What is the Dungeon Year Design Journal?

The Dungeon Year is a daily creative challenge, mental exercise, a game itself, and a moment of meditation. You can start your Dungeon Year on any day in any month, and take as long as you want to complete it.

The idea behind the Dungeon Year is simple: Bring your idea to life, one piece at a time, until you have completed 365 details: rooms, characters, cultures, maps, stars, gods, items, and more.

And when you’re done, perhaps you’ll have a massive interstellar spaceship, a new world to explore, a community of people and their relationships, a city, and yes, even a dungeon.

The Dungeon Year Design Journal is fully compatible with the #dungeon23 design challenge and all of its spinoffs (city23, facility23, npc23, etc.). You can grab the free digital version to get started right now and continue when your journal arrives.

What will you make?

With your help, we can raise the funds to make this journal a reality! The journal's design is complete and ready to go. We created this journal to help you create your own worlds, cities, communities, and universes, and we can't wait to see what you'll make.

Available in two formats

• A massive 200-page A4 sized journal, giving you plenty of room to create anything you desire.
• A condensed 128-page A5 sized journal, condensed into weekly spreads to make the journal more portable.

The digital version of the journal is available for free forever. Want to see what's inside? Or do you want to get a jump start on your own Dungeon Year? Grab the PDF!

How to use the Dungeon Year Journal

Daily Entries The day entries are what makes up most of this journal. 365 entries in total. The entries are condensed into 52 weekly spreads in the Condensed version of the journal. Each entry has a place for you to write your notes, encounters, tables, or descriptions, and a grid for drawing and sketching. At the top of each entry is a place for an ID, Date, and Connection. In the ID field, give your day’s entry a unique identifier or number that you can reference elsewhere in the journal if needed. This can be as simple as the page number, or the date. Connections are what this individual thing connects to. If it’s a room in a dungeon, it’s the adjoining room IDs. If it’s an NPC, perhaps the connection is the building they're in, or who they have a relationship with.

Day Tracker Each day that you work in your design journal, tick off a day on the tracker. We have designed the tracker to be used either as a simple counter, or as a calendar. How you use it is up to you. When you fill the tracker up, your Dungeon Year is complete. Dot Grid Paper The dot grid pages are a perfect spot to sketch out the larger concepts of what you’re trying to make, or as a place to put it all together. For instance, if you were making a city, once a week, you can take what you made in each daily entry and add it to the city map that you're building on the grid.

Tables & Generators

When you need a source of inspiration, turn to the tables, generators, prompts, and oracle provided in the journal.

Most tables are ‘d66’ tables. To use them, roll two six sided dice. One acts as the tens place, the other the ones place. For example, if you roll a 3 and a 6, look up the “36” position on the table.

You can combine results from multiple tables, but whatever the outcome of rolling on a table, use what you like, and change or discard what you don’t. These resources are there to help you - not restrict you.

The Condensed Version

The condensed version of the journal is a bit smaller and contains 128 pages instead of 200, but still has all the instructions and tables the full-size version does. However, instead of daily entries, each spread is condensed into weeks.

Stretch Goals, Funding, and Fulfillment

This is our first crowdfunding project, and as such, we are keeping it streamlined and low risk - that means we are not taking on stretch goals. We're doing this to ensure that our focus is getting you this wonderful journal to your hands as quickly as possible.

The money raised will go towards printing, distribution, and fulfillment of the journals and setting the journals up to be available in the future at your favorite retailers.

Before backing this project, please see our FAQ for important information on estimated shipping costs, VAT, and import taxes.

About Pandion Games

Pandion Games is a tabletop design studio based in Greenville, South Carolina, best known for Badger + Coyote and Banda's Grove.

They make story-based games using unique mechanics, from horror to pastoral, that often explore storytelling in games without the need of combat. To date, Pandion Games has released 6 games, 5 of which are in print and available at your favorite online retailers and many local game stores. Three of our games made Indie Press Revolution's 2022 Q3 Bestseller's list.