Help us find out!

I mean… we know what’s in it. It’s all of the things you remember fondly from dungeons and adventures of eras past. Roughly hewn walls, puzzles you need three real-life languages to solve, secret doors, a wine cellar/crypt (I’m fondly remembering my own ‘90s vampire games here, OK?).

What are those things, though? What are the classic props and décor and stuff that conjures up your favourite (or least favourite – sometimes that’s easier) era of RPGs?

It doesn’t even have to be a dungeon.. After a couple of years of D&D, most of my teenage roleplaying was White Wolf games, which means there’s a full-on goth club in my personal Metadungeon. (How would I represent that? A corridor suddenly covered in layers of band posters half an inch deep? Sticky floors?). Probably a tech-dragon’s lair, too. Definitely an eldritch library full of secrets man was not meant to know.

If you started later, maybe your memories are high school parties from Monsterhearts, or a group of nerdy-voice actors consistently defeated by simple doors. Maybe it’s a bunch of criminal bears doing a heist.

To help us envisage the aesthetic of the Metadungeon, we’ve arranged for YouTuber Odd Artworks to bring a version of it to life. Odd Artworks, amongst his many talents, draws mini-dungeons based on random prompts – you can check out his latest example here:

Or watch his whole mini-dungeon playlist here.

This map isn’t going in the book (probably), because it’ll be a chaotic mashup of every possible era, whereas the real Metadungeon will be neatly sectioned into one level for roughly every decade of RPGs.

Instead, it’ll be a powerfully nostalgic, probably tongue-in-cheek representation of what we, as a tightly-knit band of just over 1,000 friends, think of when we say “classic TTRPGs.”

If you’ve got a classic memory of “your” RPGs, whether it’s something you love or something you love to hate, leave it in a comment on this post. I am 1000% sure we’ll get some people with very similar memories, and that’s all part of the process, so go with your first thought. We’ll skim off the best comments and turn them into a list of prompts for Odd Artworks.

Then… Odd Artworks will attempt to draw them. And put the result on YouTube. So brave. So confident. I hope he’s ready for what’s coming to him.

Please help, otherwise me and Grant are going to have to write all these prompts ourselves.

- Producer Chant