#Dungeon23 week 4

This one is about process!

So here it is the 26th and I have finished the month. I'm telling myself I can't crack February yet - gotta wait. Pace myself. But here is where I'm at and some things that helped me gather so much energy/productivity.

1. One Room a Day. I take the one room a day thing seriously. On three occasions I did "paired" rooms - two rooms that are kind of mirror images of each other. For instance, two storage rooms (same shape and size on opposite sides of a hall) one containing slippers and the other robes. But generally, it's one room per calendar day. 

2. One Day at a Time? Not so much. If I feel like doing two+ rooms, I do. But I work ahead in the calendar not sideways. (Rule 1 still applies, I just time travel so that I'm writing ahead a day, but still only doing one room for each calendar day.)  I try to stop short so that I leave something to do with the rooms on the following days, but it's hard. Sometimes working ahead means I just sketch the room in the map and quit, without recording any words. Other times I do the opposite; I write a title or a few key words down and leave the map for later. This week, however, I was working on the "zinification" of my journal and I got carried away in the rush to make a complete draft.

3. Generating Content. I have avoided lots and lots of tables. I feel like those are useful when you want to generate a ton of content at once, but for one-room-at-a-time development, I have lots of ideas and don't need many tables. I started out with a simple one like this.

I should probably go back to this at the start of February to make sure I don't fall into a rut. 

For room shapes I close my eyes and plunge a finger down on one of these grids, pasted into the back of my journal. They are from Lizard Man Diaries. The top one is for dungeons. The bottom two are streets (left) and domiciles (right), but I don't really think about that; I just use them for inspiration. And half of the time my fat finger lands between several options, giving me some choice. In other words, I use the generators, but not slavishly. I transform and interpret, or even just ignore it and pick one or close my eyes and point again. It's a useful creative crutch. Crutches are bad if both your legs are good, but they really help when you have a sprained creativity ankle!

4. Back and Forth. Making a zine out of it was driven by 1) the impulse to formalize, 2) the impulse to clarify/extend, and 3) the impulse to share in a useful way. Regardless, going back and forth between journal and typing has fed energy into the project. At times it has taken me too far away from the physical experience of the journal. When that happens I go back and re-draft entries I've already written in the zine doc. I've probably written-erased-written-erased-and-written most of my entries. They started out in print and now they are in cursive (because I wanted to practice cursive and can write it smaller/denser than print, oddly), but stat blocks are still oddly in print. I guess I can't imagine writing things like "AC 12" in cursive. I really want to be able to run the dungeon from my journal because it's like a book already, but the zine format is probably more practical. I try never to write a day first in the zine - I always try to put them in the journal first. But I have failed at that three or four times. It's a process. Maybe not the best one or the most coherent, but it's working.

5. Drawings. These also go back and forth. Usually I sketch something in my journal and then send a pic of it to my iPad and work over top of it in Procreate. Most of the drawings from my last post were done that way, and it makes me wonder if you can pick out the ones that started on the iPad rather than in the journal. If anyone is curious, I'll specific which began where.

This week, week five, was mostly spent on the Ithikites – evil lava worm people – and their organic-tech, the Kjhiki – some poor creature that they mostly use now as genetic putty for their conveyance/work engines. In fact, those creatures and their digs should finish out the month and the level.