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Slowly catching up. The finish line is actually in sight. 15: Guard Room (past) (!) 12 guards in crimson livery and shining cuirasses and helmets, armed with rifles and swords. (present) (!) The guards remain, undead in rotten livery. 16: Larder (past) Peons in smooth masks and...

I'm back! How's everyone holding up? 8: Hall of Leaves (present) Riot of overgrown shrubs, flowered and thorned (!) Thorn trap. Trees saw at exposed limbs. (past) Perfumed garden, lovers' trysts in shady alcoves 9: Serving Hall (present) Collapsing sideboards. (?) Broken dumb waiter chute...

Running late due to life getting in the way, but I hope to have another update in a day or two.

OK, a couple of days late, but here we go. 1: Ziggurat Stair (?) Rises into ornamental gardens before the gates; descends into the Temple of All Gods 3. 2: Palace Grounds Dead grass and spiny bushes, raked with old scorch marks. Two colossal bronze statues with smiling faces, covered in...

I'm back! A few days late due to life getting in the way, but I made it. Hard to believe there are only three months left in the year. This level turned into less of a funhouse and more of a weird amalgam of paths and themes -- a sublevel made of sublevels. I'm OK with that, though I feel it...

Another week, another seven rooms. 15: Shrine of the Dark: Hall of Echoes (!) Lair of the Darkwights. When awoken: mimic speech; move like leaves in the wind; hunger for tender eyes. Sound travels far and strangely here, like in a cathedral. (?) The great statue of the Dark is a fractal...

Level 9, Week 2! Having a lot of fun with this level. 8: Imperial Shrine: Hall of trophies Rows upon rows of of treasures and grotesques. Weapons and armour piled on racks. Taxidermied people in diverse ethnic clothing styles with jewels for eyes. Priceless funerary urns from extinct eras...

All right, first week of September out of the way! I like this one: it gives me a chance to do a bit of a funhouse level while also maintaining a theme. Level 9: The Temple of All gods A vast, decrepit maze of impossible geometry. Was: A monument to the vanity and greed of the Emperors...

It's the end of August! How is everyone doing? Working on anything interesting? I feel like dungeon23 as originally envisioned is a difficult task to complete, but I like it when people post their dungeon-adjacent creative work here. Anyway, here's what I've got. 22: Imperial Stair Tower...

And here we are, finally caught up! 15: Freight Elevator Sliding brass doors hide a dingy lift. (?) No power – doors can be pried open, manual crank on the wall slowly lowers or raises the perforated metal platform. Goes ~100’ down, to the green room in the Fortress of Doors (level 5); or 20’...

Now that I think about it, an invigilator is someone whose job it is to prevent people looking. So, vigilator is probably more what I was going for. I'll just invent that word and use it instead.

I'm not really using it correctly, since the robots are general-purpose guardians, but I like the word.

Week two of August! 8: West Guard Tower, Lower Wreckage of a bulbous invigilator, spilled across the room. (??) Random mechanical wreckage – lenses, gold wire, a weird crystal – worth a few coins. Maybe something useful for a tinker? 9: West Guard Tower, Upper Musky and strange air. (!)...

My point with bringing up videogames wasn't to say that no-one argues about terminology, it was that you don't see the same vociferous complaints about the use of jargon itself. Especially when you move away from genre definitions, which are naturally prone to snobbery. If I call a game a...

I think this obliquely gets at one of the real and fundamental problems with the game, which is that success is taken for granted. Running into a monster that is out of your league should be fun and thrilling, but a combination of play culture, linear adventures, and rules that don't really...

I guess I don't hang out in the right places. In any case, it's the fact of jargon that's accepted in vidoegames, not whether a particular genre label is appropriate. No-one accuses you of gatekeeping for writing 'uncanny valley'.

@Aldarc mentioned videogames upthread, and I think it's instructive to look at them for comparison. Agency, sandbox, uncanny valley, skinner box, frag, lag, metroidvania, soulslike... Videogame discussions are filled with jargon, and no-one gets their nickers in a twist over it. The complete...

Slowly catching up! Here's the first week of August. I've included my notes about the level this time. I usually make these, but I have no idea whether they are of interest to anyone. The basic idea behind the these little prefaces is to outline the sorts of threats and locations invovled, but...

You know, I reread the first four books recently, and I think it's really hard to choose a favourite. I have a soft spot for The Tombs of Atuan, and I really want to finish the second trilogy, because in some ways I think it's even better (but definitely more for an adult audience).

True to my word, here's there second half of July. This level is pretty gruesome (that seems to be a theme with this dungeon of mine, doesn't it?), but after this it's all smooth sailing with very little body horror, I promise. The upper levels will be weird in completely different ways. 17...