Dungeon23 Roundup

Hey! So you like dungeons? Good. We’ll talk about dungeons, how to design them, and why they’re so cool. In this issue of The Dispatch, you’ll read mini interviews with Sean McCoy, Zedeck Siew, and Anthony Meloro.

But first let me give you some quick news from The Lost Bay Studio.

Lost Bay Studio News

Newsletter

In the next few months I’ll try to keep a more regular publishing rhythm and release The Dispatch bimonthly. Still haven’t decided on the day, could be Wednesday. I’d love to know what works best for you, you can drop me a line in the comments to let me know.

From now on, The Dispatch newsletters will have two parts: 

• The Lost Bay Studio News - releases, pre orders, what I’ve been up to as a publisher

• Indie Scene News - interviews, podcasts, round ups and more

Fallen

Pre orders for the Fallen Bundle are extended to June 11. I’m putting a bit more time into redesigning Perplexing Ruin’s Campaign Zine Redux, a collection of tables, tools, and blank maps, so I figured I should extend pre orders a notch. The Campaign Zine Redux is going to be your next best friend for running fantasy RPGs, or your new companion for solo gaming.

The bundle is 20% OFF, get it here https://www.thelostbaystudio.com/products/fallen-bundle

We deal in lead

We’re restocking We deal in lead, the weird wild west game by Colin le Sueur. Grab your poncho, your double barrelled colt, and get 10% OFF during pre orders. We deal in lead is a D20 game based on Into the Odd/Cairn, the print quality is excellent and it’s a hard back book. What else would you ask for an RPG?

And forget not, with the discount code PEOPLEOFTHEBAY you can get an extra 10% on all your orders!

Skyrealms

Your favorite floating fantasy setting is being translated in Spanish thanks to La Esquina de Rol. They have already done quite a few Solidarity translations in the past, including Fallen, and  they’re working to build bridges between the Spanish speaking community and the rest of the scene. That’s a fantastic initiative. Check their itch.io page for more info.

Two more Skyrealms adventures are coming up soon. I’m happy to be working with Roque Romero who is bringing their unique plume to deliver some amazing art in the Skyrealms spirit. Here are the cover drafts of the 2 adventures.

You can now publish your own Skyrealms content. A simple 3rd party publisher license has been set up, and you can label your Skyrealms compatible content with the beautiful Sky Forged logo designed by Hinokodo. Come and join the Skyrealms Jam, and forge your own rainbowy and cloudy content.

Dungeon23 Roundup - part 1

CW: Wolf and Rat drawings below

It’s been almost 6 months now! Folks from all over the globe have joined Dungeon23, the tabletop design challenge sparked by Sean McCoy’s, designer of the uber successful Mothership, in late 2022. It all started like this:

The task is simple: design a 365 room megadungeon in a year, one room at a time, one tiny bit every day. In the early days of the challenge, a lot of people grabbed the notebook/daily planner you can see in the picture above, the Hobonichi Techo, its shape and layout seemed perfect for the task. Looks very cool if you ask me. I should have grabbed one as well.

Throughout January, enthusiasm was high, countless variations of the challenge were sparked, horror, sci-fi, archipelagos, some publishers even released design tools and accessories. With Jimmy Shelter, we’ve hosted a game jam on itch and set up a huge spreadsheet directory in an attempt to track all the D23 projects.

Designing a daily megadungeon can be a lot of fun, but writing a room a day, even if it’s just a word or a sentence, can become a lot of self-inflicted pressure. I had a complicated relationship with this challenge. Writing a lot, every day, then taking long breaks, cursing the challenge, and going back to it. As part of the challenge I’ve written a horror minidungeon, UNIT DH-17 and now I’m dedicating myself to a big Marsh themed depth crawl. Progress is slow. I guess that like me, many of us have had Dungeon23 ups and downs. 

But some designers out there are still producing on a somewhat regular basis Dungeon23 content. And guess what, they’re making awesome stuff.

We’ll be talking with them and we’ll try to understand why and how they do it. This is going to be a multi part newsletter, but in no way it will cover the ginormous and beautiful galaxy of Dungeon23 projects. So feel free to add a link to your project or to a project you like in the comments below.

But first, what about the Dungeon23 master alchemist themselves? Is Sean McCoy still dungeoning? I had to ask on twitter.

Screenshot from the notepad app. I’m curious to see if Sean is going to release the dungeon one day. Would be interesting, considering they publish Sci-Fi books, and this looks like a pure fantasy dungeon to me.

Zedeck Siew

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve moved to a digital notepad on day 2 of the challenge. But Zedeck Siew is still using pen and paper for their megadungeon. You might know Zedeck from the zine series A thousand thousand islands or the book The reach of the roach god. Zedeck has been writing fantasy RPGs, fueled by Southeast Asian culture - You can listen to us talk about Zdeck’s RPG writing here - We all knew Zedeck is a hell of a writer, well turns out they are an amazing artist as well, as testified by their Dungeon23 maps.

Here’s Zedeck about dungeons

1.Why is designing dungeons fun?

I make #dungeon23 entries seven at a go, on a weekly basis. Each week is a “dungeon”. Few of them end up being actual dungeons—a couple of cavern complexes, I suppose? But I don’t think I’m very good at making interesting confined spaces… Most of them end up being basically towns: temple complexes, fishing villages, that sort of thing.

It’s fun, exploring a place and its people. Getting to know the inhabitants of a temple—seven entries often mean seven characters. Does the temple archivist, here in her library,  want to usurp the chief priest’s position? And what would she give to achieve that? Is the cook hiding a secret entrance in the storeroom for an evening lover?

Stuff like that—the building blocks of drama, an adventure. I guess I get to make a small adventure every week. Which is neat!

The sad thing is that the part of my brain I use to write these #dungeon23 entries is the same bit I use for work. Meaning that when I’m busy with a manuscript—ie: now—my little #dungeon23 notebook goes on hiatus.

2.What comes first, drawing or text?

The illustration comes first—though generally I have an idea: the belly of a whale, a road along the coast, a wizard’s tower.

Often I start drawing, realize I don’t draw well enough to put the idea in my head on paper, and am forced to tweak down to something simpler. (One week I wanted to make the dreamscape of a giant eel. I wanted the locations in that dreamscape to match the approximate locations of an eel’s internal organs? A castle in the gonads, a grass plain in the stomach, etc. Several problems: 1. it was pretty hard to find a diagram of an eel’s internal anatomy; 2. What I could find told me that a lot of the organs are elongated and squished together (obviously, it’s an eel); meaning that 3. I’d have to be a kick-ass artist to draw all that stuff and make it legible. So, in the end, the dreamscape’s locations were essentially seven places strung along like a train. Pretty basic.)

That’s a good thing, I guess? Editing as a side-effect of lack of skill. 

3.For your D23 project, do you have a master plan, an outline, or are you improvising as you go?

No plan. I started because I thought I had a cool idea for a queen’s burial tomb. That was Week 1, for me. She’d been a pirate before; at the bottom of her tomb is the ship she used to sail. But what was outside her tomb? If she was a queen, what was her queendom like?

So Week 2 to 4 was the city in which the queen’s tomb was in. Week 5 was a ship that the city had sent out to engage in light piracy; it gets attacked by a giant eel. And now I need to figure out where that eel’s from, and what its deal is …

4.What kind of prep/research do you do for your entries?

A lot of it is googling reference images so I can hide my lack of drawing skill with busy details.

A lot of the entries have been pretty littoral / island-ish / mangrove-y places, because that is what the geography of my town is like. The entries are pretty Southeast Asian-flavoured (dugongs and fishing boats and shrines of small gods) because that’s where I am. Honestly, I just write about home.

5.Any plans to release it in the future?

I’m telling myself: “No!”

There are a lot of cool images and scenarios in these entries; it’d be a shame to not do anything with them. And week-to-week the world that’s being sketched out in this notebook seems pretty cohesive—

But I need to tell myself: “No! No plans for this. Not publishing this. Purely for fun!”

—because otherwise it will start feeling like work, and I’ll start agonising and procrastinating and feeling bad about it. I’ll look at it and hate it and feel it isn’t good enough. And then I’ll stop.

So: no. No plans!

Well, I do hope they’ll release it someday, it looks so gorgeous, no pressure friend, keep saying No plans, but well, you know what I mean.

Follow Zedeck on tumblr for regular D23 updates

What is a good dungeon anyway?

How do you make a fun and engaging dungeon?

You’ve probably heard of Jennell Jaquays, designer of early RPGs adventures that have become references in terms of tabletop design practices, most notably Caverns of Thracia published in 1979. With her work, Jennell establishes how a dungeon should be, to the point that her last name has been turned into a verb: yes, I too have jaquaysed my own dungeons.

The design principles, one could almost say the architectural principles, can be summarized as follows: give the players tactical freedom.

Several paths should lead from one place to another. Players should have the ability to move in several directions, flank their opponents, and retreat if needed. Players should be given fun mechanical and narrative opportunities to play with the dungeon. 

If you want to know more about Jennel Jaquays’ design principles check this video by Kyle Latino: Jaquaysing the dungeon, it’s really inspiring, I recommend it. I recommend all of Kyle's videos actually.

Like a good scholar, I’ve applied Jaquay’s principles to my own dungeons, like the Furling treecave below. This is rather a minidungeon. I love minidungeons, and somehow it wasn’t easy to design connection loops with so few rooms. But I did my best. This cute map has been made by Bordercholly, for the adventure The War Sigil, included in the Skyrealms source zines.

No way out

I still wonder if there are other ways to design dungeons. Building dungeons around tactical freedom sounds very wargame-y, maybe this is what a dungeon is supposed to be. An enclosed battlefield. But what about a dungeon that doesn’t give you much choice, that takes you to some place where you have to confront the big bad wolf/dragon/orc/serial killer. Can it be fun, or rewarding, to find yourself in a situation that makes you feel powerless, if you can overcome it? Like in a fairy tale? Would that work for horror/spooky games? I don’t know, but I’ll keep searching. 

What’s certain though is that the word dungeon has transcended its original definition of an underground stone and cavy building infested with goblins and ghouls. In today’s TTRPG lingo, the word dungeon refers to the architectural properties of a location rather than to its mood or appearance. Sci-Fi facilities and malls can be dungeons as well. 

You know, how I like contemporary edgy settings for tabletrop RPGs. That’s why I got particularly excited to learn that Anthony Meloro is writing a punk megadungeon for the occult punk game Mystic Punks.

Anthony’s megadungeon, Purple Tears Of The Wolf, opens in “Uncle Nick’s brick-and-mortar video rental”. This is intriguing enough for me to ask the designer a few questions.

Purple Tears Of The Wolf

1.Why is running dungeons fun?

Exploration, the sense of danger in a liminal space, and the atmosphere a gamemaster can create can make for a really tense experience. There are many more reasons––but at its core, the ability to consistently surprise players, make them laugh, and allow them to find creative ways to escape their collective doom resonates with why dungeon crawling is so rad!

2.What makes a dungeon Punk? Is it the vibe, the design?

I think punk can be a pretty varied term––but with its roots in rebelling against the status quo. My inspiration for PTOTW comes from all over, some more punk than others. To name a few: Blame! manga, 80s/90s video stores and VHS covers, Super-Metroid, Forgotten Realm’s Underdark, and trash sci-fi/horror movies melt together to make it work.

3.What is the punkiest thing players can encounter in the dungeon?

At 21 weeks in, there’s a lot of craziness packed in there. But, Cheetongah, a floating majick-wielding Cheetos bag that appeared in Koola-Stop Qwik Mart convenience store on January 27th’s post, to assist the Punks is very fun! 

Currently, players have warped from the abyss of the dungeon, which starts under Uncle Nick’s Video Time, to the X-Ang Freight Cruiser Class N-B drifting in the deep cosmos to help the enigmatic Yuki retrieve her fourth of six stolen AI brains from Lobofexx, The Sacred Cyber-Wolf Of The Net-Void-SphereScape.

 4.PTOTW started as a Discord PBP game. How did it spawn into a D23 challenge?

When I saw Sean McCoy’s D23 challenge, I knew PTOTW was a perfect fit. So, I jumped right in! It’s been a great creative exercise to continuously generate new ideas for the Mystic Punks RPG. 

5.Are you still playing it? if yes can you give us a status report?

Unfortunately, no. The original PBP consisted of MP creators, but other commitments, mine included, made it die. I’m stoked to give it new life with D23, though! There was way too much gnarly lore and dungeon-crawling to let it go. 

With Exalted Funeral and Jay Domingo, we are currently working on the Mystic Punks TTRPG to be ready to launch on Kickstarter this fall. So, hopefully, PTOTW can be a supplement for Punks to die in!!!

Find the rest of Anthony’s work here https://linktr.ee/mysticpunks

We’ve reached the end of part 1 - I’n part 2 we’ll chat with Chris Bissette and Victor Merino. 

One quick thing before I’ll let you get back to your own dungeoning activities: if you enjoy The Dispatch, and you want more newsletter content like this, please consider snagging a game from The Lost Bay Studio. You’ll buy yourself a treat and support us in one move. Nice combo!

Let me know what you think of all this dungeoning in the comments.

Now is the real goodbye: goodbye!