My Dungeon23 plan is to put up a list of the rooms I’ve created at the end of each week, but I couldn’t let the first day go by without posting something.

So here we go, down the mossy stone stairs, torches held high…

1-1 Entry Hall: Grand staircase leads up to the surface. No wandering monsters encountered here.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been playing role-playing games quite a bit, mostly as a player in my son’s long-running D&D campaign, but also as a referee in my own free-form, improvised fantasy adventure game. (Think P.G. Wodehouse meets Drop Dead Fred in Magic Pixieland.)

Recently, I heard about the rapidly-spreading Dungeon23 challenge, where people create a dungeon room every day for all of 2023, ending up with a sprawling 365-room megadungeon of their very own. This sounded like a lot of fun, so I’m going to give it a shot.

After some unsuccessful experiments with making a dungeon level that literally followed the layout of the month’s calendar page, I decided to fall back on the old reliable: graph paper and pencil. If I come up with a nicer mapping solution, I may switch over to that, but I didn’t want to get stuck looking for just the right tool.

So here we go with the first section of the first level of The Lost Catacombs of… Some Guy. (Cool name TBD.)