and the rest coming soon.  

...several other derailments later...

Week 43: Where were we?  Trash mountain! This is a sunken section of the main heap. Heavy machinery travels up and down a spiral ramp, transporting noteworthy junk for sorting and shipping. The venomous Foreman directs excavation operations at the bottom and reports to a Higher Power.  Lots going on here. Some secret tunnels lead to the Foreman's lair, where he embezzles and hoards the good stuff. Towering over it all is The Extractrix, a huge excavator/mining machine.  Imagine The Bagger with treaded appendages and a mind of its own.  It is ostensibly controlled by The Operator, who will not relinquish their controls willingly.

Week 44: The last area of Level 10 is a maze of tunnels and poorly routed ductwork. Definitely stop here if you want to find out what a Skin Jelly is. Something large glistens in the housing of the defunct exhaust fan. It may allow you passage to Level 11, but it's gonna be gross.  Really really gross.  This week also sees the start of Level 11, which is primarily accessed via portal and only if you've earned or stolen an appropriate piece of jewelry.  This level sees a return to a more elaborate, sacred type of space.  Ornately carved white bone with no visible seams, interwoven with golden wire and covered in luscious vines.  This place is something between a library and a monastery, and the beings that dwell here come from diverse groups and places. You will recognize creatures from previous areas of the dungeon, but here they seem to have gained clarity and purpose.  Dare you find out?

Week 45: This level is filled with beautiful spaces to meditate, converse, bathe, and study a wide range of disciplines.  Visitors are advised to be on their best behavior and opportunities to get some real answers may finally be presented.  This is a place of enlightenment and scholarship, but not all knowledge may be welcome.  Only a select few are chosen to come here and only a few of those can survive the rigors of the training required.  Those who fail or otherwise disappoint the powers that be are "transferred" to a more remedial and martial role.  You've almost certainly met some of these recently, and would do well to avoid their fate and their pointy teeth.

Week 46: Great glass cylinders full of colored vapor, organized according to the emotions they elicit in those who view them.  Hundreds of lifelike 3D paintings of strange beings.  If you look carefully you may recognize a few faces.  Teleportation training!  Master it to add a very powerful tool to your bag of dungeoneering tricks.  This is also a safe place to fail, which you will do.  An ancient blind creature, living here in secret, absorbing the psychic energy that education requires and feeding it back into the complex with unpredictable results.  A place of correction and rectitude, whispered of but entirely hidden. Try not to go there.

Week 47: By the time this project got to November, I had run out of ideas for interesting map aesthetics. I'm not particularly happy with the way these pages look, but that's never the point. Onward and downward!  For some reason, this week went back to a square orientation as opposed to the previous diagonal versions. Rounded corners are silly and don't add anything.  This area is the most important and secretive part of the level and security is tight.  Not everyone is here for the purpose of enlightenment.  Knowledge may be gained but it is also required for admittance. New opportunities for travel may arise.  Ceremony is important here, and can only be performed when fully submerged. How else did you think this was going to end?

Hey, thanks for sticking around!  I'm gonna get these last five maps up in something less than five months this time.  It's been long enough that I have a thousand other things I can blog about when I get the chance. It actually took me two months between the start of this post and the end, so it's nice getting this one out.  Stick your email address in that form in the sidebar and you might get a nice email when the next one comes out.  If you're new, please check out the old posts for some context!  

As always, please share, comment, ask questions. What do you want to hear about when I'm done posting my dungeon?  What can I do to make the Blogger page or the newsletter work better for you?  What are you playing?

Andy

The Collected Works

 A repository of everything

…masses of junk, no other way to describe them. Huge angular chunks of metal, twisted and fractured, piled up into the darkness. Violent husks torn from buildings, beaten and deformed. Smaller debris amongst the mounds, bouncing down from a great churning funnel of light overhead, a cacophonous jettison of matter. A tremendous metal arm occasionally presents itself, ripping through that spinning glory and disgorging the contents of another sphere. Unidentifiable masses, useless trinkets, bits of exotic gadgetry and the shattered bodies of mysterious flora and fauna. A thousand colors of dust, drifting down onto the aggregate of twice that many worlds. And leeching from these lurid peaks, a glittery stream of the most profound…feeling. Pain. Sorrow. Nostalgia. Washing over me in waves. At once nauseated and filled with wonder, I fall to my knees. What could be the purpose of this?

I can only clutch at my ears as the vast cavern trembles and vibrates. The machines at work continue with their tasks. One skitters nearby, about the size of a large sheep, persistent in its labor. As it passes I can see a central pillar, a hub of whirling gizmos and pumping pistons. Four articulated legs with hooked feet scramble over the debris, searching. It seems to be a makeshift device, cobbled together out of various parts and plated haphazardly with bits of precious metals. Two glowing red gems on stalks seek out its target, a meter long slab of ornately carved pink stone, balanced atop a rippling washboard of fuzzy yellow slime. A beam of white light flows forth from the front of the machine, precisely encompassing the slab, and is imprinted on my eyes in a blinding flash. When I can see again, the surface of the slab is emblazoned with a pair of markings. One is unfamiliar, but according to Hen’s diary₁, the other is used to signify warmth, or fire. The machine turns, its business with this slab apparently complete, on to the next task. From here I can see what appears to be a churning mass of vegetation, like a colony of blue-green algae. It floats inside the foggy dome, tendrils reaching out to caress some sort of device within. Its lightstalks pause and dim as they pass over me. The mass within gathers itself into a tight ball, quivering…then bursts! The dome is filled with swirling green mist. It reforms, and to my astonishment, begins to shape itself into a loose ovoid, with the semblance of human lips and teeth. Clinking hesitantly, it moves closer, in a manner that suggests curiosity. Dreamily I watch as the lips slowly widen and a sense of calm prevails. Something else too…joy? Hope? Desire? It is unnerving and alien, but undoubtedly the warmest smile I have ever received…Companionship.

Delias Pitro - 10 Years in the Pit: Unexpected Romance in The Strangest of Places

Hi folks! If you’re still reading, you’ll know it’s been a month since I last published. I did send out a Note here, but it turns out that doesn’t go out to email subscribers and is just a Substack thing and wasn’t what I was hoping for. No big deal, but I’ve made the decision to switch to monthly publishing now instead of at the end of the #Dungeon23 project. Too many irons in the fire, as always. Still catching up on daily entries though, and I think I’ll only be a few weeks late to complete the year! I’ve been thinking a lot about my goals for this sort of writing challenge. I had a half-assed plan coming into the year, and that lasted me about three months. Other inspiration has appeared throughout, and I’ve tacked those ideas on, with varying degrees of coherence. Mostly I’m trying to remember this is about the process and about putting something down on paper, so most of these entries are not well planned or premeditated. This is about spontaneous creation, which is always a struggle. I did spend a little of my customary Substack time two weeks ago sitting down and making a rough conceptual plan for the last two months/levels of the dungeon. How do you finish a thing like this? Does the story have an ending? Maybe, but it’s all based on play, not on some overarching narrative or plot, so it’s not up to the author. Is there some sort of giant boss monster to slaughter for a satisfying ending? Probably not. Long combats are boring. Will you save the world? Possibly, but that’s more of a bonus. I won’t tell you here what I’ve settled on, but I have a plan and it feels like it makes sense with my initial vision. This has made the actual composing of dungeon rooms go pretty quickly when I sit down to write and I’ve been cranking out three to five entries at a time, a few days a week. That feels good, but I haven’t worked on any other writing projects. I’ve got four maps to share, and I hope you enjoyed that bit of weirdness at the top. If you read my Note, you’ll know that little illustration was done in a rush of inspiration late at night after finishing a tightly detailed bit of inking for a professional illustration job. Just my brain letting go and embracing some freedom for a change, enjoying watercolors and metallic pens. Relevant to this area of the dungeon and fun to make. Now, maps!

Week 39: By the time I reached the end of Level 9, I had a number of questions about how travel and exploration will work throughout this labyrinth of mirrors and dimensions. It has occurred to me that many of the secrets and areas of the megadungeon are merely paths to someplace else, as I’ve previously shared. I guess that fits with some of the other themes, and makes me feel like this dungeon is less of a complete adventure than a nucleus of possibility. In general, I don’t like endings. They’re usually anticlimactic and unsatisfying…so endless avenues of access and wonder are appealing to me. This page contains a single day of October, so we see the elaborate entrance to a much more concrete physical place, once again with a top-down map.

Week 40: The concept of the dungeon as a sort of accretion of other things, peoples, and…stuff has also crept into my mind gradually as this project has progressed. It fits with some broader ideas I had earlier and inspires some really interesting new ones. If you go all the way to back to my first post (now migrated over here from Blogger,) I used the term Occlusion as a working title, but most often refer to this simply as The Pit. One way I like to use “Occlusion” is in the arboreal sense, to refer to the way a tree will continue to grow over a wound in unpredictable and unusual ways. What happens when a tree can’t heal itself and must rely on assistance, whatever form that may take? More on that at a later date, but I love the idea of a massive repository of stuff, raw material for repairs and renovations. So, this level resembles a landfill. It’s far more alien than that, and the accumulations here are intentional and must be sorted, catalogued, and sent to the appropriate areas for proper use. Physical items and resources are important, but the most valuable things here are experiences, memories, and dreams. I’ve also decided that access to this level may be granted freely, provided the proper paperwork is filed and guidelines followed. Yes, bureaucracy is hard at work here on Level 10.

Week 41: Other than the entrance and a secret shaft, this level is one huge “room,” drawn in four quadrants. A few varieties of sentient machine/cyborg/otherworldly intelligence live and work here (like our little friend above,) processing and sorting. It wouldn’t be a good dungeon level if there weren’t also some disruptors in the mix, their loyalties unpredictable and fleeting. One important visual theme here is that much of the physical material is, by surface standards, quite valuable. Gold and silver and jewels are everywhere, but they are used to plate machines, build strange dwellings and utility buildings, and pave mosaic walkways. To the inhabitants of this level, it is just more stuff. Shiny, but otherwise unremarkable. This should be a fun area to illustrate.

Week 42: That means only ten more weeks! As of this post, I am finished with Week 46 and the end is in sight! This page features one of the aforementioned disrupters, barricaded off from the rest of the level, shaping an unusual garden of metal trees and clumps of wiry moss. Immensely powerful but tragically alone, it seems to have found a way to live in some sort of balance with the “normal” functioning of this place. It is searching for a way to communicate with others of its kind. Like most NPCs in the dungeon, it is dangerous and reactionary, but not entirely unreasonable or hostile. Everything is negotiable. All the maps of this level have thin white lines meant to represent access tunnels in and through the heaps of junk. These are meant for small automated drones, but a small animal (or PC?) could navigate them as well. Sneaky.

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

Hey, thanks again for stopping by! Share and subscribe, all that business. I hope you enjoy whatever form of winter holiday you choose to celebrate or ignore. See you next year!

Andy

₁ - footnote lost

Just the Maps

 Yep, more maps

Hello folks! It’s gonna be a short one for real this week, but the maps must flow. I’m a few weeks behind on writing daily entries, but I squeeze in chunks of two or three at a time. Actually writing a dungeon room every day just doesn’t make sense for my brain. Interestingly, this newsletter has been better for developing a writing habit than the actual creation of the dungeon. I think the fact that 17(?) people subscribe to this is a good source of accountability. Currently, my plan is to share maps every two weeks until I’ve completed all 365 entries. At that point, I’m likely going to scale back to posting once a month and hopefully I’ll have the brainwidth to share some other interesting ideas and art. I’ve got a handful of other RPG projects in the works and I’m very much looking forward to setting this dungeon aside for a while. Along with my usual burnout, my enthusiasm for this has lagged. I do have some playtesting planned for it early next year, and that should ease me into starting to make sense of the early levels. Things have gone in unexpected directions at these lower levels and I’m unsure what will even make it into play. I have lost many threads in this process and found a number of new ones. No problem, it’s a first draft!

What else am I working on? Illustrations as always. I spent the weekend painting guitars so I can try to get a few things wrapped up before the upcoming holiday. I’ve got an elaborate Mothership thing I’m writing that I can talk more about later, several smaller projects (I’m fascinated by double-then-trifold pamphlets), and a new map for a certain Abyss that I may document here as I draw. I’m also devising a system to generate a huge city map by numbering this fidget cube and throwing it on a sheet of paper a bunch of times. It lands in interesting configurations sometimes and I’ve been thinking about that instead of this dungeon. Stick around for some of that next year!

Week 35: The last few areas of August introduce one of the more powerful and baffling entities to be encountered in the dungeon. Seems like a good ally to have if you can make any sense of its aspirations. Or you can sit and watch what happens to the unworthy. The domed walls sing with every step you take on the grand bone stair. September! September is…different. Trying to experiment with the form a bit more and change up the maps. This level is essentially a point-crawl through various pocket dimensions accessed via a variety of magic mirrors. It is disorienting and it is dangerous. What you see in the mirror is what will be.

Week 36: The question of dungeon presentation and design style keeps coming up. For a point-crawl, all we need are some nodes and paths. I’ve done the bare minimum of trying to dress them up, if not for presentation at least for my own clarity. Some of them got silly. For this mirror maze in particular, many of the paths are one-way, which adds a level of challenge as you move about. I also intend to add a mechanic that determines the order in which you will encounter “exit” mirrors. Some of the creatures you encounter here may follow you through the maze if you give them a reason to. Most of the rooms in this dungeon are keyed with a word or two for a descriptive (or cryptic) title. For some reason I decided each of these mirror worlds should have an arbitrary made up name. Silly. This section features a bit of time dilation, a beach vacation, some soothing words from an outsider. It may be wise to protect one’s nose against being devoured.

Week 37: Ok, at this point even I am asking myself why this exists. I told you, the burnout is real. Like the dungeon, quality ebbs and flows. Sometimes writing is a formidable monster to be overcome. Some paths cannot be reversed. Heroes traversing the mirror maze will realize that this is a place of sorrow and a place of memory. Like other parts of the dungeon, you can become lost here. It doesn’t mean you’ll die, but you may never leave. I’ve thought a lot about what would happen if the PCs just wander off into a mirror universe and start adventuring there! Could you forge a peaceful living in the glistening tendrils of the mountain tyrant? The key to the journaling nature of this dungeon is that I physically have no space to elaborate on anything. A couple sentences and it’s done. Time to move on. So many hanging hooks and tasty tidbits to be revisited and revised in a later draft.

Week 38: A giant tetrahedron on which every side is down…the worst. This section of the mirror maze features a genuine Way Out! This leads to the surface. Yes, the real surface. Do you remember what that is? I’ve always imagined a hex map will detail the surface of this new continent that houses The Pit and every curious thing within. I’m sure the opposite end of this portal is well hidden somewhere, perhaps a well guarded wizard’s tower or maybe just behind some farmer’s outhouse. Thinking about surface locations sure seems fresh and exciting. I’ve been down here for so long. In one mirror you will be chased by tiny psychotic city dwellers while in another an immense hairy creature will assist you if he doesn’t accidentally step on you first. I clearly wasn’t reading my own writing here because I’ve got two room descriptions that are nearly duplicate ideas. ROUGH draft. Next episode: The mental health parallels between the writing of a megadungeon and the exploration of said dungeon.

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

If you’re still reading, you are awesome! Please subscribe and share if you find this worthwhile. Perhaps some user engagement would help get my creative juices flowing. I think they’ve slowed in anticipation of Minnesota winter. Later!

Andy

Short One With Maps

 A Mournful Dungeon Object

A finely wrought cage of bright metal, intensely warm to the touch and pulsing with life. Within sings a desperate vision. Just the length of a fingerbone, it weighs heavy on the heart. Once glimpsed, never forgotten. The door it opens is one you dread to find.

-Author unknown. Discarded beer mat.

Hello! Thanks for stopping by. These sketches are warmup studies of a shape I’ve been thinking about, inspired by this light housing I saw in Detroit a few weeks ago. I find it super interesting, so many facets and angles. This is the sort of thing my brain is drawn to, but it’s often difficult for me to conjure these kinds of details out of thin air. Someday I’d love to take the time to draw large scale highly detailed artificial and manufactured landscapes. I’m reminded again that I need to draw from observation more and work on building a cohesive reference library. Sometimes it helps to use a random sketch as a mournful dungeon object when you need a writing prompt. I’m short on time as always, so here are the maps!

Week 31: One last sneaky little room off of Level 7 and then we are on to Level 8! This is another side area off of the main shaft, so I guess I need to figure out what makes this area necessary. Put that one in the Things To Fix file. I’m definitely feeling further off the rails in the second half of this dungeon. I’ve stopped tracking connections and consistently forget to look at the rudimentary theme/outline notes I’ve made at the beginning of each month. Reminding myself it is a rough draft and a writing exercise. After a couple levels of caves and forests, this area is still open air, but fleshy organic matter and living rock covers hints of something manufactured by intelligent beings. Gross and weird is the vibe here and any incursion is promptly greeted with a physical challenge by a chosen warrior of the mosquito-like folk who protect this place.

Week 32: I guess this is a pretty major spoiler, but I think it’s important at this point to know that whatever this new continent is, this hope of a generation, it has previously existed elsewhere, and has absorbed pieces of those places and some of the creatures and things that it has encountered there. As I’ve said, I think a lot about the ways the dungeon changes the characters as they explore it. How has it already changed the creatures who have been here much longer and know it only as home? I had a good time stretching rooms and passages here to make them twist and wind, overlapping each other in interesting ways. Lots of elevation changes and some tunnels and rooms have transparent membrane walls from which you can see other areas. A dungeon made for breaking, perhaps.

Week 33: This whole section of the dungeon has been engineered by something, for something, or at least adapted to a new shape and purpose. More signs of advanced technology will be found here, but it was not created by the people who tend it and protect it. If the party finds its way through this territory, a surprising traveler will greet them eagerly and offer any assistance possible. The current occupants will provide formidable resistance and are prepared to endure a serious siege. Any adventuring party making it this far should make a nice challenge for them and a smart party may be victorious. After reading some of my previous entries, it seems impossible for anyone to get here at all. Can’t wait to test it.

Week 34: This is definitely a relatively organized operation. What is it doing here? Flying drones patrol ornately decorated tunnels that seem to undulate and breath. Fountains of black ichor and pools of crystal glitter in the dim bioluminescence. Oh, and if you thought mosquito people were creepy and gross, wait until you meet their children. Thousands of larvae crawl across a huge chrome tower that may conceal powerful secrets. I feel pretty strongly that players should be rewarded with XP for discovering secrets and exploring/mapping the dungeon, but that will need to be a future post. Finally, because I couldn’t write a megadungeon without an interdimensional goblin pawnbroker, there’s one of those here too.

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

Thanks for reading! Please share and subscribe. As of this post, I have completed my September entries and am more than 75% done with the #Dungeon23 challenge! I will likely finish it a few weeks late, but the end is in sight!

Andy

Halfway There

Run through the jungle

Songwriter Roger Clyne used to address his emails “Dear happy and important person,” and I think about that a lot when I need to address people. I don’t have much else to say about it, except that I hope you are all feeling happy and important as you read this.

No bits of fiction or deep thoughts, but I’ve got four maps to share with you, most of the month of July. I’ve been on vacation and did absolutely no writing while away, despite my fantasies of sitting by a lake with a stiff drink and cranking out brilliant RPG Content. Don’t worry, there were lakes and drinks. Equally brain and time-consuming is this ongoing illustration project, which has proven trickier than anticipated. Feeling ok with it and chronically behind, as usual. I am pleased to share that I will be providing some new illustrations for the Abyss of Hallucinations Collected Edition from Max Moon Games and Exalted Funeral. Click that link to sign up for the Kickstarter! If you’re familiar with the Abyss, you may recognize my class illustrations from the first volume. The Collected Edition will feature three new classes including the Anarchist, depicted below. These illustrations provide their own difficulties, but I enjoy trying to work outside of traditional character and costume design. Doing art for the Abyss of Hallucinations also means I get to have fun with ink washes, which I love. Here you can see the finished pencils and the final inked scan.

I’ll have more to share about this project later, but I’ve got to get back to it, so let’s get to the maps!

Week 27: July marks a shift back to a top down view, which I’m enjoying. A lush jungle deep in the bowels of the dungeon, branching off of the central shaft. Lots of elevation changes here still, but I wanted to give players a wilderness experience, stalking through a heavily forested cave. This level in particular is sprawling and complex. The first thing PC’s encounter is a treacherous slope that feeds a horrible stone-eating beast. It doesn’t like flesh though, so there’s a good chance you’ll make it through to the other side, for better or worse. Escaping the rockslide brings a bit of respite before delving deeper. A humming pit compels risky behavior and lewd rodents mock clumsy adventurers.

Week 28: A groaning bridge stretches brittlely over a sunken glade. A gleaming metal man stands guard and plays games with your fragile psyche. In the distance, a gleaming golden light illuminates a plateau that rises above the terraced forest. I like the way this map works and I can visualize the elevation changes and the size of this huge cavern. This is one of the levels that I am most excited about eventually starting to illustrate. This whole space is fascinating to me and I remember knocking these pages out pretty quickly as I was catching up after a previous lull. By now adventurers will be aware that wise travelers from beyond and powerful extraplanar entities populate much of the dungeon. This level seems to be fully stocked with new weirdos.

Week 29: A lair! This is a fun one. A giant sentient tuber and her offspring call this place home and are not willing to share. Evidence of their carnivorism and brutality is abundant. A shifting hidden stairwell leads deeper and an ancient temple may provide some clues and useful tools. A skeleton of fused bone and glass holds a Heart of great importance. Is it as important as your eyes? It might be. I think I was on a pretty good roll when I was writing these and I really like the boss here. She can do some fairly horrific things if you don’t entertain her inquisitions. This section is pretty well hidden by a secret passageway, so it’s a nice surprise for those who can find it and will reward their bravery.

Week 30: That feels like a lot of weeks! Still going. More evidence of a settlement, ancient and ruined. Monolithic and alien. The echoes of former inhabitants ring throughout and skitter around in the synapses. Creeping vines and leathery flyers dwell here currently. There is some fun to be had with scavenging tables if PCs choose to spend some time here searching the ruins. Care must be taken when investigating the powerful forces that pervade the village. Things could get very weird very quickly and it might only be the next guys who find out what happened to you. They can just ask the giant frog being who lives in the baths.

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

Thanks for reading! You know what to do.

Andy

Descent Into Madness

Making the worst of a bad situation

After these long days and weeks, I’ve begun to feel comfortable in this new skin. Muscles and joints have started to adapt and move differently, and travelling through the water with such ease is truly a joy. Breathing fluid is still uncomfortable and shocking, but I think it will become natural over time. However, nothing can last. As soon as Algite opened the seal, everything changed…again.

Whether by a flaw of engineering or a devious trick of design, there was nothing below us but open air. As the sea fell out from under me, I thrashed about blindly, desperate for purchase. The appalling dryness of it all was the biggest shock. And the sound, overwhelming and painfully harsh. A rush, crack and a scream from below was the last I heard of Algite alive. As I gathered my senses and reconciled my surroundings with my bewildered equilibrium, I found myself clutching a small spongey tree growing from a rocky ledge. Water poured down the slope around me, and far below I could see more rocks, illuminated by an unearthly light. But the depths were gone. I was left hanging in open air, my new gills flapping helplessly while my nose and lungs struggled to remember how to do that which was once effortless instinct.

- D’Bittel Bramms, Undersea Dungeoneering for Newbs and Landlubbers, vol. 1

Harry Clarke - From Edgar Allan Poe ([1919]), “A Descent into the Maelström”,

Perhaps it’s a coincidence, perhaps these are things that just bounce around in my head at all times, but I’ve recently been contemplating some unrelated Poe stories for a completely different project. I hope to share more of that someday, but this Harry Clarke illustration felt timely and appropriate. I love a nested narrative and they always seem so fitting for tales of the sea. Poe, Coleridge, and William Hope Hodgson all do it well. A character narrator who has clearly seen some shit. A grizzled old seaman who doesn’t really have any advice except “Don’t do what I did, it won’t end well.” Usually the Sole Survivor, cursed with second sight plagued with guilt and nightmares, and desperately in need of some therapy. Or just lots of rum. People better educated than I have surely written books on the subject, so I’ll move on.

As I’ve been busy with deadlines and projects the last month, I thought I could save time by skipping the little narrative bits I’d been putting at the top of these posts. This week I was feeling inspired, and I actually drafted that snippet prior to my scheduled every other Sunday blog day! Reflecting on these types of preambles and little story introductions has me wondering if this is just a good inspirational starting point for the author, a warmup exercise? That’s kind of how I’m feeling about these right now. It sets the tone, introduces some flavor and world-building to the story. I’ve missed writing them. It’s a lot easier for me to make up a short bit of fiction about previous adventurers and their delving than it is to talk design process or RPG theory (of which my knowledge is thin and my interest fleeting.) Even better, I love making up fictional books!

Now I’m sitting here writing a blog about writing a blog about writing a dungeon. If you’re new here, it’s amazing you made it this far, but I’ve said from the beginning that this whole #Dungeon23 experience is an exercise. This is an attempt for me to sit in a chair and try to write…anything. I have stacks of ideas but little free time or motivation to work on any of them. Daily stress and the extreme amount of attention it takes just to do my day job has made it hard for me to enjoy being a creative person for many years. Check out my first post if you’d like to know more. The goal of this dungeon and the accompanying blog are an attempt to develop a writing practice and a way to hold myself accountable for it. The bonus side of this is I can share it with a couple of fellow nerds who might be interested. I’m still not a writer. I’m barely an illustrator. But I’m working on it!

Just two weeks to share with you today, to keep up with my posting routine. I have settled into my previous spring schedule of being about two weeks behind on the dungeon. We’ll see if I can maintain that. One piece of art has been delivered and more are underway. (I did sign that contract, if you were wondering. I also received an advance!) Guitars are being built and repaired, and I’ve made breakthroughs on a couple of inlay design projects. The dungeon doesn’t care. The dungeon is waiting.

Week 25: Sometimes this really feels like I’m just trying to fuck with the players, but I guess that’s my job as a GM and dungeon designer. I can’t wait to playtest this and find out. Looking at the map more closely (it’s been a minute,) there is a ladder, but it is well hidden. Descending further is indeed madness, but what other choice does a party have? Continuing the theme of endless downward progress, but to what end? A pink hazy forest is visible several hundred feet below, with white “clouds” drifting above it. The dungeon will speak to you here, and it may even be helpful. A lonely spirit is searching for a companion and we see something wondrous that will be a shock to soggy underwater adventurers: BIRDS! They are perhaps less genial than the spirit. This brings up an interesting thought. Replacement PCs at this level of the dungeon may have been born here and may never have visited the surface. Note: make sure there are mechanisms for adapting or re-adapting to air-breathing!

Week 26: Ok, this one just looks like a Metroid level. An ancient sacred space, a gigantic calcified corpse, deadly traps, and something that might almost be a Boss Monster. If you can gain the favor of the Ambassador, you will be granted a great boon. If you can survive the deadly fangs of the Protector and tear your eyes away from its treasure hoard, you may gaze upon the Tree and the Mountain and the world between. The people here are peaceful and well cared for, if not entirely real. Seems like a nice place to visit. The first two entries for July feature the Sphere and Stair, a mechanism for transitioning from the underwater areas of the dungeon (specifically The Floating Gardens) to the deeper, drier areas where the mystery deepens. This page has a lot of Capitalized Things. Must have been a serious week.

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

Thanks as always for hanging out! I appreciate any subscriptions and share. Comments and questions are always welcome!

Andy

Now What?

The best way out is (not) always through

I was thinking a lot this week about what I’m going to do with this megadungeon when the year is over, which brings up a dreaded and so far thoroughly avoided topic: How Does It End? Short answer, I don’t know. I had hoped to have a better idea by now, but I simply haven’t had the time to sit down and think about it. Heck, I don’t even have a complete outline and at this point it’s a little late. It’s all kind of discouraging, because I have some good ideas here but it feels highly disorganized and I can’t help but wonder if I took a wrong turn somewhere. I take some solace in the fact that it’s merely the rough draft, but as with many things I start, I have a difficult time following through. I am committed though, and looking forward to eventually going back over all of this and trying to make sense of it. Will it become a Finished Thing, worth sharing or publishing? Will anyone ever explore it for more than a session or two? These grander existential questions are not an ongoing concern, at the moment it all seems like some sort of fever dream. I do know with absolute certainty that it will end and that I will then take an extended break from this particular project.

As I write this, I should instead be working on my paid illustration work. Hey, I forgot that I never returned that contract, so I guess I don’t really need to. I could instead be trying to catch up on Day Job work, or I could be trying to write one of half a dozen other RPG ideas that I’m more interested in or that seem more tangible…maybe even completable! I don’t even really have anything coherent to write a newsletter about this week. I could write about the ridiculous Haunted Space House I’m working on for the Mothership RPG (a thing I’m actually excited about but don’t have time to work on.) I could write about blue pencils, sketchbooks, or how much I hate the Bristol board I’m using for the illustration I’m currently working on, but I’m exhausted. As expected, with illustration work due, I have fallen more than a week behind on the dungeon. I’m not stressing that, I’ve caught up before, and I’m much further behind on more important work. I still have several months of maps to share though, and I wanted to write something. Putting something out into the world every other week feels important, for accountability and to help me establish a writing practice.

With that, I’m gonna keep this short and get into the maps. Only two this week as I really am crunched for time and creative energy. I’ll try to keep at least that much going for the time being. Thanks for hanging in here with me. Please continue to read and share if you would, it helps keep me writing. I’d love to know what questions you have about this dungeon, games in general, art supplies (I have OPINIONS), guitar building, whatever!

Week 23: It seems like I still had coherent ideas and visions of a larger picture when I was working on these June entries. Most importantly, I had the good judgement to realize that nobody wants to play through an entire megadungeon anyway, and trying to keep it interesting and weird while being entirely underwater is just a bit too much. In fact, it’s even weirder if it starts to dry out farther down. Most of level 6 is a vertical descent through a tropical forest, clinging to the steep sides of the shaft. There are magical forces at play here, and discovering what shapes them is part of the puzzle. If they make it this far, PCs will have “unlocked” some powerful abilities to survive and move about underwater. Time to throw that out the window (for now) and see if they know how to climb! Plenty of potential for falling damage. I am making a note to myself to think about streamlining climbing procedures and rulings. (I could write several blog posts about how much time my gaming group spends fucking around with ropes in games.) Visually, it feels great to get back to the side view of the dungeon. It's all about the descent. Get Deep.

Week 24: I’ve hinted earlier that it feels important to me for there to be a point of no return in this dungeon. Not that it will be impossible to leave, but certainly not practical, and maybe not even desirable. One of the themes that keeps bouncing around in my head is the idea of the character becoming part of the dungeon. Not only is the dungeon changing as players interact with it, but there is a fundamental connection being made that will alter the way players play the game. Why return to a life of poverty and oppression if you can build a future here? If you make it this far, there will be ways to leave, but probably not the way you came. I want you to stand on one of these ledges and look up into the verdant dankness overhead, through which you’ve now travelled downward hundreds and hundreds of feet. I want that return to the “safe” parts of the dungeon to feel impossible, or at least not worth the effort. Or am I just a lazy dungeon writer and haven’t bothered to think of anything fully worth pursuing at the bottom of this pit? Stick around and find out. (I could write several blog posts about how bored I am of treasure and gold as XP, or how I think all endings suck, but that’s how this started and I am way too tired.)

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

This was supposed to be a short one. Thanks for reading and sharing!

Andy