Christmas is fast approaching and so is the kickoff of Dungeon 23.

D23 Archipelago will be a campaign of island hopping and dungeon crawling for fans of the Sword & Sorcery genre. Gather your Argonauts and set sail for adventure!

I will be creating this with stats for both OSR and Fantasy AGE players. The general feel will be inspired by the Sinbad films of Ray Harryhousen. Pirates, sorcerers, deadly environments, and gigantic monsters will abound. Dungeons strung across the 12 Isles will take players from level 1 through 9.

I have been working on the preliminaries. The basic map of the 12 Isles is set and I have done most of the groundwork for the town of Port Degranya. This will be the base camp. The town is a rather mundane place by intent. Players will not encounter the fantastical until they have sailed into the Archipelago and things won’t get truly weird until they enter the dungeons.

Rather than creating in a bound paper journal, I will be committing this to digital files as I go.

Tools I’ve used so far include Other World Mapper, the random generators from https://donjon.bin.sh/, and the Tome of Adventure Design by Matt Finch. Artwork for this blog is by the Wombo Dream.ai

 

Welcome to D23 Archipelago. This is my response to the Dungeon 23 challenge posted by Sean McCoy here: https://seanmccoy.substack.com/p/dungeon23

I will be creating one new adventure location per day during the entire course of 2023, and providing weekly updates here. Rather than construct a single megadungeon, this project will encompass a long chain of 12 islands (1 per month). On each island there can be found a dungeon of four levels (1 per week) containing seven or eight rooms each (1 per day).

The general tone will be gritty Sword & Sorcery, rather than high fantasy. These will be the types of islands that might draw the attention of Sinbad or Conan.

Madness? Assuredly. I have never in my 58 years attempted a New Year's resolution. The reason will become immediately apparent when you glance at my personal character sheet:

Name: Vidgrip    Alignment: Chaotic Mess

Imagination: 18    Willpower: 3

That's all you need to know for now. Wish me luck.