Happy New Year! I’m preparing my white whale game—a culmination of my inspirations, ambitions, and sensibilities. In the interest of staying accountable to my goals, I’ll include a progress tracker at the top of each of my blog posts, like this:
Castle Kelpsprot: 28 rooms keyed as of January 6.
I’ll also write regular posts about my prep, avoiding details in case readers of this blog would like to participate in the campaign. Anyway, let’s get into it.
Castle Kelpsprot Is:
- A science fantasy capsule game (an original setting with bespoke rules)
- A world-game megadungeon (the dungeon is the world; the world is the game)
- Designed for HUDless play (strictly diegetic player-facing material)
I aim to key at least two rooms per day, ideally three—it’s Dungeon 2023+2, after all. At this pace, I’ll have 600–900 rooms keyed when I start running the campaign in October. It’s a somewhat ridiculous plan, but this thing is gonna be big and Jaquaysed as fuck. Wish me luck, I guess?
I’m aiming to support immersion, discovery, and choice-rich play above all. And by choice-rich play, I don’t just mean providing the support players need to make interesting choices: I’m paring away procedures that involve infrequent or tedious decisions or otherwise bog down play. To me, that means streamlined encumbrance rules, no player mapping, and zoomed-out rather than blow-by-blow combat.
In future installments I’ll discuss how I’m leaning hard into diegesis, how I’m generating enough content to fill such a large dungeon, why each character will have a unique origin and talent, and more.
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