Here is my summary of my January 2023 #Dungeon23 creative work. The caveat here is that over the last 48 years of OD&D I have never once set down at a desk and created dungeon areas in the advance of a game. I have always created my dungeons in game on the fly and that has worked really well for me.
Here is what I have discovered over the first month:
1. Creating on the fly is much, much easier by orders of magnitude.
2. I am much more creative in the moment with players around me, than I am sitting at a desk by myself.
3. I have trouble just describing the room and what is in it, I default repeatedly to describing it through the players eyes.
4. Although the premise of #Dungeon23 is do one room per day for one level per month for 12 months to finish with 12 levels and 365 rooms, I am incapable of sticking to that.
Oh and one other comment, for me as both a referee and as a player the primary reason I do both is for exploration. Exploration is for the me, my favorite part of the game. I always want to know what is around the next corner or over the next hill. For me everything else is secondary to exploration.
Sooo to summarize here is what I have learned about the dungeon during the first month of #Dungeon23. On the first day I discovered Level One of the Dungeon - which I named The Ruins of Mount Auyán. At least I thought it was Level One. Turns out that an, as yet, unknown number of dungeon levels change places and so what is Level One changes from time to time. Don't know yet if all the dungeon levels change places or only a few of them. The other thing I have discovered is that this dungeon is going to be way more massive than I thought it was going to be when I started on day one.
Level One
Day One - 8 Rooms
Day Two - 1 Room with 15 doors
Day Three - 25 Rooms and a Stairway that leads to 30 sub-levels
Day Four - 2 Rooms
Day Five - 18 Rooms
The Dungeons shuffled itself overnight, so still calling this Level Two (even though it is at the Level One location, at least temporarily)
Day Six - 3 Rooms
Day Seven - One Room and a passage to into another world
Day Eight - 2 Rooms - My version of The Grue, which I call The Appetite
Day Nine - 1 Room
Day Ten - 6 Rooms - One has a magical forge
Day Eleven - 12 Rooms
Day Twelve - 40 Rooms
Day Thirteen - 3 Rooms
Day Fourteen - 1 Area (Room)
Day Fifteen - 1 Room - 3 Portals that will lead to other areas of the dungeon
Passing through a Portal to some other unknown level.
Day Sixteen - 2 Rooms
Day Seventeen - 1 Room - Awaken a King who has slept for centuries
Day Eighteen - 1 Room
Day Nineteen - 1 Room
Day Twenty - 1 Room (large cavern)
Day Twenty One - 1 Room
Day Twenty Two - 1 Room with ten cells
Day Twenty Three - 1 Room
Overnight things have shuffled again. There is an above ground Tower now.
The Tower
Day Twenty Four - Three rooms and a passage into another world partly described
Day Twenty Five - More exploration of another world outdoors
Now back to the dungeon, so still calling this Level Three (even though it is at the Level One location, at least temporarily)
Day Twenty Six - 1 Room (Area One) of a massive cavern.
Day Twenty Seven - 1 Room (Area One)(continued) of a massive cavern and partial description. There are 85 passages leading out of this cavern
Day Twenty Eight - 1 Room (Area 1A)
Day Twenty Nine - 1 Room (Area 1B)
Day Thirty - 1 Room (Area 1C)
Day Thirty One - 1 Room (Area 1D) 12 coffins whose occupants are awake and waiting.
