#Dungeon23 week 2 — The Winter Palace

I’ve done a second week of #Dungeon23.

Request to anyone who plays in my games, or who might play in my games — please don’t read this. It might ruin the surprise. You know you love the surprise.

This week I’ve found the stuff I’ve made rather boring. As you can probably see from the above, I’m working at a level between “district of a city” and “topographical map of individual rooms”. It feels like I’m making areas that are simultaneously too small (to sketch a palace using only 7 of them) and too large (to have interesting details).

I do wonder if staying at an abstract pointcrawl would have been better here — it would have encouraged me to think more about “what’s interesting in the palace” rather than “what’s interesting in this broad area that connects here“. Working with interesting points rather than major areas might have been more fruitful.

In any case, I don’t think that matters much — I’m not doing this to make stuff that’s good right now. I’m doing this to (a) have sketches to work from should I suddenly be improv-ing a group in thru of these areas and (b) get over the blank-page barrier and give me something to fix if and when I come back to these areas for serious design work.

And the act of doing this, repeatedly, is probably a good way to learn what works at this level of abstraction. So that’s also useful.