I gave up on #Dungeon23 mid-June. It was an interesting activity, and I generated a lot of stuff. I don’t think I’ll use that stuff, however:
- After half-a-dozen sessions, I stopped running Lunacantium. It just felt… too cumbersome. I want to run and create things that are much tighter – more The Bone Place of Dreib than this. As Bryce Lynch is fond of pointing out, ruined city adventures are hard, and Lunacantium suffered from that. [1]
- The core Dungeon23 idea — keep making content, bit by bit — is at odds with how I create… pretty much anything. I write flash fiction start-to-end, but just about anything else I iterate, sketch, accumulate ideas (characters, locations, possibilities) without order or relationship. Only once I have a stable sketch and refined ideas do I put them together concretely, or flesh them out very much. I iterate; I don’t accumulate.
The upside here is that I’ve got enough rough content to fuel months of full-time work on Lunacantium, should I ever come back to it.
Thanks to Sean McCoy for starting the whole #Dungeon23 thing — it was, and remains, a good idea.
[1] I also think there was a tonal problem — something about Lunacantium never felt right to me. I think I was trying to do too much, create too big a thing, and that made control of tone, theme, and feel just too hard. My use of the Dungeon23 accumulative model, and that I was developing the two outer areas under pressure of play, probably exacerbated that.