A World With No Extras II - Dungeon 23 Edition

Link to First Post

I’ve heard and seen a lot about Dungeon 23 recently. Someone asked me if I was going to do anything with regards to the idea. Here are the basics of  Dungeon 23:

12 Months – One Level each month
52 Weeks – One Theme each week
365 Days – One Room each day.

Some rooms are empty. Descriptions need not be complex. That is, keep it simple.


At first I was thinking I would take a pass on this. I’ll be up front here, I’m just not a huge fan of mega-dungeons. I’m running one right now and I want to get my players OUT of it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they can be cool. For example, I can see where something like a mega-dungeon might fit or work out very well if the entire campaign was focused on just the one place – kind of like some of the oldest D&D related computer games, like Wizardy, where it’s just one massive maze the whole way through. I was also tempted at one point to do something inspired by Blame! or House of Leaves or Piranesi’s Carceri) but I found another way to handle that which I liked better.  My main gripe is one of pacing, which absolutely CAN be overcome - perhaps I am just not creative enough to figure out how to solve that problem.  The people who set up the challenge have it right that doing 365 rooms in one style would be too much – the themes and levels really serve a purpose with a project like that, and would help keep it from bogging down in same-old after the first twenty rooms..

However, I then thought that the idea of Dungeon 23 actually fits pretty nicely into the idea of the World With No Extras (linked above). Instead of doing rooms, I am going to try doing characters. At first I thought about trying to do four people a day, but while this will probably be fairly easy to start off with, I think it is likely to get more and more difficult and time consuming as the project goes on and the webs of relationship and interconnectivity begin to develop.

So here’s my thought:

12 Months – One Neighborhood each month
52 Weeks – One Family each week
365 Days – One Person each day.


In this case, Family need not be actual blood relations (though they certainly could be and in many cases will be) – rather, during that week, I’ll be focused on the most important relationships those seven people have. And I am also using the terms Family and  Neighborhood loosely – a Family could be something like "Police" or "UAW 144" and a neighborhood could also be “The Command Deck” “Gunnery Deck 1” “Enginarium” etc. though of course in many cases I will use the literal meaning of the word.

I don’t have everything quite fleshed out yet, but right now I am thinking I will dump them into an spreadsheet, one character per tab, with the tabs organized alphabetically by name. I may find a different system is more useful or easier to access / play with, and if I do, I will change my methodology. I feel like there is probably some way to create hyperlinks in excel so that it’s easy to jump around between characters.

I'd like for each character to have at least four important relationships, if not more.   

Here are a couple of examples, not totally fleshed out, but enough so you get the idea:

 

The above are not perfect - I need to change things a little to take Robert's low CHA into account, and figure out exactly which cell I want to put the occupation in, for example, but hopefully they give you an idea of how I am going to start out.

I’d like each character to have at least four important relationships, if not more.  I imagine as I get deeper into this, I may have to find or develop some new tools or organizational methods to keep it all together, but for staters, I'm just going to create stuff.

Alongside this, I am also posting another generator.  This one is to be used to determine the current mindset of the NPC.  Are they distracted?  If so, what by?  And what kind of mood are they in?  With permission, I am using the Table of Miens/ States / Emotions that kyana at noise sans signal came up with the other day.  I have also added a couple of other items to tell the DM more about what is going on in their mind.

So here is the Mood & Distraction generator for use on the fly which, again, may be revised as this project develops!  Once again I have decided to show the tables for transparency, and once again I'm open to suggestions for other things to be distracted by or ways to do this more efficiently!