In 2023, commit to being nerdier than ever with the one-room-a-day Dungeon23 challenge.
A new craze is sweeping across tabletop RPG twitter, and game designers and players are all getting in on planning #Dungeon23–a commitment to create a megadungeon in 2023 by creating a new room every single day. The premise is simple, but a blank page can often be the death of creativity. Here’s how to get started, and how to stay motivated.
Dungeon23 is a daily writing practice that is built around game design. Every day the participant will design another room in a dungeon, and at the end of the week they will have a complete level. The next week starts the process over until you have 52 dungeon levels. Sean McCoy of Tuesday Knight Games, the press behind the award-winning TTRPG, Mothership created the challenge almost on accident, with a tweet about his newest project and an image of his notebook. But the indie TTRPG scene is nothing if not excitable and easily swayed by a challenge, and McCoy’s personal goal quickly gained traction across Twitter.
However, this isn’t a strict challenge–the ultimate goal of #Dungeon23 isn’t to adhere to rules in order to definitely crank out a megadungeon at the end of 2023. The goal here is to write a little bit every day, to attempt to create something new, and to challenge yourself to be creative. As designer Vidita Voleti (Bloodbeam Badlands) mentioned on twitter, you could skip 100 days, just over 3 months, and still end up with a megadungeon of 250 rooms. The ethos of Dungeon23 isn’t that you must create something every day, it’s that you make space for writing, even if it’s a catch-up hour every Sunday.
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There’s another part of Dungeon23 that’s slightly buried under the lede, but should be obvious to anyone who’s ever run (or really even played) a dungeon crawler–it doesn’t have to be a dungeon. You could create a city where each day is a house on the block, so every week you get a couple new streets, and at the end of the month you’ve got a whole neighborhood. Designers Zedeck Siew (A Thousand Thousand Islands) and Richard Ruane (Barrow Keep) are both creating cities with factions built into the design. I really admire Siew’s illustrative map, which has a lot of simple depth, is deliberately contained by the premise and still shows Siew’s own design aesthetic as well as clearly demonstrating hallmarks of Southeast Asian architecture.
