Dungeon Diary: Dungeon Design Journal

A design diary, a creative challenge, a game in itself... Create one entry a day for an entire month, and by the end of it, you'll have an interstellar spaceship, a new world to explore, a community of people and their relationships, a city, or yes, maybe even a dungeon.

ONE DESIGN A DAY FOR A MONTH

In 2023, Sean McCoy, the game designer behind Mothership, planted the seed for this project, proposing to build a megadungeon, creating one room a day, consisting of twelve levels, with 28-31 rooms each. He called it all #dungeon23.
His initiative sparked the idea for this diary. Pandion Games, the label behind Andrew Boyd, launched Dungeon Year. Design Journal, a daily creative challenge, a mental exercise, a game in itself, and a moment of meditation, allows you to create a dungeon over the course of an entire year, starting any month and taking as long as you want until you complete it. "Create something, piece by piece until you've completed 365 details: rooms, characters, cultures, maps, stars, deities, objects, and much more. When you're done, you might have a massive interstellar spaceship, a new world to explore, a community of people and their relationships, a city, and yes, even a dungeon."

Create whatever you want, Andrew said. In Ryhope's Refuge, we've taken up the mantle, with the author's permission, and transformed it into a diary with 31 entries. If you're up to the task these days, you can do one entry a day for a month, but you can also create that "whatever you want" at your own pace, with a timeless feel.

CONTENTS
Introduction to how to use this journal, a simple counter (like a calendar) for keeping track, 20 pages of tables and generators (with elements from different genres) for inspiration, 10 dotted pages for sketching ideas and general maps, and 31 pages of daily entries (the crux of this journal), with fields for writing an identifier, the date, and connections, a box for notes, encounters, tables, or descriptions, and another for drawing.