What I'm Doing for #dungeon23

January 1, 2022

I was recently browsing Reddit and stumbled upon the subreddit r/dungeon23 and immediately into the post by Sean McCoy on it. This sparked my inspiration right away and it’s a great idea. However I’m strongly considering moving away fantasy for my next game, and I’m leaning towards Sci-Fi.

I’ve had a good number of ideas floating around about a galaxy heavily inspired by Stargate, Mass Effect, and Stars Without Numbers (SWN). Obviously I’m planning to use SWN as the system so I’ll likely be using their excellent generation tools for building a sandbox world. The main goal is content. The size of the world is rather ambitious, and historically most of my worlds don’t have much more than names over land masses outside of the current campaign location.

My plan is to do one sector a month, rounding me out to 12 sectors. Well technically 13 as I have one partially developed currently. Creating one planet a day should fill out each sector pretty well. More than likely some days I’ll develop some large points of interest. Planets need capitals and what is a galaxy without some cool space stations.

The Workflow #

Since each of the sectors in my galaxy are connected by large gates that can teleport ships between them the placement of these gates is important. One of the first tasks for every sector is to place the gates. I plan do place a 1d6 worth of gates in each sector. I’m using the the Worldbuilder’s Notebook Sean mentioned in his post so my sectors are 10x13. Upward of 6 gates should be plenty for these sectors. Rolling a d12 and d8 should give me a good spread of locations in the sectors for the gates, but still keep them off the edge of the sector.

Once I have gates I need planets. I’ll mostly be following the SWN sector creation rules. d10 and d12(+1 if an odd day) and roll some planet tags and other info about it. Maybe add a few NPCs or other things to planet if inspiration strikes. The goal is planets, but if I’m inspired would be a shame to waste that.

At the end of each week I’ll try and write up some more details and put a post up on this blog as a running update. Maybe I’ll post some mid week updates on Mastodon, but that’s unlikely for me.

At the end of month I’ll spend a few days creating some governments and what not to tie some of the planets together, though this could happen throughout the moths as well. I’m unsure if I’ll publish each sector in it’s full form, but we’ shall see.

Overall I’m excited to get started and see what others create. Hopefully we have some good Mega Dungeons that we can run in 2024!