#Dungeon23: A Procedure for Procedures

 I’ve decided to make a #Dungeon23 dungeon. More specifically, I’ve decided I want to make a megadungeon construction procedure--a set of actions I can take each day to randomly generate a sprawling dungeon while still giving it the cohesion and narrative coherence to make it be something I might actually want to run. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently on the topic of ‘default’ procedures to help teach people RPG design/GMing skills, and this should be a fun process to test out my thoughts.

So, without further ado, here is my primary procedure for #Dungeon23:

Whenever I have a question I need to answer about my dungeon, I will draw up a table and jot down as many ideas as I can think of over the next 24 hours. Once those 24 hours are up, I’ll roll on it. If the same question comes up again, I’ll use the same table to answer it. I may add or remove options from the table over time as appropriate.

Aside that, there are a few other things I plan on doing/tracking:

I want the dungeon to maintain narrative coherence, so I’m actually starting from the bottom up; the first room I key will be the ‘final’ room of the dungeon featuring the super-powerful entity the entire dungeon is built around. Normally this would be a bad idea, since you typically want to be able to start running a megadungeon without needing to finalize the areas players won't be exploring for years into the campaign, but the limited format of #Dungeon23 dampens that problem

I want the rooms closer to the surface to foreshadow what's beneath, for the entire dungeon to feel like it's flowing out of the natural repercussions of a single great secret hidden deep beneath the earth. For that to work, the first thing I need to decide on is the nature of that secret itself. This brings me to my first table:

Who Is At The Bottom Of This Dungeon?

1. Devil

2. God

3. Cosmic Horror

4. Lich

5. Artifact

6. Primordial Beast

7. Dimensional Rift

8. Immortal King

9. Archimedean Lever

10. Billionaire Fleeing the Apocalypse

11. Big Dragon

12. Tarrasque

13. Sleeping Civilization

14. The Messiah

15. Fountain of Youth

16. Magical Mutagen

17. Underground Civilization

18. Roll Twice

If I can think of any more ideas before the 1st I’ll add them to the list. Once I do roll on the table, it’ll obviously open up a whole bunch more questions (if it’s a god, a god of what? did they build the dungeon? is it a prison?), but those tables will have to wait until after the initial roll.

There are a few more tables and procedural elements I’ll be using that are inherent to any room--how big is it/how many doors does it have/what’s in it--but I’ll talk about how I’m handling those in a future post.