#mega dungeon

A free printable collection of 54 coloured A6 dot-grid journals for Dungeon23, an alternative design for your Dungeon Year journalling needs.

Includes multiple printable versions in cyan, b&w, and cyan with coloured covers.

432 pages encompassing 54 8-page A6 booklets, each with a different colour cover in a subdued CMY gradient that cycles into darker shades for the final months.

Each booklet is printed one-sided on one A4 page - just cut once & fold to A6 size to make each 8-page booklet: that's 54 pieces of paper, representing 52 weeks and 2 appendices. Instructions here (by Ashley Topacio):

Each booklet features a non-repro cyan dot-grid (even on the cover) with a tidy white border on all sides and a logo on each cover that I pulled from the Dungeon 23 Asset Pack by @lonearchivist and recoloured for each individual booklet, plus two appendices (a calendar booklet & an index table booklet).

If you want to keep up a writing or design exercise I think you should remove as many barriers as possible: you're only confronted with a tiny A6 page, every week you get to look back and mark your progress, you can always stop at the end of each week, no pressure to continue if you're not still having fun, and a fresh start every time you open a new week's booklet.

Easily scan and remove backgrounds to create ready-to-upload printable zines that you can publish each week!

There's nothing but dots on each page so you can scribble or scrawl or add a room description or encounter table or hexmap or anything you feel inspired to create.

Maybe you don't want to do one 52-week mega-dungeon? Why not 52 week-long dungeons instead?

Bind completed booklets into months or seasons (I'm going to try and bind them into a full year, with a sewn cover for the collection and instruction downloads coming in a future update).

Head here to download now and go ahead and check out the Dungeon23 Jam for more!

@thelostbaystudio @pandiongames @lonearchivist

Tegel Manor (1977) was Judges Guild’s follow-up to City-State and the next installment in their subscription series. This copy consists of a cover sheet, a short booklet, an overland map, a dizzyingly detailed map of the manor and smaller, blank player maps – it was revised many times over the course of JG’s history, however. While the main adventure site is the manor, there is a nearby town, a monastery and a large wilderness to explore, stamping out the template later adventures like Keep on the Borderlands (1979) and Temple of Elemental Evil (1985) would follow.

The interior of the manor is weirder than anything in those adventure modules! And sillier. The party is hired by Sir Runic the Rump (Judges Guild specialized in this sort of humor), who wants to rid his ancestral home (why is he not named Runic Tegel? The module never offers an explanation of this or anything else, really.) of generations of his undead family members. It probably surprises no one that all 100 of them have first names beginning with R.  

The manor is fascinating despite (or maybe because) it is described so tersely. Each room gets about a sentence, part of which is devoted to statistics so abbreviated that I have no idea how to translate them. There are haunted paintings. A ki-rin is fighting an intellect devourer in the barn. The butler is the ghost of a balrog. The house makes less sense (and has more rooms) than Winchester House. If this isn’t a fun house, I don’t know what is.

D23 ready. Download this journal or any of the other cool resources that people have made on itch.io here.

There never was an end. There never will be a beginning.

The hallway stretches on and on. A door neatly painted in a familiar burnt orange stands resolute at one distant length. A brass handled door dressed in bevelled black waits at the other.

The choice is an illusion.

Sooner or later I will walk though the door. Sooner or later I will stop opening doors.

I have not yet done so, though I am under no illusion that this is because I will some day open a door and discover that I am free.

Instead I am renewing my endeavour to maintain a record of the doors through which I pass, in the hope that one day it might serve someone else.

The first thing about Ruins of Undermountain (1991) I want to talk about is the cover art, which is by Brom, if you can believe it (it just doesn’t look Brom-y to me). This is probably my favorite artistic expression of the concept of “A Dungeon” and I find it extremely evocative. It makes me think of Zork, and also Christopher Manson’s Maze.  

Anyway. Undermountain is the vast dungeon beneath the city of Waterdeep, once a dwarven kingdom, now the playground of the mad mage, Halaster Blackcloak. The box set is a mega-dungeon (sort of), detailing (sort of) the first three levels of the place (in four giant poster maps, which are pretty but unweildy) that has taken on a bit of a legendary rep thanks to it being a key part of Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood’s own campaign. With Waterdeep above, the Underdark below, endless planar gates throughout the complex and an owner who likes to change things around at will, Undermountain is intended to be a place where anything can happen.

Much of the box is dedicated to running down the history of the place, how it works in broad terms and the personalities of the NPCs, while leaving most of the actual dungeon details blank for the DM to fill in. There are a bunch of lovely random tables to help, which are swell, but you are either going to love this or hate it.

My take: for all the possibility Undermountain presents, it feels oddly static. Because it is constantly changing, players never leave their mark on the place. And, because so much of the box is given over to justifying the ways it breaks certain rules for the players (no travel magic, no gates, etcs) while not applying the same to NPCs and monsters, I feel that Undermountain would get real frustrating real fast for my players. With so much of the work left to the DM, Undermountain seems ripe for strip mining rather than playing. YMMV, of course.

This is the Ruins of Myth Drannor (1993), the second ruins campaign box and a sort of wilderness application of the Undermountain template. Myth Drannor is a ruined elven city infested with devils. Thanks to the wealth and magic abandoned by the elves, it is the destination of endless bands of adventurers, as well as expeditions formed by the evil factions of the Realms.

Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, Ruins of Myth Drannor was written by Ed Greenwood in three weeks and it shows. It isn’t that it is bad, but it is definitely thin. Most of the material covers the city’s history. The majority of the region is broadly drawn, a sort of campaign sandbox, with details amounting to a collection of monster lairs. There’s also a lot (too much) detail on the mythals, a Forgotten Realms specific magic quirk that changes regional magic use. Mythals are introduced here, but soon after every damn place in the Realms has one. I hate mythals.

The phaerim also get a lot of attention. These monsters are bonkers, weird flying lampreys with human arms (though meant to be scary, they rather remind me of the weird green dude from the American covers of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy paperbacks). They’re in an awful lot of the art and, honestly, the art is my favorite part - what the hell is going on there? Everything is flying, reality seems to constantly be warping. It looks like a wild time in Myth Drannor going by the art and the text struggles to keep up.

It IS weird though, in a fun and interesting way that a lot of Forgotten Realms material isn’t. I just wish there was more, especially considering the thickness of the box.

Fun fact: the release of this box coincided with the release of the SSI videogame Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor, my favorite of the series.