Bad Quail Games // G. Michael Truran

Noodling on a Mark of the Odd thing. Not sure if it's a proper roleplaying game or a narrative skirmish game yet.

About star-cursed sorcerers who wear 10-meter tall war machines into battle. Cursed, because the desperate use of their power will eventually result in their dis-corporation and ascension to the stars, or in a terrible transformation into a kaiju chimera.

Please excuse my Google Translate German.

I did a blog about my practice of prototyping the character sheet while brainstorming a new game.

Noodling more on what the sheet for Hexenritter's giant robot, the marschierpanzer or "marching shell."

Muddling out an adventure setting. Developing out some ideas present in my work since Plunderlight.

The hexes connected by thick lines are big regions. The hexes connected to those regions are locations, factions, notable wandering monsters, and other features within those regions. Alignment/proximity kind of matters. The Bloodleggers in Nightcastle are conceptually close to The Bleed. The Hemophages in the Bleed tend to hang out closer to Nightcastle, etc.

Goal is to have some specific geography and themes while leaving enough blank space for individual groups to make the place their own. Or, in other words: anticanon motherfucker.

Loose idea is to tie this in with Plunderlight's successor project, which may end up being "Advanced DNGN FKRS." Or I may just end up using the name of the setting, "Dvindeltol."

Or maybe I should just let this be fucking around with the map and some GDocs notes for now and not get ahead of myself.

The usage meaning "underground monster town" is a term of art specific to video games/TTRPGs. Similarly, dictionaries don't tend to have an entry for the game-specific meaning of "boss."

Unlike "boss," though, the amount of traditional use of "dungeon" sees nowadays is basically a rounding error compared to the meaning Gary Gygax used. I bet a lot of younger folks don't even know the original definition. (Not that they haven't heard it used, but that when they did they were probably envisioning the Mines of Moria or whatever.)

The best theory I've heard -- I'd love to hear others -- is that this usage originates with the board game Dungeon!, which depicts an underground jail which also happens to be an underground monster town. Dungeon! was published in 1975 -- a year after Dungeons and Dragons -- but Gary Gygax played a hand-made version of it in 1972, then called "The Dungeons of Pasha Cada," when he was considering publishing it.

I like to use the OED, because it does a good job of breaking down the nuances of use. Here we have:

• Dungeon as a place of imprisonment, of which the use in fantasy games is considered a subset.
• Dungeon as reference to Hell.
• Dungeon as a deep, dark place.

With the exception of games dungeons, these definitions are all roughly contemporary. And none are considered archaic.

My understanding is that OD&D makes reference to the dungeon as a kind of mythic underworld. So I think Gygax was probably just using dungeon in those not uncommon terms.

Last night my Mud+Laser prototypes arrived. I just ran off enough to give away to friends and playtesters. Honestly, I would have just had them printed at work, except I laid it out as 9" x 9" (conviction: sci-fi games should be square), and it would look goofy on letter-size paper.