Roguelike Megadungeon: An Invitation to Kitbash Your Imaginary Toys

Ya know what I love about Old School Revival? It recaptures the primordial soup of outsider artist game design that gave birth to this thing we call DnD. I could see how many gamerz in the community felt that it was exactly what TTRPGs needed at the height of its relevance. OSR as a movement seemed like the burgeoning form of design that is finally crawling out of its dank dungeon cocoon. Recent works with this design philosophy have opened my eyes to a new way of GMing; one not necessarily for the Lazy GM (no shade to Sly- a trailblazer of our craft), but one for the GM who wants to make the experience of Prep itself just as impactful as the experience of Play at the table. That is to say, it make prep fun. I invite you to join me as I don my occult hood and robes to commune with the Collective Unconscious, recording its labyrinthine revelations. And probably roll a fuckin' lot of dice. 

That is to say: I just finished the Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson. 10/10 would recommend. It is revelatory to see the play culture built slowly through a network of zines, an artform I'm fluent in due to my DIY/leftist/punk roots. Peterson argues (quite successfully IMO) that TTRPG play culture in its nascency was a massive conversation between theorists, philosophers, and outsider artists at the breakneck speed of snail mail. This was a GOOD THING. Many zines like Alarums & Excursions, The Wild Hunt, and the Lords of Chaos were offering systems and game advice with open ended design. The ethos at the time was that TTRPGs were treated as a wide open spectrum and not a binary choice of systems. You write some rules; playtest with your friends; publish it for others, and they take your rules-jam on them at their tables and publish their thoughts in zines. The musician in me feels that the first wave of gamers in the 70s just got it. From my 2025 perspective, it seems like Gygax didn’t vibe with the culture at large who had taken his work (a few zines that were closer to instructions on how to make a fantasy roleplaying game than actually providing an actual game) and actually made some actual dang games! They worked! People liked playing them! In hindsight it really looks like he intended to stifle this beautiful open frontier with AD&D and was largely successful in doing so.

The most familiar example of the OSR ethos carrying on into today is Knave 2E. I don't go to any sessions I'm GMing these days without it. I love that this work bills itself as a “Toolkit”. This conveys to me that Knave is a work intended to elevate play at the table, without making many fiddly mechanics that most GMs house rule anyway. It just helps generate capital G Game in a way that is easy, logical, and fun. This is largely due to Ben Milton's knowledge and earnest engagement in the OSR scene. Old School play was being Revived for a reason. It made having fun as a GM a principle tenet. In doing so, it feels as if some ancient part of the ludic soul has been uncovered. 

All that theory aside, pulling stuff out of tables in Knave is just plain fun. In case you forgot, that’s why we do this: FUN. GM prep can be a fuckin’ slog. The dominant play culture of today propagated by sycophants and shills of WoTC (read: 5E) teaches new GMs that writing a Wheel of Time length series of google docs and creating a quagmire of fantasy gobbledeegook is the only way to prep for a TTRPG game. This is and has always been untrue. Lemme introduce you to a dope lil book that makes prep as fast as Knave's systems, but makes GMing prep feel like the experience of PLAY. Enter Roguelike Megadungeon by David Jackson.

Roguelike Megadungeon is a system agnostic TTRPG book that prompts the GM to sit down with some goddamn dice and roll them! Through a bonafide Worksheet, one comes away with 1-5 interconnected dungeons populated with gonzo encounters that are fun AF and themes that are right at home no matter what your choice of fantasy game poison is. The scope of the layout for the dungeon and its contents is general enough to be broadly applicable in your choice of fantasy milieu, but also evocative enough to spark imagination both in front and behind the GM screen.  Without giving away the bag, RLMD essentially boils down to the following. You assemble 36 dice in a 6x6 grid and refer to a 5 step process to generate a number of dungeon rooms populated with encounters, treasure and more- to the theme of one of 12 gonzo dungeons. Using some additional rules and rolls you connect these together and BAM! You have a fuckin’ roguelike megadungeon. Currently, I’m using the megadungeon I generated to fuel my own creation called Castle Trismegistus (looking at you in the far flung future mirin’ my future book Sands of Spacetime). Take a look at a few of the worksheets I completed below.

In the present, or recent past, or long distant past (making a time travel ttrpg has decoupled my brain from casual causal cause and effect) I used RLMD to make DUNGEON OF THE GRIMEHOUSE. This funky little dungeon dragged some gutter punks on a gutter crawl through my ill-advised actual play Mystic Punks Live. Partially I wanted to support the then itchfunding project, and partially I really liked the idea of an actual play actually playing cutting edge TTRPG projects in lieu of doing whatever the fuck you call what Critical Role does nowadays. I think you’ll see more of that in the future whenever I get a home grown AP off the ground. For NOW, the present, you looking at these words on a screen or maybe even a goddamn page in a book, you can see some process photos of the GRIMEHOUSE or maybe click this link to watch the episode of Mystic Punks Live as the Mystic Punks try to stay a-live. We had a fuckload of fun. I could see it on the face of one of the Mystic Punks creators standing just off set. You can see it on the faces of my players as they dungeon crawl. Big Dipper!

There are instructions on how to arrange your dice on a sheet of paper, but I opted for the more direct method. I threw the plastic clickitty clackitty right down on a sheet of bristol I had laying around. After that, I used my trusty t-square to get decent looking rooms and circled whereabouts the dice came to lay, noting the number of the dice. I kept a little table of information in my GM notebook. I trusted that the vibes of the Dungeon's content would match the whacked out vibe of Mystic Punks. Judging by the reactions of the crew to the trapped Brewer Ent, I think I was spot on.

Side Tangent: It's important to me as a multimedia artists, but even more important to me as a career archivist that these works and the work behind them is properly documented. Whether GMs realize it or not, they are creating outsider art every time they sit down and commit pen to paper in pursuit of TTRPG play. The main skill I've consciously cultivated over my years as Forever GM is to preserve as much of the initial spark and vibe of an idea from my brain all the way to my published works. It's important to me as a GM that a glimmer of the graph paper/dungeon/dice aesthetic makes it all the way to a polished work, but the raw ideas in their OG form is just as important. Special shout out to Wonderland by Andrew Kolb. The renders of the production and brainstorming process for his game design, illustration, and writing sold me on that book and the chase rules were the proof in the pudding. The big shiny coffee table book culture is important, but the sketches and developmental artifacts are important, too!  

Bonus shots of the copier I used to print out the worksheets and the dopeass key art from Roque Romero.

This style of GM prep is just superior. I really don’t know what else to tell you there. I think it was good ol’ Uncle Matt Colville who infested my brain with the word “Quagmire” in reference to GM prep. Don’t do what I started out doing: writing hundreds of pages worth of G-Docs nested in nested folders wasting Google server space for words no eyes but Zachary’s will ever disgrace. As I said earlier- GM prep should be FUN. We should be striving for FUN. Yes, this is indeed a goddamn game. Even if it’s an actual play or just you and your drunk friends playing underneath your grandma’s table in the woods. The story should be important in your game, but it’s still a GAME. Do as Wilderwhim says, not as Wilderwhim did. Do what Andrew Kolb does in Wonderland. Use your physical notebooks in meatspace. Roll your physical dice at your IRL table in the IRL World to make your intangible make-em-ups fantasy.

As my illustrious TTRPG mentor Wayne Peacock of Kismet Games once put it to me, “We really are living in the Golden Age of RPGs. Barriers of entry low, funding of indie developers high. Endless works in every genre.” I 100% agree with this sentiment. There’s something for everyone out there right now. The discerning TTRPG enjoyer just needs to dig a little past Kickstarter/Backerkit/Itch.io’s front page. Once you do that you'll easily see we don’t need 500+ page TTRPG bricks of word vomit promising “you can do anything.” The real cutting edge developers are focusing on smaller works that can snap together endlessly to create whatever fucked up Voltron experience is desired. TTRPGs have a unique attribute that allows works of art to co-mingle and communicate in their static forms as texts, but also as live experiences of Play. My hope is that by forging these connections, we can strive for a collective language of game design. One that will transcend corporations and even the play cultures that it originates from. All it takes is assembling the hand crafted dungeon delving tools made by your fellow dungeoneers and dungeon designers. Delve right in.