What's Next for Brinefathom Caves
Happy new year, me hearties!
2024 is over, and Brinefathom Caves is done...ish. The content is there, but it's not really playable in its current state, both because the information is scattered across 366+ Tumblr posts and because I deliberately avoided putting hard stats on anything to avoid getting bogged down. My goal for 2025 is to edit this beast into a playable state, with eventual (e)publication in mind. The finished project will be PWYW--it's nice if someone wants to kick a couple bucks my way, but I'd rather get played than get paid, y'know?
As a proof of concept for this, I've rewritten all the level 1 rooms to a more user-friendly format with stated DCs for checks and saves. Below is a link to a Mega folder with the resulting PDF. It's still very much a work in progress--I haven't done an editing pass beyond spellcheck, for instance.
The list of specific things I want to do this year include:
Rewrite the rest of the dungeon rooms in this format
Create clean digital copies of all maps
Write faction and NPC information for levels 2-6
Expand the minidungeons in the level 4 wavecrawl with playable rooms
Create a small hexcrawl for the surface of the island
Detail the island's port town and some NPCs who live there
Create stats for unique monsters and NPCs
Write procedures for the megadungeon play elements that 5e lacks, like dungeon turns
Probably some other stuff I haven't even thought of yet
So that's, uh, a lot! We'll see how my work ethic holds up without the day-to-day pace of dungeon24, but finishing made me pretty confident in my ability to handle the kind of workload that comes with a large dungeon.
One thing I'm not sure I'll do is go back and do full-map roundups of the lower levels. I really fell off doing that at some point, sorry. Right now, I want to move forward trying to get everything shipshape for publishing rather than spend time on more intermediate content. However, if anyone really missed having those roundups, please let me know. If there's demand for it, I'll happily do the extra work.
If anybody uses material from Brinefathom (especially from the PDF above, but also just in general), I'd love to hear your feedback! I lack the time and resources to playtest a megadungeon, so while I'm doing my best in editing--I swear past me forgot the difference between 4e and 5e encounter balance half the time--having outside perspectives is a huge help.
Finally, thanks again to everyone who followed along for the past year of dungeoncraft. Whether you started reading in January or December, you all made doing this so much more rewarding.