A Dungeon Synth Festival, Ambient Music & Video Games

Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #18📜 - A Dark Dungeon Festival short review and my friend's music (+ me coding games)

Welcome to Sleepdrifter’s newsletter, now coming to you every other Friday.
Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons.
I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.

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Summary

1. 🏰Dark Dungeon Festival: A European Dungeon Synth Festival

2. 🧙🏼‍♂️What I’m Up To: Coding Stuff & Playing Games (Like The Original Rogue)

A short and more musical newsletter this week, as I was more taken with live shows and video games than TTRPG. Hope you’ll like it anyway 😉

🏰Dark Dungeon Festival: A European Dungeon Synth Festival

The Dark Dungeon Festival III Poster

2 weeks ago was the event that all Dungeon Synth enthusiasts of Western Europe were waiting for: The Dark Dungeon Festival III. It took place on October 10th and 11th, in the Avouerie of Anthisne, a Belgium dungeon (I already spoke about what is a European dungeon in this newsletter if you are curious).
2 days, 14 Dungeon Synth bands, cool beers and great food!

It was my second time here and as the last one was a blast, I decided to go back again to get my yearly dose of this nerdy music I love.
The place’s whole ambiance suits the music well, you literally are inside an old dungeon, with wood and stone everywhere along with tapestries. This is also probably the only festival where you can find people with D&D backpatches on their battle jackets instead of any metal or rock band.
The scene is quite intimate with no more than, I would say, 150 people at the max for this year.

And this was a special year.
As the castle was shut down for renovation, the Dark Dungeon Festival was put to a pause and revived at the very last moment. So the organisation was a bit different, with fewer big Dungeon Synth names and fewer people, but it was great and lovely nonetheless.

The Dark Dungeon Festival T-Shirt for this edition, by Joan Llopis

As usual, it was very cool to be with people who love this very niche musical genre and mood. It’s always a pleasure to search among all the tapes available at the merch stand and to find a lot of project names that you like.
The festival tickets always come with a very cool T-shirt designed by talented artist Joan Llopis.

There was one concert at a time with almost half an hour between each, which is the perfect way to be able to see every band at a not so quick pace, and not so slow. You always had time to go to the toilet and drink a beer, then the whole time to watch the live show.
Almost all the bands were playing with a backdrop, often animated with beautiful scenery or amazing drawings. All of them were suited up for such a scenery: hooded figures, masked performers, arcanic wizards and even an owl and a barbarian were found on stage, embodied by the musician. This was fun!

I won’t detail every live show of the festival, but my top 3 were SvampPrinsen, Silencio Permanente and Fragmented Memories who all played some great music, often with real synths on stage (as a musician, full PC shows are not to my taste…) and with very cool scenery.

We spent the whole weekend at the festival, sleeping in our friend’s van (he got a 2 adults bed so we chose his van instead of ours) and we had a great time. It’s a quiet village, and the castle looks grim from the outside, everything that we love! It was a fun weekend despite driving 1800 kms (1118 miles) to travel on 4 days because of the 35 years old van speed 😀

I hope the Dark Dungeon Festival will happen next year and that there will be a lot of Dungeon Synth projects that I wish I could see live!

🧙🏼‍♂️What I’m Up To: Coding Stuff, Playing Games & My Friend’s Ambient Show

An image I’ve drawn for Lost In A Forest, a micro TTRPG I’ve released at the beginning of 2025 (I didn’t know what to put here as an illustration…)

I must admit that I’m feeling kind of uninspired these last weeks. I haven’t played any TTRPGs nor have I written or created anything for this hobby. Writing this newsletter was also kind of painful in a way, with not a lot to tell despite having a one month break. Struggling to focus myself on a single task probably doesn’t help, as it is quite essential for solo playing and for writing things.
Don’t worry though, I’m not saying I quit TTRPGs, I still read articles about this and rules from other games, while writing some ideas in my gigantic “ideas” Google Doc.

The only thing that keeps me inspired lately was coding stuff. I love coding things (see my previous newsletter about it) and mainly video games, and this is something I always loved. The fact is, I never go beyond the prototype stage for anything I’ve coded, and this time feels a little different.
The project I’m working on is the first one that looks doable and I would love to finish it, just to be able to say that “I’ve made a video game”.

On the other hand, video games are a subject that I struggle to handle in my newsletter. You are probably reading this because you love TTRPG, and I really don’t know if I should speak more, or less, about video games here.

That said, here are the games I have played lately:

• Valheim (PC/Xbox): In our intense research of good couch co-op games to play with my SO, we found Valheim, a crafting open-world kind of RPG game where you play as a Viking in “purgatory”. You craft your gears, tools and house while fighting beasts and Nordic monsters. We’re having a blast playing it thanks to the cross-platform capability of the game (I’m on the PC, while my SO is on the Xbox).

• Endless Sky (Android port/ PC): A free open-source and open-world Sci-Fi space opera, where you play as a spaceship captain. You can literally do whatever you want: be a miner, a pirate, a merchant, a mercenary etc etc. It’s really cool and fun, yet time consuming as you lose track of time easily with this kind of game. I play it on Android when I’m home away, then I upload my save to my PC and continue the game on Steam when I come home. I love it!

• Resident Evil Gaiden (Game Boy Color): One of my childhood games. I remember playing it on my bed, chilling along its weird chiptune music and amazing zombie pixel art. It’s not the greatest Resident Evil, it’s not the greatest Game Boy Color game, but it’s a fun one with cool and simple gameplay.

• Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead (PC): I’m a Roguelike guy, so when it comes to delve hours into those kinds of games, you can count me in. Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead (CDDA) makes no exception. This survival horror old-school Roguelike is probably one of the most complete and complex games ever made, along with other Roguelike such as Dwarf Fortress or Caves Of Qud, and it’s free! The vibe is unmatched and it came with a twist, you’ll probably encounter way more than zombies in your run.

• Rogue (DOS): Yeah, the original one. The one that is named for the whole Roguelike genre, often confused with Roguelite. Nethack, Moria, ADOM, CDDA, Dwarf Fortress and other weird ASCII games are Roguelike ; The Binding Of Isaac, Balatro, Vampire Survivor and Hades are Roguelite. I love both though, but they are different types of games with some similarities. But back to Rogue, this game is still amazing despite its really old age (1980, that’s old for a video game). This is a true dungeon delving game with a great gameplay and an amazing replayability for its time. I should make a full section about it in a future newsletter, because the whole genre is one of my biggest hobbies along with TTRPG.

Jinkstraüm Live

The Dark Dungeon Festival wasn’t the only musical event I attended these last weeks.
Last Friday, my friend Jinkstraüm was playing his first ambient/drone gig with his homemade modular synth. It was a new step in his musical career and a new way to craft soundscapes and textures.
The whole concert was pretty beautiful and inspiring. It was a real pleasure to see a friend bringing his art to life with all the new skills he learned these last years. Can’t wait to see him play again!

As Jinkstraüm is very prolific, he released a new Split-Album along with another friend of mine CLMTT, who goes more into the Noise and Harsh Noise genre. You can listen to it here on Bandcamp.

That’s it for this week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀

See you!

Cheers !
Sleepdrifter

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