Pretendo Games

We’re at about the halfway point of 2023, so I thought it would be a good time to offer a brief update on my progress with #Dungeon23 — a yearlong project to create a “megadungeon” one day at a time. The short version:

• I’m on schedule! (More or less!)
• I’m having fun! (For sure!)
• My output is very rough and sketchy! (And that’s okay!)
• I have many thoughts about process! (What a surprise!)
• I’m actually doing two adventures! (I can’t help myself!)

Let’s dig into that a piece at a time (just like I’m doing with #Dungeon23 itself).

Exhumed (again)

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I’m working on a soulslike fantasy adventure in a fancy, A5-sized Rhodia notebook. The not-at-all-finalized working title comes from how it starts: the tutorial adventure from a pamphlet dungeon I wrote awhile back, Exhumed. (1️⃣)

This project isn’t a “megadungeon,” exactly, but several interconnected adventuring locations. Each location could in theory be run as its own mini-adventure, but the aim is to string this all together for a campaign about exploring a ruined world after the gates of the underworld flew open, and trying to gather enough souls to eventually effect change on a grand scale.

As intended, I’ve been mining the spells and magic items from Grave to sprinkle treasure around these locations, and basically improvising the rest. Improvisation doesn’t lend itself super well to properly “Jaquaying the dungeon,” nor to the consistently-spaced boss battles you’d expect from a soulslike game. I expect that I’ll have significant revision ahead of me if I want to share this in 2024 (and I do).

That said, I’m pretty happy with how it’s coming along. Adventure locations so far include:

• Catacombs (starting location)
• Wake (hub village)
• The First Peak (including Trader’s Road, Titan’s Pass, The Scale, The Sun Temple, The Windy Cliffs, Greengate Wood, Greengate Lake, and Fort Greengate, with a passage underground I have to come back to)
• The Foul Swamp (including a stilt town, treetop bandit hideouts, an abandoned village, and a tunnel underground I have to come back to)
• The Second Peak (including farmlands embroiled in a peasant/wizard war, Fort Fledgling, and technically also including the largest sub-location so far…)
• The Arcanaeum (including grounds, dormitories, faculty housing, the Archmage’s Manor, offices, archives and museum, and a five-story tower of classrooms, labs, storage, The Chamber of Reflection, and the Observatory on top, which I finish next week)

From here, I move on to The Third Peak (home of a Holy City, among other things) and various underground locations, eventually including areas past the gates to the Underworld.

All in all, I’ve got some NPCs I’m excited to play, some locations I’m excited to see players interact with, and some boss fights I’m excited to see groups overcome (potentially after a couple TPKs, but being undead has its advantages).

Data Loss (again)

As I said when I first wrote about #Dungeon23, “If this process actually works for me, I could see using it to tackle a space station for 2400, or even a fully fleshed out campaign for Data Loss.” Well, I couldn’t make up my mind on which of two soulslike adventures to write this year, and I couldn’t bring myself to just throw away the Hobonichi planner I first bought for this project (and rejected early on in favor of the Rhodia mentioned above). So I’ve been doing that project in tandem with the one described above.

I alluded to this one only vaguely at times because I figured I’d burn out on it and quit. At this point, though, I figure that if I’ve been doing just fine with two #Dungeon23 entries a day for half a year, I can probably safely say I’ll at least see both through. (Whether either will ever lead to anything publishable is an open question I’m not worrying about right now.)

2400: Data Loss is (another) soulslike game, but sci-fi rather than pseudo-medieval fantasy. (2️⃣) Players take the role of memory-wiped clones in a mysteriously ruined exoplanet mining colony under the control of colossal AI “metaminds.” The clones need to find answers, a way offworld, or just the means to stay themselves; their minds are transferred into to replacement clones upon death, but there’s always a risk of data loss.

It’s a big pitch! But, of course, it’s only three pages plus a cover, fitting on either side of a letter-sized sheet of paper, so it demands a lot of heavy lifting from the group to fill in the gaps.

My aim was to use the back page to give the GM a loose framework to improvise the adventure — some location themes, treasures to find, bosses to battle, and tidbits of lore to reveal so players could piece together what happened. I have yet to hear of anybody actually running a whole campaign of that game, though, so the jury’s still out on whether it actually succeeds at that aim.

Even as I was writing it, I hoped I’d have time to give Data Loss the deluxe treatment — detailed locations, more clues to uncover, more NPCs to interact with. Something I’d want to buy and be excited to run. That seemed like such a huge endeavor, though. It occurred to me that #Dungeon23 might be the only way I’d ever devote the time to making it happen.

My notes on this one are a lot rougher than the notes for my (also very rough) fantasy adventure described above. The planner I’m using for this one has smaller pages that smudge easily, so I’m writing a lot less. The architecture of secret facilities and industrial complexes is tougher for me to visualize than floor plans for a wizard school, so I have a lot of crossed-out maps (and a lot more pages without maps at all yet).

Still, it’s coming along. It’s got a disembodied android who will pay you in information if you bring him other androids’ eyes; a hidden location with a totally optional series of quests that may or may not be a simulation; and an interstellar plutocrat who you can probably pin the blame on for most of your problems (and then fight), among other things. Locations so far mostly come directly from the original Data Loss, including…

• Outskirts (starting location, where worker clones lived)
• Plant (full of not-remotely-OSHA-approved safety hazards, cultists, and excuses to reread the excellent Gradient Descent)
• Mines (full of weird crystals and haywire construction bots)
• Labs (secret facility with clues to what’s going on, crazed psychics, and mind-wiping robots)
• The Deep Under (you’re not cleared for this)
• Barrens South (beyond the colony’s edge, shrouded in dust storms)
• Innovation Plaza (like Silicon Valley mixed with the California Gold Rush)

I’ve got some more Innovation Plaza and Barrens locations ahead of me in the near future (including several floors of a skyscraper topped by a giant robot), plus a space port, at least one space ship layout, and a deranged executive’s panic room, among others. I have less of a sense of where this one is headed than the other adventure, but I’m enjoying it all the same.

Notes on process

I’ve been diligent about writing something for every day of the year so far, sometimes even writing one or more days ahead. (I only missed the deadline on one day so far because I mistakenly thought I’d written ahead.) I often skip drawing a map for the week, and double back to that later, but the maps are just rough sketches anyway so I don’t forget what I was thinking while writing entries.

I did have an issue, however, where I wrote so far ahead — a whole week of entries that occurred to me on a walk — that I basically took a week off. This proved to be a mistake for me, personally, given my current situation.

I’ve been recovering very slowly from various health issues (most notably debilitating fatigue and frequent migraines related to long covid). It’s very hard for me to work on larger projects, leave the house, interact with people (especially in person), or even sit up without lying down for an extended period. Given those conditions, a low-demand, daily routine of mandatory creativity is essential to help me avoid terrible depression. As such, that week I “took off” was a real low point for me emotionally — but at least it taught me this about myself.

Following that realization, I made myself a new rule:

Even if I’ve written ahead, I still need to do something every day on these projects, however briefly.

I’d give myself a pass if I were so sick I couldn’t do a thing at all, of course — but so far, even on days with terrible migraines, I’ve always been able to spare a minute somewhere to do something.

Reflections on mapmaking

The most obvious candidate to “do something” when I’m ahead is to catch up on drawing maps, so I’ve been making good progress there. I find it challenging to make maps that are interesting and comprehensible (“pretty” is not even an option, for now), but I appreciate it as a creative exercise.

Devoting more time to maps has even gotten me to start some weeks more recently with a rough map to fill in as I go, which I think has led to some more interesting connections between spaces.

The map used in the featured image for this post, for instance, is actually an older version; the newer version ditches the simple “teleportation chamber” to get to sealed areas. Now you have to be a little more creative, and explore a bit more, to find neat secret stuff. I doubt this would’ve occurred to me if I weren’t mapping more right off the bat.

The joys of adventure writing

This project has also helped me find pleasure in adventure design, which is relatively new to me. (I had hoped I’d find this as part of this project, so that’s good. If I hadn’t, I probably would’ve quit by now.)

“Prep” can be a four-letter word for GMs with busy lives, so I’ve used many published adventures over the years (often hacked or adapted to fit my needs and tastes), and I’ve done a lot of improvisational GMing. I think this is the first time, though, I’ve written a detailed adventure, meant to be relatively easy to run for longer than a one-shot.

Now that I’m doing this “detailed adventure” thing, it’s interesting to learn which parts of this process I enjoy. I already knew that big-picture RPG “plots” don’t interest me much these days. (3️⃣) But I’ve learned I do quite enjoy the mundane aspects of “dungeon life,” as it were, like coming up with logical reasons to have secret rooms full of dangerous and/or wondrous things. As one recent post about a popular OSR adventure says, in a passage that speaks directly to my soul:

Who buries their legendary hero in a tomb that can only be opened without setting off a trap by speaking the names of his dogs? And then leaves a hint on the door? And makes sure the names of said dogs are discoverable within the tomb? My ideal adventure should be one that makes sense as a fictional (fantastical) place that could exist for reasons so that the GM can make judgements forward from the reasons a thing exists and the players can strategize based on them.

Svirfneblin, “I Ain’t No Fortunate Winter’s Daughter“

I also rather enjoy coming up with low-stakes “side quests,” sprinkled in judiciously. You don’t have to find a new pair of spectacles for the poor old guy working the desk at the Arcanaeum Registrar’s Office — but if you do, you (probably) won’t regret it.

Closing thoughts (for now)

I have enjoyed sharing some tidbits about my projects here! It helps me to not feel entirely isolated from the rest of the creative community working on this stuff. (And I’m not immune to the appeal of “let me tell you about my D&D character” nerd-gushing.)

Still, not writing very much publicly about #Dungeon23 has served me well for the last half-year, so I expect to go back to doing that again. I may think aloud a bit over on Mastodon if you’re interested in how these are coming along. Otherwise, expect a wrap-up post closer to 2024. And if you’re still trucking along on your own #Dungeon23 project, may you always find a few minutes a day to come up with something fun; I know it’s done me a world of good already.

---

1️⃣ Exhumed is available on DTRPG (which includes a free preview image of its entire content) and Itch (which includes free community copies). ⤴️

2️⃣ The original 2400: Data Loss is available online as a standalone PDF on DTRPG, and with the rest of the 2400 micro-RPGs as a bundle on DTRPG and a bundle on Itch. (You can also see the full text free on both sites, via the free previews of each game on DTRPG, or full PDF downloads under “community copies” on Itch.) ⤴️

3️⃣ My #Dungeon23 adventures have answers to “what the heck is going on and how do we fix it,” but you can ignore that stuff and have fun playing toward straight-up exploration/survival. ⤴️