Mapping dungeon23
Quite a long post here, looking at the first month of Dungeon 23 and thinking about how I'm going to approach this project going into the new year.
This morning I took half an hour to roughly put together my disparate chunks of dungeon into one floor plan using Dungeon Scrawl. No room numbers, no doors, no stairs, I just wanted to see how the geography fit together.
I already knew I'd messed up my spaces a little in connecting the first few areas I drew. I had to shift an area down from where I intended it to be to make the space make sense, and that left me with two long north/south corridors and a decision to make - either leave them empty, or add a few rooms between them.
There are pros and cons to both decisions here. Long, empty corridors that go nowhere are ominous. As a player they really get me on edge. And as a writer it gives me the option to repeat this elsewhere but twist it in some way. But I'd explicitly designed the lower left portion of this floor to be difficult to map, and I liked the idea of adding a few more rooms in that butt up against each other but don't actually interact.
Since I've started to think of this as an introductory dungeon for a dungeon game I also thought I could use this as an opportunity to show that the dungeon isn't immutable, and to show that exploring will reveal secrets. The westernmost passage is accessed via a secret door, while the passage running parallel to it isn't. One of the rooms running off that east passage is going to have a hole knocked through the wall, peering into one of the other rooms that's not otherwise accessible.
Deeper into the floor, the Rusted Hammer are actively engaged in remodelling the dungeon to fortify their territory and reshape the space to suit them. I haven't been consciously putting "themes" into this dungeon but it's fun to see this sort of thing emerge organically as I write.
The small red patch on the eastern side of the map is simply a spot where I saw an opportunity to add additional links and loops to the map. My plan is to draw this whole floor by hand on a sheet of A3 paper, and I think I might add a few more links and passages to make it feel a little less like 6 distinct chunks that I drew and joined together and a little more like one coherent space. But overall I'm happy with how this floor has turned out, and I've learned some things about the process of writing and drawing this thing that are going to help in the months to come.
I've been thinking a lot about how to keep track of links between floors and make sure they all line up properly as we move deeper into the dungeon. My current plan is to take some sheets of A5 tracing paper, overlay them onto the complete map once I've drawn it, trace the various exits, and then transpose them onto the relevant parts of my notebook for the coming month (i.e. break the large map back down into A5 sections and put them in place in my notebook before I start drawing anything for the month). I'll be doing that this weekend or early next week, so I'll report back when that's done.
I still have no plans to "publish" this thing. I'm typing up the rooms once a week as a failsafe in case I lose my notebook at some point, and I'm posting them to Detritus as a little extra for the people who support me over there. I'm also planning to start running this in my Gather space on Wednesdays, probably starting in February once I have a little more written.