dungeon23 week 19 - pencil and philosophers (and wordle)

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In the constant struggle to come up with something distinctive and in fact any ideas at all, this week I decided to base every room in the dungeon on that day's Wordle word (yes I am still doing Wordle). The plan was that if a day's word really was useless I'd pick one from this date last year - I wrote these down on the top right, but didn't use any in the end.

A problem with this approach is that you have no idea what the words for the rest of the week will be, so can't plan ahead much. Sort of a procedural generation approach. Normally I jot down details at the top of the map page in pencil, but this time I wrote the room descriptions in pencil too, in case I needed to completely change them.

words and thought processes

N.B. on the dungeon page, the numbers after each word indicate the number of tries it took me to get there. I had an idea that this would indicate the size of the room, but wasn't strict about this.

1. AGLOW: Perhaps some sort of furnace? Didn't really have much of an idea at this point but a furnace room is generally usable. This would likely make it a building of some sort.
2. COCOA: This made me think of warm, comforting drinks being served somewhere using the heat from the furnace. I had the furnace in the basement and a kitchen or drink-preparation point above. Where do you serve warm, comforting drinks - a church hall or community centre, a soup kitchen, a traveller's lodge?

3. ETHIC: Mulling over the overall type of building, I'd been thinking along the lines of a community debating centre, and this firmed it up to be a place deliberately for radicals and philosophers to come and discuss/argue. At any time of day or night you could find people here, sometimes holding organised debates, sometimes just hanging around looking for people to argue with.

   It was at this point that the idea of "deliberately-encouraged argument" came up, which could be an antagonistic force. I began to work on the idea of a secret ideology underneath an ostensible one of devotion to free speech and encouraging debate.

4. BROOM: not particularly inspiring, just made it a broom cupboard, or rather general storage room.

5. SNACK: this was also quite a boring word. Initially I thought the place might also serve food, but there was already a kitchen anyway. So I turned it into an underground temple chamber where the psychic energies of argument were focused to feed Toloth, Spirit of Discord.

   Think I also came up with the place being called the Blue Eagle on the Friday. This is a Twitter reference but IMO subtle enough not to be too fourth wall breaking. In-world it was simply the name of the inn that the building used to be before it was taken over by the debating society, and they kept the signage.

6. ACRID: Slightly more interesting word, making me think of fumes and vapours. While writing SNACK I'd thought of the Toloth worshippers having access to drugs and poisons to affect moods and start fights, but how do they make these? The answer was a psychically-polluted well, with the water used for alchemical creation.
7. SCARF: come on Wordle, this is a rubbish word. Luckily I had basically finished at this point. This became a cloakroom, with a couple of potential features if PCs ever got in there: it had odd robes for the priests of Toloth, and also was sometimes used as a secure and innocent drop point, as the staff would take items for a fee and return them to anyone having the appropriate token.

general thoughts about when a dungeon starts to pull together

I find it's very rare that I know what the theme for a dungeon is going to be on Monday, and sometimes I don't have a clue until Sunday. Once I do have an idea it's generally easy to write rooms, but before that point, it's a matter of bashing ideas together until they produce something that feels right.

This can mean not writing anything at all up until that point, which is discouraging. A goal of the Wordle method was that I would at least write some sort of room each day, even if extremely sketchy and liable to change (hence pencil), because the process of doing so would result in more bashable-together ideas each day. It worked here, and while the Wordle component I can replace with some other random generation procedure, that process is something I'm going to try to carry on with.