"Hello World"


 Dungeon23 is a long term project and I have a bad history with long term anything.  I certainly have trouble when any project requires more than 2 weeks of constant effort.  I'm saying this will be a challenge.

  Who am I?  What's Dungeon23?  What's an RPG?  If you find yourself asking any of these questions, I NEED to interview you and figure out how you ended up on my blog.  Let's start at the start and get an overture for this blog.

In order;  I am Grimwit, a starving artist.  I draw and hope someone gives me money.  That is literally my business model.  Dungeon23 is a challenge where I shall make a mega dungeon for an RPG one room at a time.  I plan on using a heavily altered Old School Essentials rule set, but the whole thing will likely be system neutral.  That means the mega dungeon I envision will be useful in Dungeons & Dragons, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Traveler, Dungeon Crawl Classic.  Whatever.  And an RPG (Or Roll Playing Game) is something you can google on Wikipedia with your Chrome World Wide Web Browser by Micro Apple (I'm not your school teacher).

So the rules are to develop one room a day.  Each month is a Level of the dungeon.  So 12 levels over 365 rooms.  I do not create my adventures in a straight line, however, so I may be revisiting older rooms to alter them.

This Blog will be a Log of development.

  So, what is "The Land of Four Shadows?"

  When drawing, painting, making an adventure, I like to sketch and fiddle.  The name "Land of Four Shadows" was a lovely little pun from my high school days.  Right now, I'm deep in a game called Outer Wilds, which has some of the most clever dungeon design I've seen in a time.  Of the three pillars of RPG design, it leans heavily on exploration, and now so do I.

  The Land of Four Shadows will be a map makers dungeon.  It will lean heavily on the idea that Knowledge is Progress.  Knowing something new will change the way previous rooms and puzzles play out.  Back-Tracking is a lot less painful on paper than in real life, and since we can just fast forward in play, why not allow things like "I go back to the library on the other side of the building."  This DOES mean, as I stated above, that dungeon development will be lateral, not linear.  That means as the players may have to backtrack with new knowledge, so too will I as I make the dungeon.

  So, if the game is lateral, not linear, how will the dungeon levels be organized?  We're not descending into depth, per se.  We're searching through an open world design.  If that's the case, then Four Shadows will have to be split into 12 dungeons (as it were).  As I see it, we need 12 locations...

1.  Starting Land (Hub world?)

2-5. The Four Towers (I'm spitballing)

6-9. Below the Four Towers (Locked off locations)

10-11. Bonus Dungeons (Always best to leave room for something I don't know yet)

12. Final Challenge (No clue, but it'll tie everything together).

  I'll still be paying attention to the three pillars, Combat, Exploration, and Social, but will be leaning heavy on Exploration.  If I hug close to the Outer Wilds design philosophy, a player who has spoiled themself on the dungeon will know exactly where to go and what to do right off the bat.  That'll suck.


The rules, as stated, will be an altered version of Old School Essentials.  I tend to lean towards simple rules, but this will make a good base.  Let's state some changes right off the bat.

1. Inventory will be using Pocket Rules.  (KISS)

Every item to be carried can be measured in how many pockets of space it takes up.

Tiny (0p) Size of a fingernail or smaller.  Not worth tracking.

Small (1p) Can be fit in one's palm.

Medium (2p) Can be carried comfortably using one hand.

Large (4p) Is either to big or too heavy for one hand and requires both hands to carry.

Clothes and such can be easily measured how much they can hold by how many pockets they have.  Pants typically have 4 pockets.  Dress-shirts sometimes have 1.  Half Pockets, say in women's trousers, could hold Tiny objects, but not small.  Two half-pockets = 1 whole pocket.  We'll say a backpack holds 6-10 pockets.  And, yes, you can hold a large object in the four pockets of your pants, because that's funny af.

2.  Levels

Players will be considered classless every man with d6 hit dice.  At level 1, they get a 6 + their con modifier hit points.  Hooray!  Leveling up will be done not through Experience, but through a collectathon.  After all, I want to encourage searching rooms and exploring.  The Macguffinin place of Experience will be, let's say, Night Gems (yeah, that's cool).  The Leveling Up Ritual will require x Night Gems, where x is the current character level.  That would need about 45 gems to get to level 10.  If we space them out to about 1 gem a week, that's Level 10 by November.

3.  No magic

No clerics, magic users, scrolls, or whatever.  Again, players are playing every-man type people.  The danger will be on the down low anyway.  There will be plenty of time for special enchantments, such as a ring that transforms objects by removing the letter 'e' from their description.  Spells will be rituals that take at least 10 minutes and anyone can do.  I'll design those as I go.  In fact, leveling up should be my first ritual to design.  Learning such rituals will be part of the game.  I have NO idea how I'll deal with all this, but it looks like fun to make.

Remember, writing = exploration.  Creation is play.


  Welp, that's pretty good ground work.  I will likely be altering the deal further as time goes on.  Also, I must warn that I'm not a reliable person.  This will not be a daily blog, but I'll try to keep it a weekly blog, at worse.  While all this is happening, I'm also trying to get clients, keep healthy in my old age, help my family, keep my dogs alive, and trying not to fall into a tantrum spiral of madness O_O what with the impending destruction of humanity, AI art, AI everything, and the world LITERALLY BURNINATING!  AAAAAHHHHH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

Stay tuned.

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