Dungeon 23: The Art of Stopping

I stuck a fork in my Dungeon 23 project earlier this year. Through the spring, personal commitments, work, and my home games devoured all of the time I had set aside for Dungeon 23, and by the time the smoke cleared, it was obvious it would require a major increase in work just to catch up, much less get back into fighting form. So it goes.

But… I don’t feel bad about it.

Certainly we’re all familiar with lapsed resolutions and “year-long” projects that die miserable deaths by St. Patrick’s Day. Our instinct is to slink away from them in shame because they “failed.” 

I think it’s instead more helpful to think of ways we can extract value from a “failed” project. Many nominally wasted experiences are valuable if we just make the effort to learn things from them.

Doing Double Duty 

In my initial post, I decided to make my Dungeon 23 project from scratch, and not tie it to either a game I was running or something I would publish for others to run.

This was a mistake.

I think the theory in that post was fine, but in practice, it doomed the enterprise, because when time got tight, everything else took precedence over Dungeon 23. The hierarchy was something like this: 

• Family and friends
• Home games (an extension of the above)
• Work 
• Blogging and creating stuff for others
• Dungeon 23

Looking at it that way, of course Dungeon 23 fell by the wayside. If it had been, from the beginning, something I was going to share with others, it would have been much easier to prioritize that Dungeon 23 work. As a private project, it lost out to everything else.

Salvaging the Wreckage

In my original Dungeon 23 post, I wrote the following:

All misfit toys are welcome. No failed campaign notes, unused session prep, or aborted Itch.io publication is ever wasted so long as it could still rise again, animated by dark necromancy, to become part of a new project. One or more of my past projects will surely be absorbed into this process.

Well, the same is true for Dungeon 23 itself. All the work I did early this year is still ripe for reuse in other games and projects. I still use the generator that appeared in my original post, and it will probably be my go-to dungeon-population tool in the future. I don’t think I’ll ever finish my Dungeon 23 dungeon; but I’d be even more surprised if no element of it ever made it out into the world all the same.