Hello and Welcome!

OCCLUSION

(working title)

Stay tuned after THE CONTENT for an introduction!

100 years ago, Carzstesa was a ruin.  Blight, drought, and famine wracked the land.  Toxic rivers ran into the poisoned sea until they ran no more and the sea began to die.  The wealthy few among us gathered what they could at spear point and hoarded it behind their crumbling walls.  For the rest, the only relief ahead was the end.

Overnight, the tides turned.  A wall of water washed over the coast and far inland.  The ground heaved and buckled from its force.  Coastal villages were destroyed and the sky turned black and heavy for many days. When the sun finally rose, a huge mass of new land lay off the coast, lush with greenery and life.  Within a week, fresh clean rain returned and the ocean teemed with untold numbers of nourishing plants and creatures.  Something else returned that few remembered.  Hope.

Since then, the land has overflown with bounty and opportunity. No one is hungry and there is no need for poverty.  But this strange new world has provided more questions than answers.  Mysterious structures and remnants of forgotten peoples scatter this new continent, and folk have begun to speak in strange tongues and even stranger riddles. Most mysterious of all is a deep pit in the center of this new land.  Some say it calls the names of the chosen, beckoning them to strange fates.  Those few who have returned will babble of horror and pain, treasure and magics beyond belief, and wonders that cannot be described.  Few are coherent, all are changed. None can resist the call...

...and some other bullshit. Here's what you came for! Maps!

Week 1:  The Money Pit. Big decisions to be made, and a side-view only makes sense for the nature of the puzzle.  Inspired largely by Riptide by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, which I've loved since high school, and which I only just discovered is based on a real damn place!  The similarity ends pretty quickly, but this dungeon entrance should provide some challenges, and it's got me thinking a lot about my love for Metroidvania games and how to channel that into a megadungeon design.

Week 2:  Off the beaten path.  Secret doors lead to a strange community and more mysteries.  More conventional map projection and I've realized I don't have a go-to method for shading/crosshatching a dungeon. No big deal, but something to think about. Do those visual conventions matter? Not for a rough draft, certainly.  Reveling in creating multiple paths to different areas and interlinked passages.  Water dungeons are fun...to create.

Still reading?

Hi! I'm Andy, and I'm blogging.  I've chosen to participate in Sean McCoy's #dungeon23 this year.  Why? Because I'm a sucker for punishment and already have too many obsessive things to occupy my time.  Honestly, a dungeon room a day seems doable.  Will I do it every day?  Probably not (already haven't.)  I figure if I can do half of them, I can make up some ground here or there and maybe hit 250-300 rooms.  We'll see!  The real reason to try this is that I've had the seed of an idea for this megadungeon for a couple of years as part of a larger setting I've started to outline.  This is the kind of motivation that might make some of it actually happen.  I've got a pile of RPG ideas, but by day I build high-end guitars to an obsessive level of detail, and frankly, it saps most of my creativity and drive.  Beyond that, striving for perfection in my day job has made it difficult for me to make art or music or anything else that isn't the best thing I can possibly make.  I am fully aware of this situation and it sucks. I have so many ideas, so many things I'd like to make, so many songs to write, but it often feels impossible to just go and create something for the sake of it even if I know it will make me happier.  This has been going on since well before the pandemic, which has certainly exacerbated things. It's bad for my business and it's bad for my brain.

So here we are. I'm treating this as a rough draft, which means I can't possibly be a perfectionist about it, right?  Already I'm seeing pictures of immaculately mapped dungeons with nice handwriting and it makes me anxious!  But, I'm not going to worry about it.  When I finally publish this dungeon in 30 years, it will be amazing. Or not. Or who cares?  This need be nothing more than an exercise in creativity, and I could definitely use the exercise.

If you like this, please follow along and share. I'll do my best to update regularly and share some of my creative process, as well as RPG art I've done in the past and random thoughts. It's gonna be loose and it's gonna be lazy, but I'm pretty pleased with the first few weeks and most importantly, I'm enjoying it.