Dungeon23 Introduction

In his original post, here’s how Sean McCoy planned on creating his Dungeon23 megadungeon:

A dungeon room a day, every day, for 2023. That’s 365 rooms. I’ll do a level a month, so 12 levels. Every week is a little area of 7 rooms, so I can keep my focus small.

That sounds like a lot of fun, but I think I’d like to try it a bit differently. If you read across Twitter, Mastodon, and Reddit how folks plan on participating, you’ll find ideas like City23, World23, NPC23, and so on.

I think for my own adventure, I want to do somewhat of a combination of all of these. I’d like to start out with an overland trek (building out a region or world) and then at times either “discover” and plan out a dungeon, or maybe I’ll decide to build a city instead. I think if I leave my own rules a little loose, I’ll be more likely to keep up with the challenge.

I’m also not going to be terribly strict about participating every single day for the year. If I can accomplish that, then that’s great. However, if I’m only able to write something down a few days a week, I’ll consider that a success as well. I’m not sure how much of my progress I’ll be posting to this blog, but I will try and write up at least a weekly or monthly update.

General resources

In a short amount of time, a whole bunch of content popped up surrounding the Dungeon 23 idea. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming, but there are a few sites that I do think will be an enormous help. Here are some general ones:

• The original post by Sean McCoy announcing the idea
• https://duvelmandice.github.io/vault/: website with a great roundup of other resources (prompts, theory, map-making tools, and much more)
• The r/dungeon23 subreddit with tons of posts of progress, encouragement, and even more resources

Resources specific to my adventure

In addition to those sites listed above, here’s what I think I’ll be using for my own attempt. This list may get longer as I progress with my playthrough.

• Pocket Lands (PDF) by Alexey Aparin, along with D100 Lands by Evandro Novel for generating my hexcrawl overland map
• Incompetech Hexagonal Graph Paper generator for PDFs of hex graph paper
• Obsidian.md for organizing and storing the writing of my adventure
• The Four Against Darkness core rulebook and some of its supplemental books for monster tables, dungeon room shapes, treasures, traps, etc.
• The D&D 5E Dungeon’s Master’s Guide for additional tables and inspiration
• More to come, I’m sure…