Collaboration is the soul of TTRPGs

The TTRPG space is full of amazing, creative people, this is not a secret. Many of them could be considered geniuses - although I'm not going to name anyone in particular as this is not my first day on the internet, you can think of whoever you deem worthy of such title - but in my opinion what creates the best results, be it games, modules, art, actual plays, whatever, is the collaboration.

Collaboration is what leads to the best results, to the most original ones, because it's the output of multiple minds coming together and creating something a single brain, no matter how brilliant, will never be able to.

Where am I getting with this? Here:

Let's start from the beginning: on the 1st of January 2025 Idle Cartulary published The Zungeon Manifesto, rallying fellow TTRPG (and especially OSR) aficionados to stop listening to our inner demons telling us we weren't "good enough" to write content and to make a simple zine containing a dungeon - a zungeon, and entering it into the Zungeon Jam 2025 for all to see.

At the time I had recently joined Bluesky, and I was tempted by that very idea, so I did start making one (which I ended up publishing about a month later), and at the same time many other people did the same. One person who had a different idea, though, was JFUR, who came up with the idea of a collaborative zungeon following the blueprint of the Exquisite Corpse, a concept I wasn't familiar with that they explained in this blog post: essentially a group project where each participant is given a few prompts to develop on their own, and then the group coming together to achieve something gameable from those prompts. I had just entered the OSR sphere, I didn't know anyone and I'm a shy person, but I thought 'What the hell!' and decided to try, thinking it would be fun.

It was, much more than I expected.

In the end 13 people, me included, joined this project, wrote the prompts, helped with their expertise in their fields, be it editing, art, layout - I wrote the last room of the zungeon - and the result is The Court of the Shivering Moon, of which I am really proud of: this shows what we were able to come up with by working together, each of us bringing our strength to the project.

The reception has been quite positive: Idle Cartulary herself has written on her blog a review, praising our group efforts:

I’m super impressed by the cohesiveness of this collaborative effort. I’ve spoken before about how it’s challenging to bring a collaborative dungeon together in a cohesive whole, and while this is a fairly small dungeon example, it’s exciting to see that it’s possible.

I don't think this is the end of our group efforts. Our Discord server (well, technically JFUR's) is still open, and we are already brainstorming ideas for what our next project might be (shout-out to Nael), so stay tuned. I can't wait to find out myself!

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!
 
May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon

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