Work on my #dungeon23 megadungeon The Blades of Gixa (still available for pre-order) is proceeding apace, if not quite according to plan: last video update, I said the next step after my history spread would be to create the spread for the "overworld": a map of the surface above the dungeon, the town of Baintoch on the small island Montiri. And I did work on this for a while, drawing many of the buildings and working out some major characters, factions, and the like.

But I hit a wall when I realized I was unsure how to key this surface level: I didn't know what context players (or the referee) would have for the surface, and what information would be appropriate for the surface spread. With my history spread, I'd developed the history of the dungeon, and a bit of the overworld, but I hadn't defined what would be "common knowledge" for characters first arriving to this place. In fact, my intent was that nearly none of the information on the history spread would be common knowledge.

So I took a detour, and this update's video is all about that:

The new page is titled "The Greater World (As It Is Widely Known)," and, as the title suggests, it is all about everything outside the dungeon: what the surface is like, who its major factions are, what species and languages are common, how the calendar and moons work, how magic and the gods work, and a bit about the situation on the small isle Montiri, beneath which lies the megadungeon.

If you wanted, as a referee, you could make copies of this page and hand them out to your players, or you could just use it as a guide for describing the world to them and answering those "would my character know this?" questions.

This page will be accompanied by another one with information for referees only: what's happening behind the scenes, true motives, resources, relationships between factions, etc., as well as some simple tools for playing out what's happening in the greater world between sessions.

What's going on with those moons?

The world of The Blades of Gixa uses a lunar calendar: 13 months of 28 days each, for a total of 364 days. This just makes long-term timekeeping easier than our goofy real-world irregular-month 365-day system. Referees have enough to worry about, they don't need to also wonder how many days a particular month has. The month's names are also alphabetical, for ease of use!

This world's two moons exhibit some unusual behaviors, moving in tandem, spiraling through the sky, with some quite weird lunar phases. The referee and players absolutely do not need to know any of the mechanics behind this, so the page just has a chart with the days of the month and the corresponding moon phases. But the video features a segment in which I play around with a crude prop to demonstrate why the moons work the way they do, as a bit of bonus information.

What will you run?

I'm thinking a lot these days about the mechanics of actually running the dungeon. The Blades of Gixa is intended to be run with an old-school/OSR-style system (I'll be mostly testing it with some version of Old School Essentials), but it isn't designed for any one system in particular. I will be including a guide for adaptation to other kinds of systems, and I'd love to know:

Leave a comment and let me know!