The Kuiper Belt Artefact #2 🛸

Week three of #Dungeon23

Greetings,

I’ve got a nice early-morning ritual now. I heat up the kettle and pour out 31g of coffee beans, then while the water heats up, I look over the current work and let it run around my brain as I brew coffee. I sit down, and while I drink that first cup I make some new marks on the paper. I’m done when the cup is empty. Writing short descriptions for rooms has been pretty easy, but it’s still really early, like 20ish days out of 365. I have a couple of twists coming up to keep the momentum fresh.

I’m looking for what this structure looks like. I’ve used Midjourney to generate images, and they are sooo close. I may have to do some sketching.

This mega-dungeon will be a depth crawl with a starter map of points representing the collective exploration efforts to date. That’ll give players some established entry points and locations before they are on their own.

You can catch up on week one here:

The Kuiper Belt Artefact 🛸

I have short descriptors for all 31 rooms for January done. I’ve been spending time working out mapping icons/symbols and what the location table math looks like and generating the details table. I’m using The Stygian Library as a model. For each location, you generate a detail that could result in an event, encounter, or detail. I’ve begun filling in that detail table too.

I’m still working off 11x17 grid paper and a clipboard as I figure out workflow and form. I have a Rustico Travellers journal that I’d like to move this into, but it’s good to be messy on the grid paper, a kind of rough draft. I’m not sure I could get anything done straight to the journal. I think each month may be a sheet of grid paper.

The Kuiper Belt Artefact

I’ll hack Into the Odd RPG for Into the Artefact play. Leaning into my debtpunk genre - I’m thinking about how choosing your debts links to your starter packages.

Mad Jay Zero @MadJayZero

Heechee Saga-inspired premise + Debt Punk premise + BX Zeta (or BXX, or One BX) = Sci-Fi West Marches game. I've said too much! #WIP

See you in a couple of weeks when I reveal the first twist -if you haven’t discovered it!