#dungeon23, Days 21-51: The Ruined Temple (of the Sky Lords)

Though my recent posts are a testament to how busy I’ve been lately—and really, they just scratch the surface—I haven’t abandoned #dungeon23. Oh, no, I may have missed the odd day (and mostly caught up after, but sometimes just with a room and a word or two for a vague idea about what’s in it, but I’m still going. I just haven’t posted in a while because of the size of what I was keying. 

As you can see, it’s…. an underground complex. Well, mostly underground. If you were able to read the chickenscratch on my previous post, you’ll have seen a spot labeled “Temple” and this is what’s there. I love that about game design: you put a dot on a map and then zoom in, and it’s its own enormous thing. And then you zoom back out and it’s a single spot in a larger setting. 

When I started out, I was a little conflicted: is this a #dungeon23? Is it a #facility23? I think I’ve reached some clarity: I think it’s sort of both. By “both” I don’t mean “either”: I mean literally both, simultaneously. I’m sort of playing with the idea that characters from a horror-SF game like Mothership and characters from a FRPG could walk through the same complex or region, see the same things, but perceive them in radically different ways due to their frame of reference. What if it was written up formally for both? 

Not that I have any firm plans to write it up now, but if I ever put this thing together into a project, I think I’d do it dos-à-dos, like the old Tor Doubles used to be. If you’ve never seen those, well, they were bound back-to-back (which is was dos-à-dos means in French), upside down in relation to each other. Each novella had its own front cover, neither had a back cover, and you knew you finished one because the last page of the other would be staring up at you once you turned the last page of the one you were reading. Then you flipped the book over and continued from the… end? Start? Anyway. 

I think dos-à-dos would be a pretty cool way to lay out and publish something like this. The descriptions would line up, the things being seen would be recognizably the same, but the lens of genre—the perceptions assumed in one or another setting—would shape the experience. A GM might also choose to mix things up, to run the game from one or another version that is a mismatch with the genre of the game they’re running. It’s a heady, cool idea, and it’s making me think about designing hazards, locations, and everything in a slightly different way.  

For that reason, I think I’m going to keep my (anyway almost illegible) notes sketchy and light–just enough to suggest what the description would be for either context. 

As for the next chunk of my #dungeon23, I’ve already started work on another hexmap of a moon fragment—a bigger one than the last one, though it won’t take me as long to fill out as this facility did. I hope I can keep the project going, even though this semester is going to be hellishly busy for me. We’ll see, I guess!