Station23

 There is a social media craze right now started by Sean McCoy dubbed Dungeon23. Dungeon23 is a framework for creating a megadungeon. You write up one room a day with the idea of having a completed level each month. At the end you have a 365 room dungeon.

I was thinking of doing something similar this year. I have a friend that DMs on a small community discord server I am a part of. He created a D&D 5e encounter every day during 2022 as part of a New Year's Resolution. I was already picking his brain before I found out about Dungeon23. He was looking to do something similar in 2023, but scale it back or introduce some variety. He was really feeling the it this month. He ran into organization issues as well. Organization was something he did not consider when he started. He just started making encounters with no real structure for referencing them later.

I have settled on building out Rectification IX. This is a space station in Vustrana near Mistava and the Terrax Empire in the Dalinor Dominion. The station acts as a hotbed of political drama. Dalinor may be the capital of the civilized galaxy, but it is in the Western side of Courtspace. The various peoples of the Eastern portions of the galaxy use Rectification IX as neutral ground for political maneuvering. Rectification IX is the ninth space station built at this location. Parts of the previous stations and various ships are integrated into its construction. By building a megadungeon, I have locales for adventure to break away from the political intrigue or run two player parties focusing on completely different types of stories in the same location.

I plan to organize the dungeon into sectors found on Rectification IX rather than by traditional dungeon levels. I have worksheets in google drive ready to go with google draw or draw.io for mapping. I have templates set up to work in photoshop or affinity if I decide to go that route. Either way, I have some flexibility, but also a means to easily cross-reference my work. I considered obsidian. I prefer obsidian for "finished" work that I can reference during play. I plan to go back and clean up the end result in 2024 rather than use it directly as is so may place it in the obsidian vault for the setting at that time.

I am incapable of keeping a daily schedule. I plan on not restricting myself to one room a day. I am setting aside the 7th, 14th, 21st, and the last day of every month. I will focus on creature design these four days a month. During the process of creating a room I will create creatures, but I won't worry about getting full stats until one of these break days. The 7th and 21st I will also either create a new faction for the megadungeon, or expand upon an existing faction. The 14th and last day I will create at least one random event for the sector. This leaves me with 317 rooms instead of 365. I think the slight change in what I am working on might help. These days also give me a chance to catch up.

There will be a focus on architecture, but I will have things like initial lighting, hazards, puzzles, denizens, and treasures. I will have factions, but who occupies an area will adjust over time. For me, a good megadungeon is not a place players go through once and are done. A good megadungeon offers reasons for players to return. The ecology should be flexible enough to shift and change with time and circumstances. In the end, I hope to clean up the results to have reference material for my setting that I can get use out of for years to come.

I still need to figure out what game system I will be building encounters around. We used Ulltramodern5 Redux in the past. The rules were a big hit. The players loved the character building options. We also liked that it wasn't just D&D with a scifi wrapper. You can feel the R Talsorian influence throughout the product with inspiration from games like Cyberpunk and Mekton coming together with D&D 5e to create something new. There are issues with digital tools however. I have been an online only GM since 2017 so digital tools are a big consideration for me. No platform has direct support for UM5 Redux. 5e sheets work for characters, but there is no option for vehicles of any variety, and UM5 Redux has rules for a variety of vehicles from ground to air to space to mecha. UM5 Redux also introduces a 7th stat, saves, and resource for its magic system. I find the magic cool and interesting, but it is another thing that is not easily tracked with existing digital tools. So on the upsides, popular with my friends and scales with other D&D 5e products. There is a plethora of creatures from various companies to cherry pick from. Downside is the lack of digital tools.

We are currently shopping for which system to use going forward. Leading candidates are Starfinder, Genesys, and Star Wars 5e, but we'll see how things shake out. I plan on initial write ups of creatures to use the Cypher System. Cypher lets me get into general power scaling and focus on flavour in a manner that I can restructure to another system later when one is chosen without wasting a lot of time and energy.

I do not plan to update this blog with progress. I feel like this is an interesting challenge with a lot of flexibility in how one can approach it. This is my plan going into this. I have the games I run aside from this. I usually do not share what is going on in games as it is extra work for something that the people that should care are already there for. I may post the occassional post here and ther, but please do not take me posting this as an indicator that there are more posts on the horizon. There are not unless I feel the urge to share something with the world at large rather than keep it to just my friends.

Here are some good resources for anyone looking to partake in the dungeon23 challenge. Happy spelunking!