Bad Quail Games // G. Michael Truran

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.

"You see Captain Pellaeon, it's a maxim of Chandrillan society that rules elide. They're so confident in how orthodoxy veils the possibility of their world that it would never occur to them that the right rule can put a thought in their head they would never otherwise have."

Last night I rolled up a test character for Mud+Laser. Purely random. Just took a couple minutes. That shouldn't really surprise me, but I'm used to character creation with more decision making built in, which tends to add a lot of pad time even if the decisions are few and fairly simple.