Mediums and Messages

Zungeon 25

Hubert Robert. A Hermit Praying in the Ruins of a Roman Temple. ~1760.

Over the past few days, I've been thinking about Dungeon23 - a year-long mega-dungeon challenge. I missed the boat then and was musing on Discord about trying it out this year as Dungeon 23+2. Others, it turns out, had a similar inclination and were already independently making moves. Idle Cartulary took the initiative to launch a year long jam, the Zungeon Jam 2025 and next thing you know, we've got a whole community thing going.

This post will both be an initialization for the project and a hub for links as it develops. My plan is to post once a month with updates unless something particularly worth spinning off into its own blog post comes up. At some point later in the process I'll start to work on layout for the actual zine.

Premise

I want to write a 365 room mega-dungeon. Maybe influenced by recent discourse around language, the first idea for a big ruined structure that came to mind the Tower of Babel. I take a contrarian delight in the dungeon sprawling up instead of digging down. Off the top of my head, this suggests a set of references:

Looking over this list, my orientalism warning klaxons are going off. I'd rather grapple with that issue than dodge or deflect it. What if the tower isn't a biblical construction, but instead is the ruins of a puritan utopia - John Winthrop's "Dreams of a City on a Hill" literally manifested, then blasted? Now we've got some themes to play against each other.

Working upwards rather than down imposes architectural considerations on the structure. Floors can only sprawl so much wider than the floors underneath them without support. Also, in order to work tall, I'll cut off a floor every week rather than every month. Seven room floors might be tight, but I imagine with appropriate vertical jaquaysing, I think it can work.

In the end, we have a 52 story tower made by puritans attempting to reach the gods and create a beacon to serve as a role model for the faithful everywhere. They built it on top of a mountaintop for practical reasons, so the clouds obscure everything above floor 20. This project ended in disaster, causing the builders to fragment (and potentially transform?). Now the lower levels are full of bandits, mountain goats, and oblivious maintenance servitors. Rumor has it the higher levels are full of the remnants of the builders and even celestials who have crept down the tower into the material world.

Procedure

Following Nova's Zungeon Manifesto, I'll start by generating six rooms at a time using Marcia B.'s Bite-Sized Dungeons. To each set of six, I'll add a seventh - a linking stitch strictly to help connect the floors vertically. After the first 7 I'll see if that feels like enough for a floor, whatever that means. No doubt this will still create nightmare floorplans where stairwells intersect or overlap one another or have no logical connection to the rest of the tower, but all the better.

Every floor should have at least one stairwell connecting upwards. The state of that stairwell can be a d6 roll:

  1. Intact
  2. Crumbling
  3. Eroded
  4. Destroyed (by what?)
  5. Repaired (by whom?)
  6. New construction (by whom?)

Other rooms that have "entrances" in them can have a random means of ascending (rolled on a d6) that goes up a random number of floors (d3 perhaps?):

  1. Stairs
  2. Ladder
  3. Shaft
  4. Pole
  5. Elevator
  6. Ramp

I'll figure out things like encounter tables, factions, and rumors as they come up. I have a couple initial ideas, enough to get through the opening floors, but I'm excited to "play to find out what happens."

Getting Started

001 Grand Entrance

(Interactive, Entrance, 2 exits)

An archway wide enough for two carts to pass abreast lets sleet and freezing rain into this vaulted hall. Puddles form on the floor. On the opposite end, double doors flanked by two colossal stone eyes set into the wall 20 ft up. To the right, a smaller corridor entrance.

#Zungeon 25