Dungeon 23! I wanna do it.
Andrew Duvall has been collecting a list of dungeon design resources, both prompts to get the juices going and general theory. I got him to add the GDC Talk Hitman Levels as Social Spaces which heavily influenced the design of Aw Jeez! The Airship's on Fire!.
I want to keep at the worldbuilding procedure I was on but also came up with a megadungeon premise. The current plan is to buy a fancy notebook and try to do both.
So I got most of the way through the Gygax 75 Challenge (it's free go read it here https://rayotus.itch.io/gygax75) and it's good! I genuinely think it's an interesting way to go about making a campaign world specifically for tabletop play. I also wanted to tinker with it, so I've started writing something with the project name of Phipps 23 (in the hope that it'll be ready to print in 2023).
The goal is to structure a tabletop rpg campaign worldbuilding exercise that starts with a sketch and fills in details over time. Something built to be anti-canon. Something built to be semi-system-agnostic. Something that knows you're going to discover through play so it gets your world ready to play in as quickly as possible.
The outline so far looks like this:
Name a handful of things that you want to inspire your setting. Shoot for 6, maybe more maybe less, don't go overboard.
Once you've got a list you're happy with, use it to write down 4-6 things your setting is About. What are the core themes, feelings, vibes, tones, or other elements from your inspirations you want to bring to your setting. Explicitly state to the best of your ability why those inspirations are on your lest.
For each of your About statements above, write one of the following that embodies it.
If you get stuck, go back to your inspirations and borrow heavily. By the time you're done you should have 24-36 stray setting components that speak to at least one thing your setting is About. For a lot of GMs this is enough to host a session zero, maybe even start playing.
Name the following
Your Icons and Inspirations should help a lot here. Be explicit about how your icons relate to these larger organizations or areas. You don't have to use all of them. If you haven't been playing yet start playing. Write down what your players are bringing
This is where things start getting fuzzier for me lol.
Remember that none of this is necessarily the truth, this is just what someone would tell you.
Look at what your players are doing, let that guide your priorities. Start drawing the first floors of dungeons, maps of neighborhoods. Start fleshing out important or interesting factions. Start making timelines of what will happen if the players don't intervene. Start making rival adventurers and hirelings. Start looking for a second set of players to play in your setting with a different system.
By now the About is baked into your setting so you can just add stuff that's cool. I'm a fan of tables, add some tables.
I'm trying this out with my Gygax 75 Setting called Meteor Break. You can follow along here.
2022-11-28: Icons - Changed "Creature" to "Peril" to open things up a bit and make it fit a broader type of adventuresome worldbuilding activities. Realizing the full text might need a disclaimer on how you approach the designation of "person" vs "creature". Not today's problem. Thanks to @binary for poking at this.
I'm building a setting using a modified Gygax 75 Framework i'm tentatively calling Phipps 23! You can read about that here. The Meteor Break main post is here.
Event: The Waning. The autumn parade from the top of the city to the earth carrying the preserved corpse of the last moon elf king via palenquin, mourning the death of the moon and the founding of Loch Syzygy. It culminates in a feast to new beginnings and the future.
Landmark: The Vector Building. Downtown skyscraper of steel and glass evoking a rocket launch. Indirectly owned by multiple aristocratic houses, it is the foothold of the immortal aristocracy in the city.
Person: Nicolai Stone, CEO of Syzyrgy Liquidations. Former partner of a larger private military company who left abruptly and on bad terms to seize an opportunity to operate out of Loch Syzygy.
Creature: Blight Ochre. Industrial magic byproducts left to accumulate and gain life. Shared enemy of Fungal Bellringers and Forest Folk (though they differ greatly in approach).
Treasure: Telemetry Records of The Basilisk. A magnetic tape from the godhunter craft that shot the moon in pursuit of a new god. Contains both evidence of the house that funded the act and indicates where that god hid. Any house of the immortal aristocracy would kill to get their hands on it. The Loch Syzygy Council could use it to demand reparations, to know who pulled the trigger and destroyed their ancestral home.
Secret: Envoys of House Ecliptic are meeting in secret with the Terminal Authority board of directors to establish a shell company and smuggle goods in and out of the city.
I did 3/5 of a gygax 75 challenge and now I'm pivoting it to get it into a playable state by Thankgiving (by which I mean Christmas (by which I mean January)). I'm using a new and exciting framework that I'm making up as I go. I'm tentatively calling it the Phipps 23 Challenge, cuz that's funny. For part one, I'm going to write out some media touchstones. I'm gonna use those to write out a few core About statements to express the tone, vibe, and themes I wanna hit on. Then I'll loop back and write the pitch for the setting, name a few genre conventions, describe the kind of RPG systems I want to use, and post the playlist cuz I made one.
Immortal Aristocracy godhunters accidentally blew up the moon, and a lunar elf city crash landed here. A few generations later anyone who's anyone in the adventurer scene is operating out of there. From the ivory towers of the immortal aristocracy to the chaos pits of pandaemonium, all eyes are on Loch Syzygy: known to you and your band as Meteor Break.
These are the main things I wanna pull from
Meteor Break is About:
Post Dungeon Fantasy, Dirtbag Fantasy, Science Fantasy, Surf Crime
Any game that supports a revolving cast of dirtbag adventurers operating out of a city, getting into trouble, and making their way back. Going for a looping West Marches variant with a strong sense of home base. Games I'll probably end up running for this:
I'm gonna take each of the About statements above and I'm gonna try and come up with one of the following for each:
If this sounds rad let me know cuz I wanna flesh this out like a little bit more and then start running it with cool people.
Part 2: Icons
