It’s no secret that I’m drawn to so-called “difficult” ergodic texts. I regularly cite books like House Of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts, and The Unfortunates as among some of my favourites and some of the books that are the most influential on me.

I’ve been wanting to do something weird with dungeons laid out purely as text for a while, and tomorrow’s update is my first attempt at doing that. The central conceit of A Month Of Misery is that we’re reading the transcribed journals of our wayward monk. As he gets further into his journey - drawing further from the safety of his home, and deeper into the unknown - I intend for the text to fall apart more and more, becoming weirder and more difficult to read.

House Of Leaves does an excellent job of getting us lost in the labyrinth of the Navidson house through text formatting (especially as it leads us through a labyrinth of its own in the footnotes). I very much wanted to channel that energy, but I also wanted to make sure that this dungeon would be usable in play (at least a little bit, anyway). One of my first steps when I set out to tackle a difficult layout challenge is to gather references, and so I started looking into things for this.

I very quickly discovered that Christian Eichhorn has actually done something like what I’m attempting with this dungeon in his Dungeoneer’s Black Book. There’s a dungeon in here (Dr. Grigoriy’s most disturbing Laboratory Warren, on pages 10 to 17) that does almost exactly what I was envisioning for Kratar Markat’s tomb. The text is laid out in a way that evokes the layout of the dungeon, and the room entries act as their own map.

The dungeon in today’s release looks a lot like Christian’s, and I wanted to make sure that I acknowledged his influence on it. Mine is much scrappier, much less “put together”-looking, which is by design. It’s less functional, harder to use in play, because it’s meant to be the panicked scribblings of a monk fleeing for his life, and because that chaotic House of Leaves vibe is something I’m still aiming for. For that reason I’ve also included an Appendix with a more traditional map and room keys.

Enjoy!