Toward an Exquisite Crypt

the exquisite crypt can be many things

in the wake of all the cool jazz happening on bluesky, i got myself feeling the spirit of g+ alive again. it's certainly more twitter than it is anything else, but there's still potential. folks be talking about what the community of the OSR could look like, and using a strengths-based approach, defining what we want instead of what we don't want --- so i want more collaborative dungeon design.

nova at playful void helpfully released a very lovely little "Zungeon Manifesto" for lofi dungeon making, so in that vein i thought i would attempt to use this framework for collaborative zungeoneering, which i'm gonna call "An Exquisite Crypt" after one of my favorite games i played in my youthful days of poetry and art, the exquisite corpse.

The Exquisite Crypt: A Proposition

the process that i have been toying with regarding this process essentially boils down to targeted prompts. while the fold-over method works well for drawings and poetry while sat in a jazz bar, as i did often once upon a time in kansas, it's not all that accessible for disparate OSR designers sat across the globe from each other.

furthermore, a dungeon has a bit more complexity, so i propose a prompt based system of play, wherein each of the major elements of marcia's bite sized dungeons: there are six rooms and six elements (two creatures, two treasures, a trap, and a special) additionally there are six connectors.

this prototype shall have 42 prompts to build a 6-room dungeon, approximately 3 prompts per element, with only one prompt for the connectors.

The Dungeon Rooms

I devised 8 prompts for the rooms, each room should have three to be rolled randomly from this list:

1. The Walls of this Room...
2. The Floor of this Room...
3. The Ceiling of this Room...
4. In the Center of this Room...
5. In the Corner(s) of this Room...
6. The Air in this Room...
7. The Light in this Room...
8. The Timbre of this Room...

I feel as this covers a lot of the particulars of a room description, general features of the room, the stuff in it, as well as sensory features.

The Dungeon Elements

for the six elements, i decided to give the Monsters/NPCs the most prompts as they are the most interactable, and the treasures are split into two sets of two, as they are less immediately interactable. this was a vaguely arbitrary decision, but i'm sticking with it for now. the connectors will have simple prompts such as "This Door...", "These Stairs", "This Shaft...", etc.

Monster/NPC	Treasure
This Creature Resembles… Another Notable Feature of this Creature is… Currently this Creature is… This Creature’s Goal is to…	This Magical Item Resembles… This Magical Item’s Power is… ----------------------------------------
	This Treasure Hoard Consists of… This Treasure Hoard is sought by…
Traps	Specials/Interactable
This Trap is Triggered via… This Trap’s Primary “Tell” is… This Trap’s Effect is to…	This “Special” Resembles… This “Special” is Triggered via… This “Special’s” Effect is to…

The Dungeon Process

now we make the thing. in my first playtest (planned but not yet done) i will act as the facilitator. firstly i will roll up and/or devise a theme for the dungeon using whatever random generators i have at hand. perplexing ruins's Fallen has a great bunch of "esoterica" prompts of verbs, adjectives, and nouns, jason lutes's Perilous Wilds also has some great dungeon generating tables, and i been swimming in all that is lovely about huffa's Between the Skies.

we are looking for surrealism, sure, but a theme helps tighten the focus and provides something to go off of for inspo when responding to the prompts.

then i will roll up the prompts for the rooms and i will put all the prompts together in a numbered list, then divide the list up into a number of categories equal to the players including myself. in a typical bite-sized dungeon there will be:
18 prompts for 6 rooms
8 prompts for 2 monsters
4 prompts for 2 treasures
3 prompts for 1 trap
3 prompts for 1 "special"
6 prompts for 6 connectors
42 prompts for all elements

with six rooms, i like the idea of playing with about six people, then in the spirit of the zungeon, once the prompts are completed and collated, each individual player will go and make two pages, one room and one element, then brought together into a collage of collaboration

hopefully this makes sense, but if not, i'm on bsky to field any questions

a postscript...

in my playtest (now ongoing) i have 13 players, including myself, i decided to do a 12-room dungeon, two sections of 6, half the players will take on section 1, the other half take on section 2. i generated the three prompts per room and then made a long list of the 42 prompts for each section. i then split them up between each player, prompt 1 for room 1 went to player 1, prompt 2 for room 1 went to player 2, prompt 1 for monster 1 went to player 4, etc. all the way down to prompt 42(a door) going to player 6 or 7 depending on who's in which section. i split it all up arbitrarily

then once all the results are in, i will collate all the disparate prompts together so we see that player 1 put a large brazier in the center of a room whose walls are made of paper and the air in the room smells distinctly of almonds, or whatever, and then we can iterate more in post-production as we see fit