Planetary Display for #Dungeon23 and #space23

There is a dungeon-drawing project currently taking off on Twitter and on Mastodon. The original suggestion was made by Sean McCoy, and is spreading with the hashtag #dungeon23 (or, for space-themed variants, with hashtag #space23). The idea here in the dungeon iteration is to create a megadungeon. Beginning on January 1, participants will create one room each day, and move to the next level each new month, using a journal or daily planner for this to collect the notes for this. At this rate, by the end of the year, you will have accumulated 365 rooms and descriptions over 12 levels – a megadungeon!

There are different approaches one could take for extending this idea from a classic megadungeon and doing something more science fiction. A tower complex or a space station are ready options I’ve seen some people discussing. I’ve also seen suggestions of doing a Traveller sub-sector. And, if you want to do a dozen planets for this, I have some resources for you.

A few years ago, I made some resources for planet mapping that are based on a truncated icosahedron (which you may also know as a buckyball or a soccer ball). Since it has 32 faces, this makes it nearly ideal if you are doing one section a day. (And since there are north- and south-poles, if you let those go, then the remaining 30 sections are even easier to fit into monthly formatting.

Assuming that a few people might be interested in working with this, I’ve made discounts for these from DriveThru RPG:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?discount=95b542e778 (PDF)

A set of Planetary Display Log Book pages, with one section per page designed for printing an 8-1/2″ x 11″ notebook for mapping a planet.

This Logbook is designed for mapping the surface of a single planet (or other spherical body). The surface is divided into 32 faces; 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons, all with equal edge length.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?discount=95bf35c96c (softcover print)

A POD print version of the Planetary Display Log Book The print version has a blank globe on the cover (image right), but unfortunately, the glossy cover isn’t very easy to draw on.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?discount=95cf9d2af3 (PDF)

Single page PDF poster with the latitude and longitude lines and the 32 sections.

I hadn’t done anything with the Planetary Display logbook for a few years. But I just re-opened it to check it out again. I found it works very well as a digest (zine) size 5-1/2″ x 8-1/2″ booklet. I also did a re-ordering of pages and printed it in the order “1, 3-40, 2” which might also appeal to you as a better layout.

The discounts on these at DriveThru is good through the end of January.

Tags: #dungeon23, #space23, map making, planet map