dungeon26 - stationery, background, and gatehouse
See the archive of all dungeon26 pages here
I started work on my dungeon26 after the previous planning post. I've now pretty much finished the first area (the gatehouse) and it's unlikely to change a lot, so might as well post it.
Drawing tools are the same as the previous dungeon23 up to now (previous post on this). For D23 I moved to use Frixion pens a lot in the latter stages, but I've not found them very good for this - I am doing larger maps, which I change a lot as I go along, and erasing large quantities of Frixion ink is not as good as erasing .
My main writing pen is a Kaweco Brass Sport with extra-fine nib. Currently I have a Graf von Faber Castell Carbon Black cartridge in it, but am going to move to J Herbin Perle Noire afterwards to see how that works - I'm always slightly nervous about using carbon ink with EF nibs, though this seems fine so far.
I'm using more post-it notes to jot down thoughts and little details which don't fit in with the rooms on the pages. I'm also using small blue Fabriano index cards for NPCs and factions (not yet scanned, they will probably change).
The notebook itself is a Traveler's Notebook grid refill. This was a convenient size to carry around and work with last time so why not this time as well.
System and structure 🔗
As this is supposed to be a consistent dungeon across the whole year, not me being a dilettante and changing my mind every five minutes, I decided to specify a system - Old School Essentials. Of course I then changed my mind and thought it would be better done with White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game because it's a bit looser and also a bit easier for PCs to challenge powerful monsters (as standard, very few have more than one attack or do more than 1d6 damage). These are very similar games though and the whole thing should be usable with any OSR-ish system at the end no matter how many times I change my mind.
I do intend to have it with a traditional treasure-for-XP setup, where each level (area) has enough to level up a party depending on how deep it is. I'm not experienced in doing this so it will be a challenge.
Areas 🔗
Basic layout and the outside world 🔗
The left hand side here is the inner leaf of the notebook, where I'm keeping an index, so that will change. It will also develop more post-it notes as I come up with random ideas that I don't know where else to put. At the moment there are little notes on climbing the walls, sewerage, and what I want to do with treasure (as above).
Page 1 has the layout of areas in the castle, in pointmap form. I may add some other connections but I'm going to try to keep to those.
Page 2 has a little map of the surrounding region, vaguely based on Castle Gormenghast and mostly to give me ideas about it. Page 3 has notes on the traditional Dungeon Town, but they really are vague notes. I can develop it more later with connections to things that appear in the castle.
Local area and gatehouse 🔗
A little bit on page 4 about the area immediately outside the castle. The only entrance is the half-collapsed gatehouse. This area has a lot of people to talk to and is not amazingly dangerous; it is also small, it's mostly an intro to what is going on in the rest of the place.
The "gatehouse NPC" note is redundant now as it refers to Lucien Piety who is described in more detail on pages 9 and 10. The pixie isn't though, that was something I thought of to liven the place up a bit afterwards.
Currently, I am halfway through the next area, which is the Guest Area. I will post the pages from that as and when.