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.
Trying to keep the visual style consistent.