A short announcement video, dungeon synth playing underneath it, in which Daniel (@dungeondive) reads out the details of a festival he is about to become part of. Dungeon Siege West is the west-coast debut of a festival that had already worked in Worcester, Massachusetts — three days in November at a vegan bar and grill on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, with tabletop RPG sessions from five to nine each evening and live dungeon synth from nine until one.
He explains the genre’s lineage in a sentence: dungeon synth spawned from the nineties black metal underground and turned out to be the ideal accompaniment to role-playing games and fantasy fiction. The bill he reads spans epic medieval soundscapes, old-school dungeon synth, 8-bit, dark ambient ritual and neoclassical soundtrack work.
The part that matters for the channel is that he is going, as the Dungeon Dive’s sole representative, to run games on the first two nights. His three picks are deliberate: Escape the Dark Castle to open each session because it suits a convention perfectly, Secrets of the Lost Tomb using a scenario from an expansion nobody can buy any more, and Darklight: Memento Mori as the best modern representation of old-school crawling. He wants this to become a recurring thing.
There is also a quiet aside worth catching: he has written and recorded over forty ambient albums across twenty-odd years, and points listeners at his own Bandcamp.
Daniel picked three games for a four-hour convention slot on the grounds that two of them are hard to find and deserve to be seen. What would you bring to a table of strangers — the crowd-pleaser, or the thing nobody else owns?