If you’re tabletop RPG enthusiast, you’ve probably heard about the #Dungeon23 challenge sparked by Sean McCoy designed of the SciFi horror RPG Mothership. The idea is pretty simple: design a mega dungeon in one year, one room per day, 12 levels. Each day, do something, even the smallest thing, like adding an empty room. Since the initial spark on Twitter the #Dungeon23 challenge has sprawled in a variety of sub challenges: Facility23, City23, Horror23.

I haven’t settled yet on what I will do for the challenge. But as I was scheming for it, I reflected about a short stay I did last summer, in a 1000 y/o monastery lost in the ancient mountains of Central Italy. As soon as I set foot in the huge stone building I was struck by the resemblance with a TTRPG dungeon.

A “good” dungeon, a dungeon à la Jennell Jaquays: so many possible routes to go from one point of the monastery to the other. Courtyards, bridges, tunnels, weird stairs and infinite loops. Huge and tiny rooms. Hidden chapels. Unexpected windows.

And I could access only one half of the building, the rest, the majority of it actually, was open only to Monks. I asked myself all day long why the monastery was built that way without having a single clue.

Then at 10pm as I was trying to find a spot with cellular network in the courtyard I heard the gigantic doors of the monastery closing, and locking all of us up inside the building. Those doors. So big. The Monks and their guests were cutting themselves from the rest of the world. Just for one night. As every night for a thousand years. I imagine they might have done that for longer periods in the past. During wars for example. They could move freely inside the Monastery, they had all they needed to survive a few days/weeks: food, a library, a pharmacy, kitchens, a small garden and even a small river powering a mill and running under the building. When the Monastery doors closed it was obvious it wasn’t just a big building, it was a small city.

I guess this is what a dungeon (a JJ-like one) is about. It’s not just a lair or a refuge, a retreat. It’s world in miniature. I’ll try to keep this in mind as I attempt to run the dungeon23 challenge. But most importantly does that make sense at all to you? (or is it obvious?), lmk what you think in the comments.

The door image is not the actual monastery door. This a google maps view of it. The doors/cloister I write about are in the bottom left part of the building. More than 2/3 of it, the upper part, were off limits.