Over the past few days, I’ve seen a flurry of activity on Bluesky inspired by Idle Cartulary’s Zungeon Manifesto.
The manifesto is a call to revive the DIY aspect of the OSR in the face of ever increasing professionalization, a return to the arts-and-crafts folk tradition D&D and away from the Highly Polished A5 Kickstarted marketplace.
Nothing against highly produced books of course, but I think that this is an admirable goal, and one I think I’ll try to achieve over the next few weeks. I have some ideas for a clockwork dungeon, which I’ll make through cut-and-paste physical collage.
As long as you keep the design clean and simple, you can get quite far with Google Docs or Libre Office, I think. But it gets out of hand quickly with mixed single / double column documents or trifold brochures. Haven’t made the jump to Affinity yet because of the time investment to learn the software
I don’t think that you necessarily need artwork for your DIY dungeon or adventure, but a map is very useful and channels such as JP Coovert and Map Crow have super great and encouraging videos to help you draw your own maps.
I’m currently working on an RPG system zine using a lot of public domain art from oldbookillustrations.com and a little bit of GIMP magic Trying to keep the visual style consistent.
If anyone gets a little “stuck” I have a few tools that can help in my Dungeon Stocking - Expanded Resource. It works a little like an Oracle alongside the traditional B/X Stocking Table and links to some of my d100 Tables that can potentially spark some inspiration.
I also went into my process for stocking quick “20-minute Dungeons” the other day in this thread on bluesky that might provide some insight.
After getting partially through the first 3 floors of a megadungeon I have realized I am much better at working in smaller chunks. I made a rough Zungeon outline last night and am enjoying the smaller scope. The 6 room dungeon/generator is a great tool.
Fingers crossed we can actually get back to a world where some zones are photocopied messes made with the utmost conviction, glad to see this movement of the zungeon!
Glad to see a thread started on this already. I’ve been feeling very invigorated by the whole Zungeon idea and trying to focus more on just getting something made than fretting over presentation like I have been on other recent projects.
I’ve done two so far, and there’s a lot of other good ones already submitted to the Zungeon jam on Itch: Zungeon Jam 2025 - itch.io
Awesome! We’ve got a face-to-face gaming group with lots of aspiring writers - and I’ll share this with them. This is a great effort to get folks to experiment with some DIY, and I need more reminding of how much enjoyment I used to get out of making dungeons, adventures, etc. without any fear of such projects not “living up” to the “kickstarter standard.” (especially when I’ll make these to play and share)
Trying to keep the visual style consistent.
