Dungeon23: Session Zero

Dungeon23 and Solo Gaming

The creator of Mothership RPG, Sean McCoy wrote a blog post last month where he came up with the idea for Dungeon23, a challenge to create a megadungeon by drawing one room per day in a diary, with one dungeon level per month. Then at the end of the year you have a huge 365 room dungeon that you can run for players in 2024.

I thought about ways to get involved with this and decided that instead of designing a dungeon I'd generate and play one in a solo RPG with random dungeon generation.

Enter Four Against Darkness. It's a really quick and fun dungeoncrawler - it's a dungeoncrawler rather than an RPG as there's no roleplaying in it. It's more like Advanced Heroquest. It's quick to create characters, generate the dungeon and have fights, with monsters being slain left right and centre by your party of four adventurers.

It also has a lot of expansions that add variety to the dungeons with new monsters and quests. I'll be using the following:

Twisted Minions
This adds unique twists to monster encounters. I'll roll a D6 for each encounter and on a 1 I'll roll on the twists table.

Fiendish Foes
New monsters for levels 3 to 5. This one also adds rules for resting which will probably be useful in a megadungeon.

Caverns of Chaos
Adds chaos themed monsters, quests and themed dungeons for levels 3-6. This should give me some ideas for customising deeper floors of the dungeon and creating my own monsters.

House Rules

I'll be playing one room/corridor per day all year. 4AD generates rooms and corridors, and both can have features or monsters in them. I'll keep a record of play but I'll update this blog once a week with the latest map and the record of what happened in the dungeon that week. I'd love to make 365 individual blog posts but I just don't have the time to play the game and update the blog every day.

If a character is killed the others will have to find their way back out in order to go and get a new friend to join them. I might reduce the likelihood of finding wandering monsters while doing this, to give them a bit more of a chance.

At the end of the month, the final room they discover will have stairs or a trapdoor leading down to the next floor of the dungeon, so there will be 12 floors in total. I hope to make some themed floors with unique monsters when we get deeper into the dungeon.

The Plot

Our four heroes detailed below have been drawn to the massive underground complex known as Zozu's Domain. Filled with horrifying creatures and devilish traps, in the deepest chamber of this maze of nightmares sits the demon lord Zozu the Unmentionable. Legend has it he hoards piles of fabulous treasures and has grown fat and lazy on the devoured souls of his victims. A small party of adventurers could potentially seize his riches for themselves if they're able to overcome his almost infinite defences.

Character Creation

Here are my four starting characters. I'm calling them that because I'm expecting them to be replaced with fresh faces regularly, as adventurers inevitably meet gruesome ends.

Grobern
Class: Male warrior
Level: 1
Attack Roll: D6+2
Defence Roll: D6+1
Life: 7
Gold: 3
Abilities: None 
Equipment: Two-handed sword, light armour, bandage x1

Rorri
Class: Male dwarf
Level: 1
Attack Roll: D6+2
Defence Roll: D6+2
Life: 6
Gold: 1
Abilities: +1 attack roll vs goblins, +1 defence roll vs trolls, ogres and giants. Can smell treasure on monsters: on a successful roll can determine a monster's treasure before choosing to attack it. Can sell gems and jewellery for 20% more.
Equipment: Maul, heavy armour, bandage x1

Malia
Class: Female rogue
Level: 1
Attack Roll: D6-1
Defence Roll: D6+2
Life: 4
Gold: 4
Abilities: Adds her level to attack rolls if enemy is outnumbered. Adds her level to disarm trap rolls. 
Equipment: Shortsword, light armour, rope, lockpick, bandage x2

Brima
Class: Female wizard
Level: 1
Attack Roll: D6-1 (+1 when attacking with spells)
Defence Roll: D6
Life: 3
Gold: 9
Abilities: Adds her level on rolls to solve puzzles.
Spells: Blessing x1, Sleep x1, Fireball x1
Equipment: Staff, sling, spellbook, quill and ink, bandage x1

So that's our characters made. In seven days I'll be back with a report of how the first seven rooms went! To see the whole series of these posts just click the Dungeon23 label on the sidebar.

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