Chronology IN DUNGEON23

Do you need an excuse to write something new for your RPGs?

Of course you don't … but there has been some gathering momentum around a planned “write every day” challenge for 2023 going under the name #Dungeon23

Sean McCoy (author of the Mothership RPG) sort of accidentally kicked it off with a picture of his notebook and a brief description of a plan to create a “megadungeon” by writing a new room every day in 2023.

There are more details on his substack page including a picture of the notebook, the tweet, and the original challenge. https://seanmccoy.substack.com/p/dungeon23

Since then it seems to be getting a lot of traction around RPG spaces and some coverage elsewhere like this article on Gizmodo which describes some other ways people are using the #Dungeon23 challenge in other games https://gizmodo.com/dungeon23-2023-ttrpg-writing-challenge-roleplaying-game-1849930262

Gizmodo is ad-funded and links to a lot of affiliate things via kinja so be sure to scroll / dig down to the real article content.

And that brings us to … now

Could you use more RPG content in your games?

If so - then maybe setting yourself a #Dungeon23 challenge to carve out a few minutes a day to write something for your game.

Some ideas I've seen kicked around include new NPCs, encounter locations, monsters, treasure, magic items, spells, plot hooks, spacecraft, and more.

Not sure what to do? Make a wish list of all the things you'd like to have / would find fun, and then roll the dice to see which to write the next day once you finish your current one.

If you want to “make it happen” in 2023 - here's an excuse 🙂

Background And Approach

I started laying down the sketch of Chronology in 2014 under the name “A System I'm Making Up” (ASIMU) which became KAIROS shortly after.

I renamed KAIROS to eXiSTeNCe (intentionally stylized) when I found someone published an “emoji” game named KAIROS and renamed again to Chronology RPG when I found someone else made an Existence RPG.

Through many years of ad-hoc development, real life job changes, hurricane Harvey and helping my brother rebuild, the internet, and everything else kept getting in the way of finishing even a draft of the “complete” game I envisioned.

So that leads me to 2023 and the idea of #Dungeon23 as a push to finish organizing and drafting the piled mess that is my current game system… spanned across a 3-ring binder of pages, hard drive notes and files, a Joplin electronic notebook, and this site.

The approach will be to sequentially work from top to bottom of my index / table of contents page, reviewing and improving whatever has been posted before, if anything, or drafting the start of all of the missing pieces that I have scattered around into the site so those broken links will stop haunting me.

And, you are welcome to follow along with RSS or using the subscribe for email notices option (Widgets “Gear” menu)

https://armageddonmoon.com/feed.php

I will be tracking my progress by linking each page as I review/draft it in the main site to the matching topic here in this index.

Section 1: Setting

Timelines (01-A)

Locations (01-B)

Cultures (01-C)

Section 2: Props

Personal Equipment (02-D)

Vehicles (02-E)

Structures (02-F)

Section 3: Actors

Attributes And Reserves (03-G)

Advantages And Disadvantages (03-H)

Species (03-I)

Origins And Backgrounds (03-J)

Education And Professions (03-K)

Skills (03-L)

Special Effect Abilities (03-M)

Non-Player Characters (03-N)

Creatures (03-O)

Section 4: Plots

Plots And Complications (04-P)

Session Zero (04-Q)

Resolution (04-R)

Skill and SFX Resolution (04-S)

Terrains (04-T)

Conflicts (04-U)

Social Conflicts (04-V)

Martial Conflicts (04-W)

Supernatural Conflicts (04-X)

Progression And Downtime (04-Y)

Endings (04-Z)

Campaign

Campaign entries remain locked to preserve the adventure secrets.

Campaign entries also link back to planet details for reference while adding more public knowledge to those worlds.

2024 Reflection

How Do I Feel?

So here I am a year later, trying to sort my feelings out from all of this.

In some senses, I am disappointed with how it all turned out.

Here a year later, pushing every day, I still don't feel I have a playable system or setting.

After so much thought and working through it methodically, so much still feels “undone”.

In other senses, I am ecstatic with how it turned out.

At the least - I did it - I set out to write something every day and did.

I chiseled *something* out of a fog and gave it a more solid form.

I even ended up with extras for some areas that I had not imagined at the start.

What did not go well?

My initial plan was to do 3 things each day:

  1. Go through the directory of notes and references for a topic and clean them up by putting all those into the notes I was writing that day.
  2. Go through the notebooks in my cloud notebook app for the topic and put those into the draft I was writing that day.
  3. Write the topic

Setting myself this expectation was setting myself up for failure of my own expectations.

Here I was starting out with the idea in mind that I was going to do more cleaning than writing, which was pretty dumb on my part.

The goal is to write something everyday - not clean something every day.

I had a second failure of expectation: I was writing the final copy.

No, I am definitely not that good of a writer.

Everything in life is a draft and I forgot that in the glowy rush of taking on a new huge project.

I did not have a good way to say “okay I've done a little bit but here's my ideas for more” to come back to easily… a “more To Do” marker of some sort.

What went well?

From time to time, I like to challenge myself by taking on a project that sounds horribly outside of my comfort zone and this definitely fit the bill.

Planning the calendar of topics by day based on how I wanted to the Table of Contents worked well.

This gave me a concrete “target list” and reasons to avoid rabbit holes of all the other interesting stuff that might come up along the way.

Each day after finishing a block, looking ahead to tomorrow's topic gave my brain time to churn and start assembling a lot of the random mishmash about that together.

Using a DokuWiki site allowed me to draft and re-edit easily from basically any device with a web browser WHILE making the progress visible to anyone who wanted to look at any point.

This was much better than something like a discord channel or social stream where the updates get lost in the greater stream of noise.

Somewhere along the way I snapped that each topic would make a great place to organize links to related Roleplaying Tips articles from the archive - setting myself up for future prep work success by having those on hand when I revisit each topic.

What did I learn?

Beware overloading your expectations by hitching too many things to the “do this each day”.

Keep your “do this each day” loop of activities as small and tight as possible.

Build that calendar of topics first as a promise to yourself.

Be sure to note holidays and such up front and plan around them.

Be prepared to rework the upcoming calendar of topics by day.

Plan “work ahead” days, like Saturdays or Sundays, where you can draft up the upcoming week's updates so that you preload them into the brain for noodling.

“Work ahead” days are how you can accommodate holidays effortlessly.

But, you must remind yourself you still need to go touch that page on the day.

Be prepared to go back and rework “done” parts throughout the year as extra writing each day.

Pick good music to write to.

Keep yourself accountable by posting your progress publicly - every day

Let the announcement of the next piece become the “check in the box” that you are done for the day.

Be prepared to accept “its not done but you did make progress on it” each day.

And “its not done but you made progress” is one of the most important take-aways at the end.

There's not a sense of closure unless you are writing a novel.

Instead - at the end, you've really arrived at the beginning - because you started with nothing, but now you have something … to do something with.

If you made a megadungeon, well now you gotta play it.

I made some sort of RPG-like thing and now I gotta run it.

Would I do it again?

Maybe?

I do have at least 2 more settings to add that would benefit from this approach.

And I could easily take another year to just go back through and *edit* this thing more and fill in gaps.

But I don't feel like being killed by my players waiting impatiently for something to *play* after telling them “it's going to be a few more years…”

Do I think you should do something like this?

Absolutely.6)

▲ Chronology

5)
Personal note: Today's post is day 183 of 2023 - 182 days left … I am just over halfway there
6)
But do I recommend anyone write their own RPG from scratch? Heck no… Save yourself! Run! Faster! Pick an existing game you find fun and stick to that. You only ever need one universal system in your life.