Announcing: The Dunmør Gazetteer!
Want to know more about Dunmør (and/or other stuff I’m working on?), join the Mac Makes Things Discord (formerly the Discord of the Midden Vale)!
Apologies for the word vomit below. Apparently I can get pretty… verbose.
Shortly after finishing up Rangers of the Midden Vale HodagRPG reached out to me about another project that we could work on together. The details were vague and every shifting as we fired off Discord messages back and forth, but there was one constant: we wanted to call it Dunmør. I don’t know if it was the weird slash through the “o” or something, but the name just felt right (sorry if that sounds too nerdy). Hell, Hodag even went as far as to draw up a bunch of “trading cards” for Dunmør that were sent off with random Rangers of the Midden Vale packages just to get the word out.
So what exactly is Dunmør? Well first it was going to be a system and setting all wrapped into one. There were some things I loved about Rangers and some things I wasn’t as amped about that I’d like to change, so I wanted to cut my teeth on game design again. That wound up being short lived because, frankly, there’s already a lot of awesome OSE/R systems out there and I wasn’t exactly adding anything of particular interest or value to the scene. It was a hard call to make, but one that I’m ultimately happy to have made.
We still had a lot of content - some names, setting notes, and even an awesome map by Red Bear Maps. There was too much good stuff to completely scrap, so Hodag and I decided to rework things. Instead of it being a setting, Dunmør was going to become a hexcrawl. Rather than create a new system to add to the hundreds (if not thousands) already out there, I decided to write it with T. Thomas Giant’s As Above, So Below in mind. It’s a system I was already very familiar with since Giant is the GM/Referee at most of the tables I join, it was inspired heavily by Knave, Into the Odd, and Cairn so I knew that by writing the hexcrawl for As Above, So Below I’d be making an adventure that could be easily converted over to those three systems. And, admittedly, I also knew that if I had any questions about gaming syntax for the system I could just pester Giant on Discord.
So with a new direction envisioned, I reached out to T. Thomas Giant and he was kind enough to make a map for me (pictured below) that could be used as a starting point for a hexcrawl. Being an eager young creator I decided on an impractical 195 hexes, each of which would have one “location” to check out. Hodag and I came up with brief descriptions of the different sites players could check out and I got to work on fleshing some of them out, running the sandbox for some friends of mine to help encourage me to do some additional writing. Unfortunately my schedule became too busy to regularly run those sessions and the scope of project proved to be too much and it joined countless others on the backburner while I focused my attentions on Bullets & Bourbon: Reloaded for ZiMo23.
The original map, with 195 different hexes to explore. Proved to be too much for an initial project like this, so it was downsized.
Once ZiMo23 wrapped up, I was left without a major project. I have The Castle of the Mad Sorcerer Ossifrage going on as part of Dungeon ‘23, but that’s only one room each day, leaving me with plenty of time to try in vain to scribble things down so the voices in my head stop yammering. I decided to revisit Dunmør, and after talking with both Hodag and Giant decided that it was a project worth pursuing, but at a smaller, more manageable level. I printed out an 8 x 11 hexgrid I found online and redrew the map by hand (a hobby I’ve enjoyed since Middle School) in a similar style to the “official” (read: the one in the rulebook) map of the Midden Vale. Already the map was smaller and more manageable, but I went a step further and gave myself plenty of blank space in the form of a sea on the northern border to accompany the waters to the east. I figured if Dunmør was meant to be a hinterland or frontier, I’d put it at the “ends of the earth.”
After a few days of drawing I was quite happy, shared it with Hodag and Giant, and decided to get back to work.
The second iteration of the Dunmør map, this one considerably more manageable from a content perspective.
Most of the original sites Hodag and I came up with were still completely usable, so I spent a few days going through each entry we had written and found the best location on the new map. Instead of one “location” in each hex, there were now two (with a few exceptions, namely the village hexes). I figured this gave potential players reasons to return to hexes after their initial pass through. I’ll probably come up with some tables (I do love tables) to generate random, smaller locations based on terrain type for more replayability, but that’s a project for another day.
Unfortunately, shortly after putting the initial document together I was hit with the overwhelming sense of “there’s too much work to do, where do I start?” and promptly shoved Dunmør back on to the backburner, for what was at this point the fifth or sixth time. Poor Dunmør, never going to catch a break…
… or would it? (It would, I don’t know why I’m trying to be clever here). After talking with Giant and getting my hands on a few smaller hexcrawls I decided to turn Dunmør into a gazetteer, allowing me to break it into smaller, more manageable chunks. The map had already been broken down into four semi-official regions: the Ünland, Seamarch, the Wikkenwood, and the Tharosi Wilds (previously the Tharosi Valley, but the change in topography required an update to the name). Even better, the four regions were roughly the same size, which will ideally allow each “issue” to be similar in size and scope!
I don’t know if it was the attainable goal that did it or something else, but I wrote the rough draft of Issue #1: The Ünland in a week or two, including the creation of three mini-dungeons (something I still think I’m pretty mediocre at putting together) and we’ve got a good and proper dungeon written by Giant on the way. The other three gazetteers will have something similar: a few smaller dungeons (one or two levels) and then a much larger one to serve as a capstone of sorts.
If we play our cards right, Issue #1: will be ready for ZiMo24, with Issue #2 crowdfunding in Fall 2024, Issue #3 popping up in ZiMo25, and Issue #4 crowdfunding in Fall 2025. I want to get as much of the writing and art completed as possible beforehand so the turnaround time is minimized. Giant and I got NUKED! out pretty quickly thanks to having most of the assets ready before we hit the go button on the itch campaign and I’d like to do that again.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough for one post, so we’ll call this the close. If you’re interested in checking out what we’ve got going on with the Dunmør Gazetteer so far, feel free to download the rough draft and join the Discord server. I’ll likely post about this project again, maybe getting into some of the details of the world itself if for no other reason than to give the ability to share some details that probably won’t make it into the final products. Thanks for reading!
