Lore24? Challenge accepted!

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I’m going to be trying Yora’s challenge Lore24, a kind of spiritual successor to Dungeon23. It’s focused on writing rather than strictly designing, pretty laid back, and open enough that if you were to sufficiently finish a project (a world, a fantasy system, etc) you could start a new one while maintaining the creative momentum and pressure.



Check out the full post at Spriggan's Den!


I like it! I detect a sentiment that Lore24 is going to be easier to maintain than Dungeon23, however as someone who managed to stick around with D23 (for the most part, see my coming analysis on the project!) I think they’re just different beasts. It’s essentially a writing marathon rather than a design/drawing marathon and its format is more abstract; some people can take that and run with it, while others (like my neuro-divergent self) might find that the scariest thing is a blank page. Er - more like a blank prompt, I mean.

That’s just sophistry, though! What are my plans?

I’ve done the D23 thing and made more than 365 rooms for Myr Regath, my megadungeon. I’ve noticed substantial improvements to both my game design skills and my drawing. It’s both humbling and gratifying, and a testament to myself that daily practice / devotion is the way forward to getting better at the things that truly bring me joy. To that end:

  • I’m going to write >400 words every day. 

    • This is modeled after the late great Sir Terry Pratchett, who infamously set a daily word count of “only” 400 words every day. 400 isn’t a lot, but through daily progress he was able to publish 2 books a year in his prime.

  • This is a minimum (or a floor), not a maximum. 

    • I’ve got to hit my floor to proceed with my day, which means modifying my behaviors to be able to make writing and working both work. If I hit a stride and really, really want to keep going…I can! This isn’t NaNoWriMo where I have a final page count, it’s about inspiring daily practice.

    • I feel like many folks bounced off D23 because they (for whatever reason) felt constrained to doing ONLY one room on a good day...which I literally never followed. On good days I went crazy and made a bunch, b/c any creative challenge is focused on making daily habits.

  • Expanding my megadungeon’s lore. 

    • I’ve got this outline of the royal family of the city that still haunts the dungeon, and I’m going to use Lore24 to flesh them out both for my own sake and to drum up new content to flesh out the dungeon: spells, items, traps, boss battles, etc.

  • Expanding my mental pantheon of Sheydim

  • Drafting up cool fantasy systems that I might end up publishing as small little rules-light zines in the future. I had ideas for magic powers collectable in my megadungeon, and now after reading scholarly sources on The Sefer Yetzirah I've got some fun ideas for how that'll work...

  • Returning back to my GLOGtober setting of The Road of Dead Buddhas which is a fantasy silk road. Being distracted by real world events took me away from that (and switching hyperfocuses from silk road to Jewish mysticism) but I can now I have pressure to return to it!


The best part is that when I do go over my set target, I feel like “holy shit I wrote as much as/more than Terry Pratchett would’ve on a bad day” and feel even more inspired to keep going. Like now! :P 

Part of my attraction to D23 was the asset pack Sean McCoy made helped to standardize the attention around said challenge, so I made a quick Lore24 logo for myself using shareware Summer Scroll 1 Font :(https://www.fontspace.com/summers-scroll-1-font-f5435) and BlackCastleMF (for the 24). Check it out!

Keep making cool stuff! I'm gonna take a break from my computer and then start on a tear for what'll be tomorrow's writing, the story of The Queen in Lilac, the ancient sorceress-queen that haunts Myr Regath. Stay tuned!



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