Lore 24

It’s now only three more weeks until the start of 2024, so it’s probably high time to get some promotion for this idea going.

I think most people in the DIYRPG space are familiar with Dungeon 23, the big project to write up one room for a big megadungeon every day for all of 2023. While it was hugely popular (at least on Mastodon) in January and February, coming up with a whole new dungeon room every day was a mighty ambitious plan. A few people seem to have made it nearly all the way to the end now, but most have dropped out long ago, and I heard from several other people that they also never started with it because the whole thing seemed just too big from the start.

A few weeks back, we had some conversations on Mastodon about doing something similar in 2024, but for worldbuilding on a campaign setting instead of rooms for a megadungeon.

The whole idea is fairly simple and straightforward:

• Come up with a general concept for a new campaign setting or take any setting you already done some work on and want to expand upon.
• For every day in 2024, write up a description of one thing that exists in that world. Could be a place, a creature, a spell, a character, an item, a deity, an event, or whatever you can think of.
• The purpose of it all is to practice turning vague ideas in your mind into concrete words that can be shared with other people. The entry of the day should of course be something that you’ve written up on that day, but the idea that you’re describing does not necessarily have to be a completely new one. It can just as well be an old idea that you never got to properly put into words before.
• The entry of the day can take any length or format. Could be as short as a post on Mastodon, or a full page description with stats for your game system of choice, or anything in between.

Personally, I see two main goals in doing something like this. One is that in my experience, ideas become much more concrete and real once you have put them into words, and with that it comes much easier to expand upon them and create connections between the different elements of the world. The other one is to simply share worldbuilding ideas with other people. Small snippets of things that you think are cool and that other people might use as ideas for new things in their own settings. The goal is not so much to have a complete setting finished at the end of the year that is ready to play in. There should be no commitment to treat any of the entries you write as an established fact of the world from that point onward. If at a later point you get ideas for things that would overwrite something you’ve written and shared before, I would not bother about that and just ignore any inconsistencies and conflicts between the entries. If at the end of the year (or even any earlier point) you end up with a big heap of spelled out ideas from which you’ll take only half or a third to use for the world of a future campaign, I would still consider that a huge success.

After some discussion, most people bouncing around ideas seem to be quite happy with using the name Lore 24 for this entire undertaking. It’s short, snappy, and makes for a good hashtag. Which is already being used on Mastodon. With this being a thing that is supposed to be done every day starting at day 1, it really would be great to spread the word about it now in advance as much as possible.

If this idea sounds fun and interesting to you, please do what you can to promote it. Feel free to link to this post if you want to.