Wednesday Investigations 2.0 [006]: Dungeons, structures, and neighborhoods
On resolving, exploring, drawing, and walking
I made some resolutions this year.
I am honestly pretty skeptical about New Year’s resolutions. Just the whole enterprise. I’m in favor of rituals to mark the looping cycle of the seasons, but I feel cautious of starting off a new year by urging ourselves to Get More Done in one form or another. Given that we’ve been increasing productivity for as long as anyone can remember, and we aren’t getting paid for it, one could argue that we should all be kicking off 2023 by channeling some Paul Lafargue and committing to a resolution of being triumphantly lazy. Or, to put it another way, by committing to doing nothing.
On the other hand, I do love a project. And in late December I saw Sean McCoy (designer of the horror/SF role-playing game Mothership) propose a community challenge for fellow game designers, something he called #Dungeon23. The basic idea is to map out one room for an RPG each day in 2023, so that at the end of the year, you’d have a sprawling, 365-room dungeon for your players to explore.
By the time you reach 365 rooms, you’re really no longer designing a dungeon, you’re designing what RPG nerds refer to as megadungeon. Hell yes:
For some reason, back in 2014 I got interested in the deeply geeky aesthetics of megadungeon design, and I took an obscure pleasure in reading reviews of incomprehensibly complex spaces like the Caverns of Thracia, Barrowmaze, the Ruins of Undermountain, and Castle Zagyg (this last one an attempt at realizing the “lost” Castle Greyhawk, a long-promised megadungeon by Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax). And more recently, in 2022, I have been tinkering with homebrewing a RPG system of my own, The Meanings (which I’ve mentioned in previous entries of this newsletter).
Although The Meanings takes place on a “demon-haunted island,” it isn’t inherently a dungeon-centric system, and I felt uncertain as to whether making a megadungeon would be the best use of my time. However, my interest in taking on McCoy’s challenge grew as I noticed other designers beginning to propose their own distinct #Dungeon23 variants: for constructing a massive science-fictional complex (#Facility23), say, or a vast city (#City23). I was further encouraged when I spotted designer emmy verte proposing an “alternative schedule” which encouraged dungeon developers to spend time on characters, factions, rumors, and items instead of just more rooms: the final result of following verte’s system would be a smaller environment, but one with more depth and color. This appealed to me.
Long story short, I’ve taken a page from verte and concocted my own alternate schedule—yielding an even smaller but still formidable environment—and am going to try to adhere to it. So that’ll be fun. And this seems like a good spot to mention that if you’re interested in playtesting The Meanings, just drop me a line. You don’t have to know me in real life! Also, you won’t have to commit to doing a whole megacomplex: I have a small starter scenario that can be completed in a few hours but which still should contain enough intriguing mysteries to reward curious players.
Even if you aren’t a game designer or even a game player, investigating outward from the #dungeon23 hashtag yields all kinds of interesting resources and discussions: here’s an archived talk on “Architecture and Horror in RPGs,” complete with a list of what looks like a hundred or so hyperlinked annotations, encompassing everything from the brutalist architecture of Bertrand Goldberg to the short horror fiction of Brian Evenson.
I am also excited, in 2023, to continue my ongoing collaboration with the experimental cartoonist DW—as many of you already know, we’ve been collaborating since 2019 under the name Churchdoor Lounger. We do zines and stuff—including this nifty new split-zine published in New Zealand—but we also maintain an Instagram page you can check out if your day hasn’t had enough high saturation color in it. (DW also writes a very good Substack newsletter of his own.) We resolved to kick off 2023 with a new project, “stations on the highway,” an attempt at trying our hand at the time-honored comics genre some have ably described as “little weirdos in a fucked up environment.” One-third traditional oban landscape painting, one-third Krazy Kat, one-third hyperactive side-scroller video game? Something like that? Will we do it for a whole year? Who knows, we might! Regardless, here’s the first bit:
Reading the new Renee Gladman book, Plans for Sentences, released in 2022 by Wave Press. Those of you interested in what happens to narrative when it’s immersed in a “fucked-up environment” may already be familiar with Gladman’s breathtaking quartet of novels set in an ontologically unstable interzone, Ravicka. They begin with Event Factory, which I once described thusly:
Gladman also works as a visual artist, and Plans for Sentences is her third book of drawings, following Prose Architectures and One Long Black Sentence (both excellent). If you like weird topographies or “moving/erupting architectures”—that last bit is taken direct from the back cover copy—check this one out. It has poems in it too!
“It’s never a waste of time to go for a walk” —Anna Pendergrast, cited on this “neighborhood bingo” sheet I got in the mail from the Antistatic sisters, part of their yearly “print object” zine.
They don’t have a Substack, though they have occasionally written for The Prepared, a newsletter on engineering, manufacturing, and infrastructure. (See, for instance, this installment of theirs on stretch wrap, “the diaphanous material that holds together the subcomponents of the containerized world”). Also interesting: they have a collaborative Google Slides slidedeck, Untitled Presentation, which the public is invited to peruse. Ongoing since 2018! (“The idea to use Google slides as a medium came to us via two 8 year olds, who used the free software to share pictures of cars with each other after school.”)
This week’s listening comes courtesy of AUGHT \ VOID, a grimy post-industrial label about which I have little useful information beyond that they should be properly referred to as “THE AUGHT\VOID NORTHERN SEMANTICS-NETWORK FOR THE PRODUCTION OF CRITICAL ARTICLES.” One thing I do know is that A/V has fallen out of compliance with some tax requirements Bandcamp now insists upon—reportedly a consequence of their, Bandcamp’s, acquisition by Fortnite developer Epic Games— and as an act of pointed refusal they, Aught/Void, have elected to stop accepting payment for their releases. Twenty-first century economic trends continues their slow corrosion of everything that matters, but you could purloin a superb soundtrack for capitalist disintegration out of this particular decaying storefront. There are about 70 releases here, an enormous catalog I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of, but if you were looking for an entry point I might recommend How Much is Enough from Cordial Fare: “hyper-compressed electronics with little concern for fidelity.”
Happy new year.
-JPB, writing from Dedham, MA in the week ending Wednesday, Jan 4