Thinkin' 'bout Dwimmermount

I'm waiting on a single piece of art for the first part of the Dwimmermount Codex that I've been showing off over the last couple of weeks. Once I have it, I can make the final tweaks to the text and layout and then send it off to DriveThruRPG.com for sale. In the meantime, I've also been working on the second part -- Monsters & Treasures -- and that's coming along nicely, too. And since deciding that doing things myself is probably the fastest way to get it done to my satisfaction, the months-long logjam on Petty Gods has also broken. I'll have more to say about that unduly delayed project over the weekend, but suffice it to say that there will be an early Christmas present waiting for old school fans this year. There's also Thousand Suns, too, and I'll have more to say about that once it's ready for sale.

I've also been giving a lot of thought to the publication of the Dwimmermount megadungeon. It's something I very much want to do and, judging from the comments and emails I get regularly, it's something a lot of people want to see. So, it's not so much a question of if or even when so much as how. I mean, the dungeon is done. I have all my notes and maps and other write-ups. Turning that stuff into something others can use is the issue. For example, I'm a terrible mapper, as I've admitted many times before. To produce a Dwimmermount project, I'll need to pay someone to do the cartography for me and good cartography costs money. Likewise, I'd like to include artwork, both for purely esthetic reasons and also to illustrate some of the more interesting sites in the megadungeon. That, too, requires money to hire people with skills I lack in abundance.

Ultimately, money is the biggest hurdle. Unlike Petty Gods, which was never conceived as a for-profit project, the Dwimmermount megadungeon product would be for sale. If I'm going to ask others to pay for what I've written, it goes without saying that I'd, in turn, pay those who lent their talents to assist me in bringing the megadungeon to print. And, having been a freelance writer in the RPG biz in the past, I know all too well how poorly it treats creatives, especially artists. I don't want to contribute to that sad history, which is why Dwimmermount will likely need to wait till I've accumulated a bit of cash through the sale of stuff I can produce on my own.

On the plus side, I have a very clear idea of how I plan to present the megadungeon. My model is Mike Carr's In Search of the Unknown -- all the rooms in the dungeon are described, but there's also a high degree of customizability, allowing each referee to place whatever monsters and treasures he wishes into many of the room. This, coupled with the ability to expand the maps through the use of geomorphs and self-contained sub-levels, would turn Dwimmermount at least partially into a "design your own megadungeon kit." But, as I said, I'll need a lot of maps to do this right and I can't map to save my life. The other neat part of what I have in mind is the inclusion of integral sandboxes for the worlds of Areon, Kythirea, and Ioun, since there are active portals to all three of these worlds on Level 3A. Those worlds have generated a lot of interest in Dwimmermount over the last couple of years, so their inclusion seems a no-brainer to me.

That's where things stand at the moment. In between my other work, I've been transferring my notes into legible formats and trying to get a sense of how many maps and how much art I'd like to have for this Dwimmermount product. Then I can start to assess how much it'd all cost to produce in the manner I'd like. I suspect it'll be enough that completing it will be a long-term goal -- that is unless one or more of my regular readers is a millionaire with money to burn. A guy can dream, right?