Category: Being a Referee

The Dungeon d100s: Doors, Floors, Walls & Ceilings

(An Italian translation of this post is available on Dragons’ Lair)

It has been my experience that even the most creatively written dungeons tend to ignore the opportunity to be creative with their basic building blocks. This isn’t the worst thing. Stone walls and wood doors work. Dungeons don’t exist to be flashy, they exist to channel play into interesting situations. That said, something as simple as giving your dungeon carpeted floors and steel doors goes a long way towards making it memorable. After being introduced those details can easily slip into the background, until brought forward again when the Magic User tries to power up their Lightning Bolt by rubbing their socks on the carpet.

Because this table is made up of details which are meant to slip into the background, I have specifically indicated that each results applies to everything of its type. That’s just my framing, though. If you roll “Floors are carpeted,” it is worth considering that instead of all the floors, perhaps only some are carpeted. Alternatively it may be that all floors in a particular section are carpeted. For that matter you might also consider that if the floors are carpeted, what does that say about the walls? The ceilings? Are they carpeted as well, or do they have some other styling which seems like an appropriate accompaniment to carpeted floors?

Thanks are due to Qpop for proof reading this post.

The Dungeon d100s
1 – Themes
2 – Structures
3 – Rewards
4 – Doors, Floors, Walls, & Ceilings
5 – Factions
6 – Locks & Keys

Bonus – Auto-roller, at Liche’s Libram.

d100 Dungeon Doors, Floors, Walls & Ceilings:

  1. Doors are all heavy portculli. They are difficult to lift, and will slam shut again the moment they are released unless special care is taken to brace them.
  2. Doors open automatically whenever someone comes near them, and automatically close again behind them.
  3. Doors are all quite small, requiring adult humans to crouch or crawl to pass through.
  4. Doors all swing freely in either direction, like saloon doors do (also called batwing doors).
  5. Doors all have windows in them. Perhaps open bars or safety glass which can only be looked through, or perhaps easily broken plate glass.
  6. Doors all have windows in them which advantage viewing from a single side, such as peep holes, or sliding hatches.
  7. Doors are all terribly noisy when opened or closed. Perhaps their hinges squeak, or maybe each has a chime attached to it.
  8. Doors have arms on the hinge side, allowing them to be barred. Some or all may even have bars nearby ready to be put in place.
  9. Doors are all high up on the walls, and must be climbed up to.
  10. Doors are all trapdoors in the floor or ceiling. Thus even rooms on the same dungeon level are connected by passages above or below.
  11. Doors are all one-way. They close behind each person who passes through them, and cannot be opened from the other side.
  12. Doors are all revolving doors, with “wings” that rotate around a central pivot point. There may be 2 or more of these, creating separated sections between them.
  13. Doors are all open doorways, without any way of being closed.
  14. Doors are all insubstantial. Hanging drapes, or strings of beads. Just enough to block clear sight, but not sound or entry.
  15. Doors are all rollup style, like a garage door. The rails which guide and hold it might be exposed, or could be enclosed within the wall.
  16. Doors all have a stable door style, with upper and lower halves. (Also called Dutch Doors.)
  17. Doors all have smaller “wicket doors” built into them. (Are the wicket doors for creatures smaller than humans, or are the proper doors for masses of humans / large creatures?)
  18. Doors all have a lower lip to step over as you go through them, like those found on ships.
  19. Doors are all air tight, and opened via a time consuming turn crank or wheel.
  20. Doors are all airlock chambers, with air tight doors on each side, and a space between where characters must wait. The airlocks might exist because the rooms are kept at different temperatures or pressure levels, or because their atmospheres contain trace elements which are dangerous when mixed, or potentially for no reason at all.
  21. Doors are all janky, old, and often get stuck.
  22. Doors are all locked, barred, or otherwise intentionally sealed. Some creatures may carry key rings, key cards, know passwords, etc.
  23. Doors are all sliding doors.
  24. Doors are all folding doors, to one or both sides.
  25. Doors are all double doors.
  26. Doors all have sticky notes, thumbtacks, or doodles on them. Clearly they’re being used as a means of casual communication between dungeon inhabitants.
  27. Doors are made in the style of oversize pet doors. Great flaps which must be lifted as one passes through, and fall back down behind.
  28. Floors are carpeted.
  29. Floors are all slippery, perhaps covered in goo, or ice.
  30. Floors are a raised constructed path through a natural space. Like a catwalk through a cave, or a pontoon walkway along a canal.
  31. Floors are packed earth, or so thoroughly covered in dirt that they may as well be packed earth.
  32. Floors are sandy, snowy, or otherwise provide awkward and unstable footing.
  1. Floors are bouncy. They might be springy lick a trampoline or mattress, or they may have been coated in flubber.
  2. Floors all have drains in them, and are gently sloped so water will run towards these drains.
  3. Floors have dry channels running at their edges, perhaps once used as gutters, or ruts for wheels.
  4. Floors are cracked and uneven. Footing is poor, and dropped items may be lost.
  5. Floors have many weeds growing up through them, perhaps dense enough to occasionally tangle feet during vigorous action.
  6. Floors are loose tiles or boards which can be removed easily.
  7. Floors are noisy: metal plates, creaking timbers, or covered in dry leaves.
  8. Floors all have paths to various locations painted on them, like you might see in an airport or train station.
  9. Floors are solid marble.
  10. Floors are angled steeply to one side, as if the dungeon is tilted at a 20°+ angle.
  11. Oops! All pressure plates! There is nowhere to step that doesn’t depress with an ominous mechanical click.
  12. Floors move those who stand on them. They may be conveyor belts, or be under the influence of magical riptides.
  13. Floors are scattered with toys. Dolls, balls, bicycles, left scattered haphazardly about.
  14. Floors have a rail system built on them. There may be mine carts or handcars.
  15. Floors are wet, soggy, or perhaps even covered in ankle-deep water.
  16. Floors are very wet. The water is at least waist high. A boat may be required.
  17. Floors are fragile. Glass, or ice. One must tread carefully lest it crack, and drop them into danger, or simply into a lower level.
  18. Floors are metal grating.
  19. There is no proper floor. One must traverse the rooms and corridors by hopping between stepping stones.
  20. Floors are pointy, covered in caltrops, broken glass, or nails mounted as spikes.
  21. Floors are covered in detritus and trash. It may be omnipresent but scattered, or so dense that one’s feet sink into it.
  22. Walls are easily destructible, perhaps made of rice paper.
  23. Walls are dense with written language. It could be intended carvings, modern graffiti, or science fictiony scrolling text.
  24. Walls are dense with art, perhaps carved bas relief, or murals.
  25. Walls are dense with holes, cupboards, drawers, or animal burrows. These are mostly empty, gross, dangerous, or filled with useless junk.
  26. Walls are dense with buttons, switches, and other controls. Some don’t do anything, others seem to cause random events to occur. Insert your favorite random table here.
  27. Walls are dense with shelves displaying tchotchkes. Ceramic figurines, papercraft, old toys, fake flowers. Objects which once brought someone joy, but now serve only to collect dust.
  28. Walls are plaster, and perhaps covered with wallpaper. The pattern could be nearly anything.
  29. Walls are densely stacked with bones.
  30. Walls have regularly spaced air vents built into them, which are too small to climb into.
  31. Walls have regularly spaced air vents built into them, which are large enough to climb into.
  32. Walls are very smooth. Not even the most skilled climber could find handholds.
  33. Walls are rough. Even a complete novice can climb them with relative ease.
  34. Walls are padded. Perhaps thoroughly so to prevent injury, as in an asylum. Alternately they may be fine tufted leather or velvet, meant to create an air of sophistication.
  1. Walls often have windows into adjacent spaces. These might be glass, wicker, barred with metal, tiny arrow slits, etc.
  2. Walls are periodically interrupted by half columns which could be used for cover.
  3. Walls are constructed of a thick bramble, like blackberry bushes.
  4. Something icky oozes out of the walls. Slime, blood, or more feculent excretions.
  5. Walls are limited force fields. They might keep air in, and water/vacuum/monsters out. However, if one were to stumble, they’d go right through, and may not be able to get back.
  6. Walls are constructed of poorly mortared bricks, many of which are loose.
  7. Walls are made from honeycomb, shellac, or other insect excretion.
  8. Walls on the interior of the dungeon are all metal bars. They can be seen through, reached through, and for particularly small characters possibly squeezed through.
  9. Walls are dangerous to touch. Perhaps because they are very hot or cold, are dense with sharp protrusions, or charged with electricity.
  10. Walls and Ceilings can be walked on as easily as floors.
  11. Walls are great ramshackle heaps of junk. Oak tables nailed to bed frames, densely stacked chairs, supported by cast iron bath tubs, and insulated with soiled mattresses.
  12. Ceilings have pipes running along them.
  13. Ceiling leaks. Probably water, but perhaps fluids less wholesome.
  14. Ceilings have thick roots protruding through them from plants up above.
  15. Ceilings are low. Human sized creatures will need to hunch, or even crawl to get through.
  16. Ceilings have cameras, crystal balls, or disgusting organic eyes on them. It’s unclear who (if anyone) is observing.
  17. Ceilings are high enough that most light sources cannot illuminate them. What might lurk up there?
  18. Ceilings are mirrored.
  19. Ceilings have skylights or open shafts in them, which partially illuminate the dungeon.
  20. Ceilings do not exist. The dungeon is open to the sky, perhaps with some danger on top of the walls preventing easily cheating one’s way through the dungeon.
  21. Ceilings are covered by colorful drapes. These might be bright and tidy, or soiled and tattered.
  22. Ceilings are home to a number of birds who’ve made their nests in the dungeon.
  23. Ceilings are covered in sleeping bats, or docile insects. If disturbed they will swarm.
  24. Ceilings are covered in loose paneling, which could be pushed aside to access a crawlspace above.
  25. Ceiling has exposed rafters.
  26. Ceilings are made up of something which, if the laws of physics were being obeyed, ought to immediately collapse. Something like water, or loose sand.
  27. Ceiling has regularly placed fans, which may or may not operate.
  28. Ceilings droop precariously, and are supported by ramshackle post hoc construction.
  29. Ceilings have footprints on them.
  30. Ceilings are coated in a weird and dense mist. If it is dangerous to breathe, it is at least too high to be accidentally inhaled.
  31. Ceilings are dense with hanging chains, hooks, pulleys, and rails.
  32. Ceilings are metal of a peculiar color. Anything which hits them bounces directly away without losing energy.
  33. Ceilings are dense with hanging papercrafts clearly made by children.
  34. Ceilings are dense with precarious icicles or stalactites, ready to drop dangerously if jostled.

Also, All Cops Are Bastards.

The Dungeon d100s: Structures

(An Italian translation of this post is available on Dragons’ Lair)

This table focuses specifically on cartographic prompts. The goal is to add both visual interest to your maps, and functional differences to your dungeon. It’s is challenging to clearly communicate lines on paper when my only tool is words, so I must thank Elias Stretch and PresGas for both taking a pass on this doc to ensure it was comprehensible. Thanks are also due to Dyson Logos, whose maps I studied extensively while filling out the back half of this table. I’ve also used clippings of his maps for the illustrations in this post. (Specifically: Coolant Processing Facility, Dwarven Mines, and Kins River Cave.)

The Dungeon d100s
1 – Themes
2 – Structures
3 – Rewards
4 – Doors, Floors, Walls, & Ceilings
5 – Factions
6 – Locks & Keys

Bonus – Auto-roller, at Liche’s Libram.

d100 Dungeon Structures:

  1. Layout is mirrored on one or more axis. (Roll a d6?)
  2. Layout is shaped like something, such as a dog, an axe, a word, a hand, etc.
  3. Layout must conform to the shape of some object the dungeon is built within, such as an outcropping of stone, a titan’s skull, a colossal statue, a world tree, etc.
  4. Layout is open concept, with many mini-dungeons all connected to the same central space, or with dungeon spaces being separated by distance and low visibility (mist, woodland) rather than by walls.
  5. Layout is a rising or descending spiral. For example: a path carved around the outside of a steep hill, or around the edge of a quarry.
  6. Layout combines both natural and constructed spaces.
  7. Layout is built in and around some more ancient construction, so that two or more distinct architectural styles are evident.
  8. Layout has been modified by amateur dungeon denizens digging out new corridors and chambers, knocking holes everywhere, and getting around on ladders and rope bridges.
  9. Layout includes rooms or corridors which overlap one another while nominally being on the same level of the dungeon. (i.e., the same sheet of graph paper).
  10. Layout includes varied room shapes which serve as indicators of their contents. For example, circular rooms might always contain magical traps, octagonal rooms might be claimed by a specific faction, etc.
  11. Layout is built in and around a massive corpse of some kind. A neolithic mega crab, a dead titan, a cosmic snail shell, etc.
  12. Laid out as several separate clusters of dense dungeon, connected to one another by long corridors.
  13. Layout adheres to a certain regular structure. Perhaps a grid of broad corridors forming “blocks” of square dungeon space between them, or the dungeon could be a connected set of geomorphs.
  14. Layout includes an exploration bottleneck. A single corridor or room at which all the dungeon’s tangled pathways converge before opening up again on the other side.
  15. Layout is separated into 2 or more disconnected parts, such that delvers must pass through non dungeon space to reach different areas of the same dungeon.
  16. A river flows through the dungeon. It may have been intentionally incorporated into the construction, or the result of a natural disaster which broke the original layout.
  17. There’s a pond, lake, or even a sea contained within the dungeon. It may have been intentionally incorporated into the construction, or the result of a natural disaster which broke the original layout.
  18. There’s one or more geysers in the dungeon, which erupt with hot water from time to time. They may have been intentionally incorporated into the construction, or the result of a natural disaster which broke the original layout.
  19. The dungeon contains a pleasant hot spring.
  20. The dungeon is replete with wells, fountains, or other constructed water features.
  21. There’s a body or a river of some hazardous liquid in the dungeon: lava, acid, mercury, etc.
  22. There’s a body of some entrapping liquid in the dungeon, such as quicksand, thick mud, or tar pits.
  23. Some significant portion of the dungeon is underwater. (20% + [d8×10])
  24. Dungeon has a water level which rises and falls dramatically. It may be due to tides, artificial cycles, or controlled by some accessible mechanism.
  25. Numerous small pools of fetid standing water pockmark the dungeon’s layout, breaking up its spaces.
  26. The dungeon abuts a beach, opening out into a hidden cove that is not otherwise accessible. Perhaps with a secret dock, and further dungeon rooms to be found on a nearby island.
  27. Many half walls, fences, or barricades break up the dungeon’s spaces.
  28. Many boulders, pillars, or statues break up the dungeon’s spaces.
  29. Large furniture such as shelves, tables, couches, or beds break up the dungeon’s spaces.
  30. Trees grow in the dungeon, breaking up its spaces. The dungeon may have been built around them, or they may have broken the dungeon’s original structure
  31. The dungeon has moving parts, such as a room which rotates, slides laterally, or moves up and down like an elevator.
  32. Many passageways are unusually narrow, requiring explorers to walk sideways, or remove bulky equipment.
  1. Connections between areas are sometime spatially impossible. Corridors looping back on themselves, or doors leading to the other side of the dungeon, etc.
  2. Vertical movement from level to level is accomplished by some means other than stairs. Climbing ropes, fireman’s poles, ramps, ladders, elevators, levitation chutes, etc.
  3. Greased slides, escalating ladders, trap doors, or elevators create one-way passage to higher or lower dungeon levels.
  4. Some passages are only accessible by swimming underwater.
  5. There are many more stairs than necessary. Stairs everywhere. Hallways go up and down, doors enter rooms above or below ground level, etc.
  6. There is a train, trolley, a system of teleportation pads, warp pipes, or other rapid conveyance through the dungeon
  7. There are meandering, tangled hallways between rooms, perhaps with dead ends.
  8. There are multiple paths up and down between each dungeon level.
  9. Dungeon contains a broad staircase, or grand promenade.
  10. Dungeon contains one or more rickety bridge.
  11. Dungeon contains one or more gap which is crossed by something other than a bridge: a rope, a chain, a basket on a rail, etc.
  12. Dungeon contains one or more balcony, which may look out over a different part of the dungeon, or over some exterior space.
  13. Dungeon contains one or more sky bridge, connecting two dungeon spaces by walking over a different part of the dungeon, or over some exterior space.
  14. The spaces intended to be inhabited are criss-crossed by traversible sewers, air ducts, or maintenance tunnels.
  15. Some areas on the same level do not connect directly, and can only be accessed by traveling through a different level.
  16. Main hallways include alcoves, perhaps originally intended for small statues or sitting spaces.
  17. There’s a natural cliff face in the dungeon. There are rooms above and below, with no intended means to get between them save climbing.
  18. Dilapidation has left several of the dungeon’s non-load-bearing walls weak and easy to knock holes through. Doing so is noisy, and leaves clear sign of passage.
  19. The entrance cannot be used as an exit.
  20. Dungeon’s entrance is a small dock, only accessible by boat.
  21. The entrance is in some public and relatively safe space. The presence of the dungeon might be unknown to most folk, or it may be a landmark which everyone steers clear of.
  22. The entrance is inside the ruins some structure which has long since been razed to the ground.
  23. The entrance requires a perilous climb, preventing quick egress. Perhaps up a cliff, down a well, through a smoke stack, down a crevasse, etc.
  24. The entrance can only be accessed by traversing an inhospitable environment. Perhaps it is deep in a swamp, hidden in a desert, behind a waterfall, or at the bottom of a lake.
  25. The entrance is at the center of the dungeon, with rooms radiating out in every direction.
  26. There is more than one entrance to this dungeon. (Roll 2d4?)
  27. Dungeon includes obvious and useful entrances which are locked from the inside. One must open them by entering first through the most difficult entrance.
  28. Immediately upon entering the dungeon, characters have access to d6 + 1 levels. Perhaps via a central staircase or elevator.
  29. The dungeon has windows, or even whole walls open to the outside. These are likely in areas with a high elevation, and inconvenient as an entrance.
  30. The dungeon includes a connection to the underdark, hell, the hollow earth, or some other new world with its own limitless adventuring possibilities.
  31. An easily destructible wall could create an exit from the dungeon. It is not obvious from the outside, and may even open into some bustling populated space.
  32. The dungeon intersects with d6 structures which are currently in use, but exist apart from the dungeon. For example, the dungeon may grant access to a secret door or peep hole into someone’s home.
  33. Part of the dungeon exists in “duck blinds.” For example, the dungeon might connect to several buildings in a large city which appear normal, but in fact have no real entrances.
  34. Part of the dungeon’s original construction was never completed, leaving inconvenient dead ends, cranes, scaffolding, etc behind.
  1. There are secret doors which connect non-secret areas. Their purpose is to enable quick and subtle movement, rather than to hide treasures.
  2. There are secret doors which are only accessible after falling into a pit trap.
  3. There are false doors, used to frustrate explorers, or disguise traps.
  4. There are traps designed to separate parties into two or more groups.
  5. There are hidden observation spots, where certain areas of the dungeon can be observed unobtrusively.
  6. There are many curtains or tapestries, some of which simply hang against the wall, while others have doors, shelves, or passages hidden behind them.
  7. There’s at least one secret door which is clearly called out by the architecture. For example, stairs leading up to a dead end, or a group of doors with an obvious blank spot.
  8. Dungeon includes many small storage closet sized rooms.
  9. Dungeon includes a section where instead of walls, the rooms and hallways are bounded by a hazardous drop, a lake of fire, or some other hazard.
  10. Dungeon includes walkways around the upper edges of its spaces, perhaps serving as the corridors of an upper level, or firing positions for archers.
  11. Dungeon contains some space where the elevation changes are drastic enough to justify topographical contours.
  12. Dungeon includes a patio, breezeway, gazebo, or other partially enclosed space.
  13. Dungeon includes areas so dilapidated that they are prone to collapse if not traversed carefully. The ceiling may fall in, or the floor may fall down, etc.
  14. Dungeon contains an area clearly meant to be protected or secret, which has long since been forced open.
  15. Above ground levels include towers, keeps, or other enclosed structures which extend upwards from larger levels below.
  16. Dungeon includes an exterior garden or courtyard space, no less dangerous to explore than its interior spaces.
  17. Dungeon contains a space within it which is so large that play ought to switch to overland travel rules while traversing it.
  18. Dungeon contains a large space with individual structures, and perhaps even roads built inside of it.
  19. Dungeon contains an “outdoor” space, such as a garden, woodland, farmland, or a grassy plain. How does this space fit and thrive within a dungeon?
  20. Dungeon is the only way to gain access to a real outdoor space, such as an enclosed valley lush with fertile soil and bounteous plant life.
  21. Dungeon contains a settlement as safe, prosperous, and welcoming as any village the party might encounter on the surface.
  22. A crevasse intersects multiple spaces throughout the dungeon. It might be 10 feet deep and easy to get through, or it may be a great bottomless chasm that only a skilled engineer could bridge. The dungeon may have been intentionally built around it, or it may have been opened up by an earthquake which damaged the dungeon’s intended structure.
  23. Dungeon contains gaps (either intentionally constructed, or the result of damage) which are deep and wide enough to hinder progress. They must be jumped, bridged, swung or flown across, or bypassed by some other creative means.
  24. Dungeon contains spaces which are completely inaccessible via normal means due to collapse, or other dilapidation.
  25. Dungeon contains raised sub-areas, such as a stage, pulpit, natural ledge, or plateau. The upper and lower parts of the room might be connected by ramps, stairs, or ladders. Alternately, they may not be connected directly at all.
  26. Dungeon contains lowered sub-areas, such as gladiatorial arenas, holding pens, or sacrificial pits.
  27. Dungeon contains windows into spaces which are not quickly or obviously accessible from where they are visible. (“window” here being a euphemism, since breaking glass would be easy to do.)
  28. Dungeon contains one or more rooms which intersect with multiple levels.
  29. Dungeon contains one or more rooms with no physical connection to the rest of the dungeon. How do you get there?
  30. Dungeon contains a ship. The stranger it is for a ship to be here, the better.
  31. Dungeon is at least partially reclaimed by nature. Spaces exposed to sunlight have been broken apart by growing trees and other plants.
  32. Dungeon contains a large space where the ‘rooms’ are platforms suspended from the ceiling above a deadly drop.
  33. The roof of the dungeon is accessible, and includes its own creatures, treasures, tricks and traps. Climbing to it from the outside would be difficult, but probably not impossible.
  34. Dungeon includes some spaces with air currents strong enough to be dangerous. They may be natural, such as a walk along a cliffside path, or produced artificially by fans or magic.

Also, America delenda est.

The Dungeon d100s: Themes

A 19th century drawing of castle.

(An Italian translation of this post is available on Dragons’ Lair)

The Dungeon d100s is a series of six tables that will appear here over the next six days. Each will provide 100 prompts for creating an interesting dungeon. The tables are not necessarily meant to be used in tandem. A dungeon forced to include one more more results from all six of them would likely be an overstimulating, unplayable mess. Better to pick one or two tables, or even roll a d6 to determine which of the tables you roll on, then employ your own creativity to build out from the result you get. If a result doesn’t spark your own creativity, reroll.

This first table is the most general. At various times it has been called d100 Dungeon Origins, d100 Dungeon Gimmicks, and at one point simply d100 Dungeons. At least two of the six tables in the series budded off from this one when I realized far too many entries revolved around the same shtick. At times I was tempted to split even a third table off from this one, but 600 prompts has proven to be the hard limit of my creativity. Thanks are due to my sister Veronica Whelan for proofreading this colossus.

Good dungeons are places in decline. Knowing their original purpose is useful both before and during play as a creative prompt, but it is essential in my view that the whole dungeon cannot be united in its purpose. Dungeons are wild places. Places where players can get into shenanigans, where they can do violence, and not be immediately rebuked from all sides by a united front of defenders. If a place is active; held in whole by a single faction, then the mode of play is dramatically different. The players are storming a fortress, not exploring a dungeon. Both activities have the potential to generate fun play situations, but are so different from one another that I don’t think they can be usefully discussed in the same breath.

The Dungeon d100s
1 – Themes
2 – Structures
3 – Rewards
4 – Doors, Floors, Walls, & Ceilings
5 – Factions
6 – Locks & Keys

Bonus – Auto-roller, at Liche’s Libram.

d100 Dungeon Themes:

  1. A palace made entirely from sea foam, which comes into and out of existence with the tides. Inhabited by folk who are able to survive the transition.
  2. The folly of a forgotten ancient civilization, jealous that none of their accomplishments were listed among the wonders of the world. They built this labyrinth in hopes that their architectural ambition would be recognized, but it never was.
  3. A magical board game which the party has been drawn into. The game may have rules or random events which don’t conform the laws of normal reality. Leaving the game may be as simple as reaching the exit, or require completing arduous win conditions.
  4. An alternate version of some familiar game space. Perhaps the tower of a friendly wizard, the party’s home city, or their own citadel. The place may have fallen into chaos while they were away, or may be mirrored in an extradimensianal space, or be fully recreated elsewhere for some mysterious purpose.
  5. Alive, in the same sense that an intelligent magic item is alive. The dungeon has a consciousness, and a will. New corridors and rooms sometimes appear as it becomes stronger, and it seeks to better itself further by accumulating greater hordes of treasure within itself.
  6. An in-game version of a real world location that some or all of the players would be personally familiar with. A local grocery store, church, school, or someone’s current or former home. It may need to be altered to function as a useful dungeon, but the players ought to be aware of its origin so they can use their real world knowledge in play.
  7. A holy site built in ancient times by a religion which still exists today. It was ceremonially sealed to mark the end of some forgotten religious schism. What few pilgrims still visit must be content to make their prayers at the entrance.
  8. Mobile, requiring that characters catch up to it, or anticipate its route when they wish to enter. It may have been built on (or in) a massive creature, it might move mechanically with understandable mechanisms, or by inscrutable magics. It might walk on legs, roll on wheels or treads, hover, swim, or burrow. Its movement might be destructive or not, intentionally or unintentionally. It might have an operator, or follow a per-designated program, or simply have gone rogue. It may be new or ancient: a familiar sight, or something unexpected and frightening. When the players leave, they could be quite far from anywhere they’ve ever been before.
  9. Flying high in the air, requiring some effort for characters to reach it. Its flight may be slow and drifting, or swift. It may be stable in the air, or in the process of falling, or there may be something the players can do within the dungeon to cause it to come crashing down.
  10. The colossal pleasure barge of some ancient ruler. The reach of its construction exceeded the grasp of ancient ship builders, and it sank. It may still be underwater, or it may be resting in a dry lake bed, or existing in some stage between the two extremes. After being here so long it may have been connected to tunnels, or to some greater dungeon beneath it.
  11. A focal point for a time fracture. Within it, the characters can travel to different eras of the dungeon’s existence. Probably a fixed number of them. Travel through time can only occur at certain fixed locations, and the players can only exit the dungeon in their own era.
  12. The elaborate hairpiece of a grand lady, who contracted a wizard to fill it with tiny treasure and tiny monsters, and to shrinkify any adventurers who want to brave the danger so she can show off during the grandest party of the season.
  13. The death palace of an ancient conqueror queen who demanded that each of her subject people’s build a grand home for her. This particular one was filled with confusing corridors and traps, in the express hope that she might visit someday.
  14. Permeated by extreme temperature: perhaps very hot, in which case armor is dangerous to wear, metal objects are dangerous to touch, and copious water rations are needed. Alternately it may be very cold, in which case layered clothing is necessary, floors will often be slippery, and important details may be obscured by ice or snow.
  15. A defense built by a subterranean civilization. They dug ever upwards, not realizing until too late that eventually the solid earth would give way to a terrifying sky. Believing they had discovered hell, they built this place to prevent any horrible surface creatures from reaching the wholesome lands below.
  16. A training ground for a creature which predates on humans. Their young must learn to hunt perfectly in controlled conditions, lest they make some mistake which reveals the creature’s existence to human kind. People are lured to this place with rumors of hidden riches.
  17. A facility for the creation of new forms of life. It may be a naturally occurring spot where evolution is wild and rapid, it may be God’s own workshop, or it could be the magical or scientific laboratory of an ambitious mortal. In the latter case, there must have been some intent: to replace people with clones, to produce an army, to satisfy a god complex, etc.
  18. An afterlife, which was once a paradise for the adherents of faith now long forgotten. The gods who made it are dead, asleep, or so weakened they can no longer justify the effort of maintaining the place. Many of its pleasures have turned to horrors, and much of its boundless space has collapsed into the ether between realities.
  19. The former hive of an extinct colony of giant architect ants. The spaces are more complex and intricate than one would expect of a typical ant, but retain a naturalistic quality.
  20. A small cog in the mechanism of reality. If the birth and death of the whole universe is a cycle that takes ten billion billion years, it is only because its cycle is powered by other cycles which turn more rapidly. This place is born, dies, and is reborn within a mere few hundred years, and is presently in a state of collapse. Even as the player characters plunder it, parts of it will cease to exist around them.
  21. The extra-dimensional retreat of a long dead wizard. It is located on another world, and enjoys grand views of beautiful vistas. The exits all lead back to our world however, as this planet is entirely inhospitable to all familiar modes of life.
  22. The habitat of a unique species of creature that lives nowhere else. They are not hostile, and may not even know how to respond to violence. Their presence alters the typical dungeoneering experience in a major way: perhaps they scream when they see light, or exhibit a natural anti-magic field, they may excrete a slippery or sticky substance on every surface, or be naturally inclined towards serving as mounts.
  23. A mysterious structure which appeared overnight, and occupies a much-used space. It may be sitting in a farmer’s field, or in a town square, or perhaps its appearance has displaced other structures whose inhabitants are missing. (Did they go wherever their homes went, or are they in the dungeon?) Alternately, the dungeon might have formed itself around existing structures, such that their inhabitants are now trapped in their own homes.
  24. A towering lighthouse, abandoned after an ancient catastrophe sundered the earth and caused the shore to move hundreds of miles away.
  25. The studio of an eccentric artist who stumbled into being considered a “genius” by wealthy elites. This person dabbled in every medium, indulging every depraved and harmful instinct in the pursuit of novel modes of expression. When they passed, their multiple wills created such a tangle of confusion (another attempt at unusual artistic expression) that the descendants of the original beneficiaries are still arguing in the courts.
  26. A snowy mountain resort for affluent guests. It may have been a ski or hunting lodge which has fallen out of fashion, and gone many years without proper maintenance to protect it from the bitter cold.
  27. A secluded island or private stretch of beach which was once a popular destination for wealthy people on holiday. Nearby is a severely depopulated service village where the help was left to fend for themselves. They resent living in hovels and penury while all this wealth has sat abandoned for decades. They’d move in if they could, but the owners left many dangers behind to “protect their property.”
  28. A great multi-level stable. The folly of an obscenely wealthy aristocrat who loved horses more than they loved people. Much more.
  29. Someones unconscious mind, which has been temporarily manifested as a series of rooms and corridors. It may be the psyche of a king, a demigod, or a player who happens to be absent for this session. Within are creatures that represent the character’s hangups, insecurities, and defensiveness. The treasures may be their secrets, spells, or access to levers which control their feelings in some way. The players might want to help this person heal from trauma, recall vital information, or may simply be taking advantage of a person who has fallen into this peculiar and vulnerable position.
  30. A slaughterhouse or fish gutting plant. An industrial building for killing and disassembling meat creatures. Perhaps built in a strange way by an eccentric industrialist, or warped by angry magics.
  31. An island which has only recently risen up from the sea. Its spaces are constructed of coral, lava channels, sea monster corpses, and dense groupings of strange plants which only survive underwater. If it rose only yesterday it will be teeming with dying sea life, lashing out at anything that comes near. If it rose a few years ago, a new ecology will be emerging, and the inhabitants will be migrants seeking to build a new life for themselves.
  32. The seasonal villa of an obscenely wealthy bourgeois or aristocrat. They are not in residence, and so it is protected by traps and guard creatures. The deeper one delves into the villa, the more terrible depravities are uncovered.
  1. In heaven there is a house waiting for each of us. Angels toil to make these homes worthy of our goodness. Recently a true saint who had earned themselves a sprawling and decadent mansion committed a horrific sin just before their death. They were cast into hell, and in His disgust God hurled their mansion away, and did not realize that it fell to earth.
  2. Placed here by the gods themselves as a test for those who might wish to consider themselves heroes. Those who overcome its many challenges will earn themselves divine attention. This is, at best, a mixed blessing.
  3. A great landfill where the detritus of civilization is discarded. A series of passages and chambers have been hollowed out of of the great heaps of trash, perhaps connecting further to underground tunnels or sewers. Inhabitants probably include a mystery cult of rich kids on a poverty tourism kick.
  4. A titanic boulder impossibly rolling back and forth between two mountain peaks without ever appearing to loose momentum. Perhaps the spirit of Sisyphus labors on it. The dungeon within the boulder may be terribly disorienting, or may have a sort of artificial gravity to it.
  5. Radiant with powerful healing energies. Any living creatures within the dungeon gain fast healing 20, though this only applies to injuries sustained while inside the dungeon. This makes both the player characters, and the inhabitants they may come into conflict with, functionally invulnerable. Violence will not effectively solve problems here.
  6. An active factory whose interior is a mystery. The dungeon’s produce simply emerges, and is taken for granted by those who collect and use it. Alternately, the factory dungeon may take input, but give no output. People may continue to load coal onto a mysterious conveyor belt simply because it is a traditional ritual.
  7. So high tech as to be impossible for the player characters to comprehend. It might be an alien vessel or space station, or an anthropological observation post. It is destroyed, abandoned, and at least partially reclaimed by nature. There may or may not be some survivors left behind, some bits of technology could still work, a clever person could learn a lot from studying this place, and potentially advance their own culture’s technological abilities.
  8. Santa’s Workshop, or the lair of some other folkloric character. The burrow of the Easter Bunny, or the sky castle of the twelve merry goblins of [insert setting specific holiday here]. The more out of season it is when this dungeon is delved the better. It might be properly abandoned, or perhaps the mighty folkloric creature is hibernating until their appropriate season. Perhaps each year they wake up and spend a week sweeping out all the squatters who settled in their home while they slept.
  9. Builder Beetles were born from a poorly-worded wish, spoken by a dying architect who regretted never being responsible for any truly spectacular structures. Where they come from before they do what they do, and where they go after they’re done, is a mystery. They appear in small human settlements, drive everyone out, and build. Great walls and ceilings over the whole town, connecting existing buildings with elaborate tunnels and sky bridges until the whole village is a dungeon. Humans rarely want to live in the spaces the Builder Beetles leave behind, but for other creatures it is a very convenient domicile.
  10. Noah’s Ark (or perhaps the arc of Ziusudra, Atra-Hasis, Utnapishtim, etc). A great vessel large enough to shelter a breeding stock of all the world’s land animals during a great flood, which came to rest on the top of a mountain when the water receded. It still rests their, perhaps filled with the descendants of those unrecorded creatures who chose not to disembark with the rest.
  11. A legal library, for The Law is sacred, and its sanctity depends on its secrecy. Only the arbiters could ever know The Law, only they could study and interpret its precepts. To maintain the purity of The Law, it had to be housed in a labyrinth beneath the city, with entrances known only to the arbiters, so they could disappear to consult the law, and reappear to render their verdict wherever their intercession was needed.
  12. A woodland where the trees and bramble grow so thickly they might as well be walls surrounding ‘rooms’ and ‘corridors’ that were carved into existence by an ancient and secretive religion.
  13. A test of maturity, constructed bit by bit by the girls of the People at the Foot of the Mountain became women. Before any girl could seek a mate and a home of her own she must present a plan for a new corridor or room, then build it with her own two hands. She may be instructed, but never aided. Many began their work quite young, as it could take years to complete an ambitious addition. The temple is so sprawling now that no complete map of it exists, and all manner of creature have settled in long neglected sections.
  14. An abandoned train yard. No active rails even connect to this place anymore, and the rusting hulks are scattered pell mell about the place.
  15. The work of true artisans. Folks who believe in craftsmanship for its own sake. It should not matter whether anyone will ever see a thing, one should still labor to make it as beautiful and sturdy as they possibly can. The result of your work should stand apart from every other example of its kind because even if other people don’t see it, it will be appreciated by god who sees everything. Even this sewer system.
  16. A trap for humanity, eroded into existence by spiteful water spirits who do not appreciate the haphazard way their essence is often drawn up to the surface via hateful human wells. The spirits deposited many noxious fungi, amphibious carnivores, and subterranean treasures here.
  17. An active temple for a god of foolhardy death. Attempting to plunder the temple is an act of religious devotion. The priests say that even if you don’t die, taking such risks is an act of prayer that will surely be heard by their god. Others contest that there is no such thing as a god of foolhardy death. They argue instead that the priesthood is cover for a demonic cult, and the dungeon is an elaborate form of human sacrifice. Sure, a few folks might make it out with fabulous wealth, but far more will perish in the attempt!
  18. An abandoned factory, which may have been built to produce statuary, war materiel, print publications, worked metals, candy, etc. Much will have been left behind, but only because extracting it would be more expensive than it’s worth.
  19. An arctic research station composed of multiple buildings and some excavated ice caves, all with guidelines between them to aid movement whenever thick fog or snowstorm makes vision unreliable. Unless your setting is more modern, this place is likely the caprice of a wizard who believed there was some ancient wisdom hidden nearby, or the former home of some hero who was cursed to be unable to endure warmer climes.
  20. A mystery. A few years ago the people of a nearby village all blacked out in tandem. When they awoke, there was the dungeon. The callouses on their hands told them they had done the work themselves. Years had clearly passed, and those who had been too young or too old to work were found long dead from starvation. With nowhere else to go the people resumed their lives, but it is a trauma none of them will ever overcome, and they make a concerted effort never to look at the structure they don’t remember building.
  21. A forgotten showcase structure, built in collaboration between various guilds of artisans to demonstrate their skills, and serve as a unified guild hall and catalogue for potential employers.
  22. A cold, cold revenge from the dinosaurs. Their sages foresaw the meteor which heralded their destruction, and could find no means by which to avoid death. They foresaw also that the planet would come to be dominated by disgusting ape creatures. The final years of their race was spent building this place, and placing their greatest treasures within it so as to better tempt as many of the ape things as possible to their deaths.
  23. An archaeological dig of massive scope, abandoned perhaps due to lack of funds, or because it released something it should not have. The rooms are semi permanent living structures, and partially excavated buildings.
  24. A sort of rat’s maze built by a cosmic entity who wishes to observe and rate humanity’s quality. This is not hidden. Everyone knows that when you enter this dungeon you will be watched, and tested. The tests are often different, and are rarely fair. People attempt it anyway because the “cheese” at the end is a legitimately bounteous treasure.
  25. An ancient military base. Perhaps a grand permanent campus with parade grounds, thick walls, and offices for generals. Alternately it may have been a frontier structure, built in haste to to withstand brutal assaults.
  26. The refuge of a wealthy and powerful old man who suffered a public embarrassment so severe that he decided to build a miniature city for himself, populated by his servants, where he could live out his final days. It was inhabited for a scant few years before he died. No one else ever took up residence, as it was in a terribly inconvenient location, and managing its great size would have been an absurd expense.
  27. Formerly a political prison. A place where the ruling elite could cause enemies of the state to disappear, “convince” them to turn against their comrades, and put an ultimate end to their disloyalty in some efficient and satisfying way.
  28. An artificial tiered garden out in the middle of a desert. Unless there is magical watering at work, the plants will have long ago died from lack of imported water. Only native desert plants grow here now, though some invasive plants may have survived by eerie mutation. Within the garden’s tiers are a series of chambers originally meant for maintenance staff and visiting guests.
  29. An elaborately ornamented temple built by a short lived religion which worshiped some particular animal. It could be any relatively simple animal: iguanas, penguins, beards, crows, flamingos, etc. The whole place exudes big Horse Girl energy.
  30. A time capsule built beneath the foundations of the city, and intended to be opened on the 1000th anniversary of its founding. It was intended as a showcase of the city’s original culture, and to play a few pranks on the naughty future-folk. Doubtless, the past thousand years have seen a few other creatures sneak their way in via unintended means.
  31. An ancient race track, or other sports stadium. The field of play will likely have had other structures built within it by the dungeon’s current residents, and will likely also contain chambers that were intended for food vendors, green rooms, announcers, VIPs, perhaps even an attached palace.
  32. Intended to trap a terrestrial god, built by a sect of that god’s worshipers. They came to believe their god had a hellthorn in its paw, which they wished to remove. As such the dungeon is in all ways designed to show respect to those it traps.
  33. Formerly a school of some kind. It may have been for primary education (elementary, high school), higher education (university, philosophy, science), trade education (culinary, carpentry, cosmetology, medicine, law, military officer), spiritual education (seminary, martial arts dojo), or something fanciful (necromancy, spying, assassination). It may have been abandoned because it lacked funds, due to fallout from some horrible scandal, or simply because the civilization which built it is long extinct.
  34. The first draft of hell. Eventually more capacity was needed, as well as updated security since a few souls had managed to escape. All the damned souls and devilish tormentors are long since moved on to better facilities.
  1. The dungeon is a metaphorical space. Different rooms and creatures are representations of places and people. There are clues to what the various elements of the dungeon represent, but the connections are not always obvious. None the less, actions taken in the dungeon will be reflected outwards. If the party were to meet a goblin who represents their house, for example, and they killed that goblin, they might return home to find their house had burned down.
  2. A zoo, aquarium, or menagerie. Presumably the animals have either escaped, died, or become mutated in some fashion.
  3. An enchanted pleasure palace wished into existence by someone long dead. The magically created servants within have split into factions over whether they want to kill anyone who visits the palace so they won’t be compelled to serve any more, and those who miss having someone to serve, and wish to trap visitors so that their lives can have purpose again.
  4. An intact suburra from the ancient world. These were a sort of ancient apartment buildings. The bottom floors would be businesses or upper-middle class homes. The higher floors were rented by poorer and poorer people as you went up. Given that these buildings were notoriously prone to fire and collapse, this one most likely survived either by being buried, or by some preservative magics.
  5. A testing ground built by order of a capricious prince who declared he would only marry the person who could retrieve the treasure from the dungeon’s center. Legends say he never did marry, so presumably that treasure would still be there, right?
  6. An ancient library assembled by a philosopher king, who made it their goal to record and collect all the knowledge in their world. Its treasures include many alternate versions of texts which are still well known in modern times, as well as lost literature, history, and science which may or may not have been rediscovered since it was lost. Unfortunately for looters, much of this writing is on great stone tablets which are incredibly difficult to move, and much of the rest is on scrolls which crumble to dust if touched.
  7. Laid out in an incredibly precise shape. Its structure forms a magic sigil that was used in an ancient and dark time in a grand summoning ritual which created the sun.
  8. There is a member of the royal family who was so mean spirited, ambitious, and stupid, that they were eventually exiled to a small island. Great care was taken to ensure all the perquisites of their royal rank remained in place, save only their freedoms of movement and association. They could never leave the island nor have contact with anyone not personally approved by the king, but were otherwise left to enjoy a life of excess however they saw fit. This is all ancient history, and now this island prison / pleasure palace is a dungeon filled with all manner of creatures. Alternately, it may be that the king has only recently died, and their will stipulates that this troublesome royal must be assassinated to prevent future troubles. The player characters could have been hired to do the deed, or to smuggle the prisoner off the island to safety.
  9. A place which predates the world. It floated through space for eons, gradually accumulating bits a space detritus, until its gravitational mass was great enough that it formed a rogue planet, and eventually fell into stable orbit around our star.
  10. The interior of an inscrutable tool which was left here by a creature beyond our understanding. It could be God’s anvil, or Yog-Sthoth’s power loom. Though, obviously, the names of human tools can only vaguely approximate the scope of this thing’s function. It may have been left intentionally, or dropped and forgotten. Some of its functions could potentially be manipulated by player characters to produce strange results, or the things it does may be entirely beyond human ability or understanding.
  11. A laboratory in which a wizard or scientist conducted various atmospheric and ecological experiments. One room may emulate conditions of an arctic tundra, while another is meant to simulate a rain forest. Hazards might include tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, etc.
  12. An embassy built when humanity was at peace with a strange race who had strange needs. Perhaps sea creatures who needed to be submerged in water to live, sky creatures who could not breathe our thick air, or burrowing creatures who could not abide the light. This place was built to accommodate their needs, and facilitate better relations between the two peoples. Peace has long since broken down, and the two races have parted ways. The embassy still stands, though. As hostile to human life as it was adapted to theirs.
  13. A former senate house or parliamentary building. It contains a large space for collective lawmaking, and ancillary spaces for offices, ceremonies, meetings, and other amenities peculiar to the culture who built it.
  14. Crafted for no particular reason by a wizard who had created a peculiar nightmare-scanning device, which enabled them to construct real versions of the imaginary spaces those nightmares took palace in, and link them together. The complex connected dozens of dream spaces before the wizard realized there was actually no point to this activity, and moved on.
  15. Created by and for very small creatures: rat sized rat people rearranging sewer pipes, or intelligent viruses building a citadel within a human body, or pixies hollowing out trees and boulders. The player characters will need to shrink themselves to enter the dungeon. They could perhaps just destroy it if they wished, but doing so would likely destroy any treasures contained within. (After all, such treasures are likely to be art, magic, or information. One does not plunder a minuscule dungeon looking for great heaps of gold!) It should also be noted that tiny folks are well acquainted with the tactics and defenses necessary to protect themselves against giants.
  16. Created by and for very large creatures. Everything in this dungeon is far too big for the player characters. Stairs and furniture require difficult climbing to navigate. Note that just because it was built by large peoples, does not mean they are its only inhabitants. They may not even use it at all anymore.
  17. A prison constructed according to some armchair philosopher’s notions of how to reform undesirable peoples. Perhaps it is filled with challenges, on the belief that overcoming them would make a person deserving of reentering society. Perhaps it is built on the idea that isolation, medical torture, or constant observation would best ‘fix’ a person.
  18. A great complex tree house, possibly built by long gone elves, or long dead architects attempting to survive whilst marooned on an uncharted island.
  19. A medieval monastery of the western style, built for the outwards appearance of maintaining a simple life of prayer and holy labor, while allowing the monks some privacy to indulge in sinful luxury. Perhaps more privacy than usually was provided here with great chambers hidden underground for all manner of decadence.
  20. A performance space built for the delectation of the upper classes, with greater social rank allowing access to lower chambers where ever less socially acceptable art is performed. At the lowest levels, the performers themselves rarely ever came out again.
  21. An important cultural site for your people. Your ancestors built it and used it, but at some point chose to abandon it. Until recently it was fairly common to visit the place and view its wonders, leaving offerings to the ancient dead where appropriate. Recently, a colonial power has brutally dominated your lands. They’ve declared this place to be an archaeological site, and forbidden your people from entering it.
  22. A high class casino where the highest of high stakes bets were placed. It was transformed into a dungeon by a really, really foolhardy bet which went very poorly.
  23. The maintenance corridors of a massive inscrutable machine, the engine of a natural process. Perhaps this dungeon is what turns the sun and moon in the sky, what controls the tides, the passing of the seasons, or the birth of heroes. It may even be an engine of destruction. God’s own fail-safe in case creation ever gets out of hand. It may or may not be possible for the players to make minor alterations without completely disrupting the machine. Perhaps it is broken before they arrive and they wish to fix it. Perhaps they can radically alter the nature of their world with some ill-advised tinkering.
  24. The exterior of a titanic creature. A mega-elk, ur-mammoth, or humaniform colossus. There is a whole ecology across—and even within—their body. Pockets and purses are like rooms, fur is a forest, whole settlements could rest on their back or hang from their underside.
  25. Knowing they would be conquered when the next campaigning season began, a whole civilization dedicated themselves to building this dungeon. They sold their souls for the necessary magics, and heaped the whole treasures of their history in a room that is visible from the entrance, but protected by a great and impenetrable wall of death.
  26. A petrified egg from which a god would have hatched if it had been properly tended. The dry yolk still forms the center of the dungeon. Alternately, there may be a creature which gestates in dungeons is if they were an egg. Protected by the shell of the mythic underworld, nourished by the yolk of the dungeon’s inhabitents once its digestive tract develops.
  27. The labyrinthine halls from which the enforcers emerged, dragging criminal wrongthinkers into dark rooms from which they rarely emerged. The space connects here and there, and contains many unpleasant places now settled by creatures less horrible than the enforcers were, though that is not a high bar to clear.
  28. Shelter built against a civilization-ending cataclysm which never came. Or perhaps did come, was survived thanks to the shelter, and is now only long forgotten history.
  29. A facility for containing creatures and objects with dangerous abilities and unknown purpose. There was a breakout long ago, so many of these things have since escaped into the world and may even be widely considered normal today. Perhaps, before the breakout, nobody ever got cancer, pregnancy and birth were trivial affairs, and the human lifespan was triple what it is now. Some safeguards and some anomalies are still here and still dangerous. The world is a better place for not being subjected to the influence of those which are still secured, contained, and protected. Whilst exploring this dungeon, the characters should certainly encounter clues as to how the world was better before certain anomalies got away.
  30. A reverse tower, hanging down from the sky of a great underground cavern. Alternately, a sideways tower, straight out from a cliff face. Gravity may or may not be reoriented within the interior.
  31. Sailing ships clustered together and left unattended. They may have all run aground on an uncharted island, or been discarded and left to rot together in a shallow bay, or forgotten in the secret dry dock of a fallen military power, or abandoned in the shipyard of an insolvent corporation.
  32. Constructed as a habitat for an endangered creature with a sensitivity to something which has been magically warded against. Perhaps light kills them, so the whole dungeon is shrouded in magical darkness. Alternately the whole dungeon may be under a zone of silence, an anti-magic field, or have a robust automated fire suppression system.
  33. The world ship on which ancient human colonists arrived on this world. Malfunction caused it to crash, and those who made it to the escape pods are our ancestors. It is a history so thoroughly lost that no human even suspects we did not originate on this world.
  34. The famous money hole. Of late it has become a fad among the wealthy to flaunt their excess by throwing larger and larger amounts into a deep natural shaft. The more a person can afford to discard, the more affluent everyone assumes they must be. Of course, the hole itself is heavily guarded to prevent any dirty poors from misappropriating the discarded funds and unbalancing the economy. Perhaps creatures have also been set loose below to make recovering the treasure even more foolhardy, or creatures may have come up from the underdark to fight over this great heap of treasure. Regardless, there might be some other way into those caves.

Can you believe that titanic tirade is just one sixth of what I’ve written for this series? I mean, the entries in this one are particularly verbose, but none the less, dang.

Also, All Cops Are Bastards.

Two Week Megadungeon

I recently committed to running a fresh campaign, which required I construct a megadungeon from scratch in about two weeks. It was a big job. I was a little worried it was too big to get done in such a short time, but I managed it with days to spare. Some of my players have asked me to explain my methods, and I will endeavor to do so here.

Like any other creative project, I’ve found the best way to accomplish my goals is to lower my expectations. When I say I created a megadungeon in 2 weeks, I do not mean that I meticulously crafted some beautiful bespoke adventure module with hundreds of pages of room description. I can barely conceive of how I’d use such a thing at the table, much less how I’d create it. The dungeon I did create fits on 7 single-sided sheets of paper. One page of random tables and rules reference, and 6 pages which each have the map and key for a single level of the dungeon. Even within that drastically limited scope, I only completed my megadungeon by taking every shortcut I could find.

First step was to source maps. There are more freely available maps online than anyone could use in a lifetime. For this project I went with old reliable Donjon’s Random Dungeon Generator. With it I could quickly produce as many maps as I needed. Plus, generating all the maps with the same tool meant they had a consistent style, which is useful for avoiding all sorts of little annoyances that have cropped up in the past when I’ve tried to force maps from different sources to be part of the same structure. Somewhat arbitrarily I settled on starting with 6 levels to the dungeon, my only real reason being that it felt large enough to be a megadungeon, but small enough not to stress me out while keying it. The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two is probably a factor here. I played around with the generator’s settings quite a bit between each level. More densely packed rooms on this one, fewer rooms on that one, this map shaped like a cross, that other one is a circle. There’s plenty of knobs to tinker with, though I think only three of the settings I used were actually important:

  1. Straight Corridors + Remove all dead ends. These settings produce the most direct corridors. Even still they’re more meandering than I would prefer, but beggars can’t be choosers.
  2. No stairs. This is perhaps a minor point, but I wanted to have direct control over where connections between floors would exist.
  3. Map Style: Graph Paper. This is by far the most important setting. Not only does it waste the least amount of ink when printing, but it leaves a lot of white space available for making notes.

Once I’d gotten 6 maps I liked, I printed paper copies of each so I could easily make alterations and notes. On each level I added an elevator shaft adjacent to one of the rooms, usually one near the center. One of the most important elements of megadungeon design is that players have direct access from the entrance to many different parts of the dungeon. Otherwise, every single session begins with the party moving through the exact same set of rooms, which can be difficult to prevent from becoming tedious. The elevator shaft means they have 6 choices for what their first room will be each session. In a more traditionally themed megadungeon a grand staircase would work just as well. Within an hour of starting the project the bones of the dungeon were assembled.

Pixelated, low-color photo of an empty dungeon room, in the style of old DOS games.

Now I had ~225 blank rooms to key. That’s a lot of opportunities to get tripped up by Blank Page Syndrome, so I started by creating some touchstones that would help inform my keying later on. The first and least important of these is the dungeon’s origin. Who built it? Why? What calamity caused it to stop being used for its original purpose, and become a dungeon? These are all good things for a referee to know, but it’s also important not to get caught up in them. A dungeon in a ruined hospital may have a lot of beds and broken medical devices in it; and a dungeon in a ruined school is going to have books and desks; but that’s all filler for empty rooms. The treasures, traps, and creature encounters are going to be derived more from what happened to the structure after it stopped being used for its original purpose.

Next step was figuring out tyrants and factions. My six level dungeon has three wizards and a dragon as its tyrants, because as we all know a 2 is always a dragon, and a 12 is always a wizard. These primarily exist as big scary random encounters, but they also need a lair. I place these by writing directly on the map, aiming to be as evocative as I could. Instead of “Merlin the Great’s Lair,” I might write “Mirrored Palace of Merlin the Moody.” Later on the personality and style of each tyrant will affect what sorts of rooms are nearby.

I use this same style of keying through the process, writing the text directly on the rooms they describe. It limits how much detail the key can have, and in particular means small rooms must have more simply described contents than large ones, but these are limitations I can live with. In fact I’d say this limitation forces me to produce better work than I otherwise would. When I’m running games I quickly get frustrated whenever the forward momentum of the action is disrupted because I can’t find the information I want in a block of text. A few words, or maybe a sentence is enough for me to construct a shared imaginary space for my players. That’s especially true here where I’m writing notes for my own future self. Nobody else needs to understand this dungeon.

One major mistake I made here was writing the room keys in pen. I usually prefer to write in pen because it forces me to commit to what I write. I enjoy not being able to go back and change things, and instead be forced to adapt to whatever decisions I’ve already made. I feel the same way about keying the dungeon, BUT, many room descriptions will need to be altered during the restocking process described below. So for the love of the gods don’t make my mistake, key your megadungeon in pencil!

Chrono trigger screenshot. The primitive humans and the lizard people are good examples of opposed factions.

Factions are the most important megadungeon touchstone. The way different groups interact with the players and with each other is a huge part of what I enjoy about megadungeon play. The players will forge alliances with some, go to war with others, play diplomat to negotiate peace between enemies, or convince groups to wipe one another out. Like tyrants, factions control some rooms, influence others, and provide fodder for the encounter table. Coming up with factions is simple: some kind of creature + some kind of distinctive behavior = a faction. The Boastful Bovines are a braggadociously proud community of cow-people who live on the first level of my dungeon. I came up with between 2 and 3 factions for each floor, recorded the name of each faction using a specific color, and placed colored dots on the map to indicate the center of each faction’s power. This is the room where they are most safe to eat and sleep and conduct their private affairs. The colors aren’t necessary, but I often want to know what faction the players are most likely to encounter in a given room, so being able to quickly reference what faction is closest is handy.

By now every level of the dungeon has multiple points of interest I can riff from when keying other rooms. There’s no reason you couldn’t add even more if you like. All mine were social, but you could create all sorts of different touchstones. Perhaps one room could be where some tyrant of faction used to live, and they left traps, treasures, and monsters behind. A portal to hell would make a good touchstone, as would a magic crystal that absorbs all heat, a massive zone of silence, a miniature black hole, really anything that would have a ripple effect across multiple surrounding rooms will help make the keying process easier.

There’s still one more way we can break the problem down before we start keying in earnest. Broadly speaking every room in a dungeon will fit into a fairly small number of categories. Some will have creatures in them, some will have traps, some will have really weird stuff, some will have treasure which may or may not be guarded, and most of the rooms will be empty. That last bit may sound counter intuitive, but it’s vitally important. In this context “Empty” doesn’t mean a completely bare space, it just means a room without monsters, traps, treasure, or special weirdness. A kitchen would be an empty room, but it would still have pots, pans, cupboards, salt, vinegar, and knives in it. These rooms are important because they are where the action will spill into when the players retreat from battle. Empty rooms are where the players will rest, where they’ll devise wild plans for how to make use of something that was intended to be set dressing. Empty rooms are where the players make their own fun. The ancient texts actually advise having 60% empty rooms (1st edition AD&D DMG, Appendix A, Table V-F). I like 50% because I’m a dense dungeon kinda boy.

Photo of the water bottle described in the text. Light green, twist top, printed trees and an americorps logo.

With my desired ratios in mind, I made this little table to get myself started keying:

1-10: Empty
11-13: Creatures
14-16: Creatures with Treasure
17: Trap
18: Trap with Treasure
19: Something Weird
20: Unguarded Treasure

Each day I’d sit down with my maps, throw a fistfull of d20s, then key one room for each of the results I rolled. If I felt like doing more when I was done, I’d throw the dice again. As I got into the rhythm of things and the maps started to fill out, the dice gradually became less important. A few times each day I’d pull my papers out to spend maybe 20 or 30 minutes writing keys. Whenever I got stuck I’d pick something, anything, and do some free association. As I write this there is a water bottle beside me on my desk. Perhaps the dungeon could have a room filled with water? The bottle has trees on it, maybe there could be a room with a tiny forest, or a meticulously cared for garden? The bottle also has an “A” on it, sorta like the scarlet letter. I could have a room with some prudish creature in it which calls everyone a slut. Just like that I’ve got three dungeon rooms from a single object on my desk. You can do this with anything. I’ve personally gotten a lot of mileage out of using Magic: The Gathering cards for this. I also did a fair amount of stealing room ideas from other dungeons, video games, and blog posts. This dungeon is for private play, not publication, so plagiarism rules don’t apply.

As I keyed I jumped all over the six maps. If you haven’t already, you should free yourself from the expectation that your megadungeon’s layout will make logical sense. That’s impossible to accomplish, and boring to attempt. These are mythic spaces that run on dream logic. If I were to key adjacent spaces one-by-one, my brain would try to force those rooms to conform to some pattern. My goal is to create a wild network of weirdness first, then once that’s done I can let my brain off the leash to do its pattern matching thing. This produces wildly more interesting results for me. All of which is not to say that you should ignore inspiration that comes from referencing nearby rooms. That inspiration can be good, and it’s why we created the touchstones. Jumping around just helps to avoid a sort of tunnel-vision design, where you become bound to obey the logical implications of whatever room came before. Jumping around is also an easy way to create multi-room problems. You can simply place “THE BLOOD GATE” somewhere on level 3, then jump to level 1 and write “TOILET WITH THE BLOOD KEY IN IT” on some empty room. In 10 seconds you’ve created an adventure that could keep your players busy for a whole session.

Once the rooms are all keyed the dungeon is ready for play. Of course you’d also need an encounter table, but I have discussed my process for making those elsewhere. The only notable difference here is that I used 2d3 rather than 2d6. The fundamental method remains the same, but the ranges are somewhat compressed.

Here’s an example of what is produced by this dungeon crafting process:

Fully keyed dungeon map with a couple dozens rooms, and descriptions written on them in pencil. The three factions are Goblin Boomers, Ninja Slugs, and Jealous Banditos

If you’re looking at this and wondering how anyone could run a good consistent dungeon crawl from it, remember that the only person who needs to understand it is me. If you made a dungeon with this same process then the only person who would need to understand it would be you. When I write something like “Blue Chest, Difficult Lock, 2 Magic Spells & 1 Item,” I know that my future self will interpret that in a certain way. A Blue Chest implies the existence of a Blue Key somewhere. A difficult lock would mean the lockpicking check is penalized, perhaps by half the value of the sublevel the room is on. So a difficult lock on floor 2 would be at -1, a difficult lock on floor 4 would be -2, etc. There’d be some random junk in the chest in addition to the treasures, maybe some moth eaten linen? The 2 magic spells would be on scrolls, and I’d roll some dice to figure out what spells they were. The magic item would likewise be randomly determined off whatever table is most convenient. I might even ask my players if one of them has a favored magic item table they’d like to roll on.

Even so there’s a lot of missing details to that room description, but if they come up I’ll figure them out on the spot. At any given time during play I’m probably mentally filling in a room’s description. A good 40% of my game prep happens while I wait for players to argue about what they want to do next. There are days when I’m able to do this really well, and days when I’m not. I wish I was always operating at peak performance, but it has to be okay for the game to have a bad day. And the longer I run games the better I get at doing this. My worst sessions these days are still better than the best ones I ran 10 years ago. I think my players mostly come away from my games feeling good about the way they spent their time. That’s the important part.

A megadungeon is a living space, so even once it’s ready for play it will never really be complete. After each delve I review the rooms my players visited and consider what changes may result from what they did there. If the players kill a monster and steal its treasure that room might become empty for awhile, or a different creature with different treasure might move in. If they only injured the monster, then perhaps that monster was forced to make an alliance with a nearby faction while it healed. Now that faction will be ill-disposed towards the players in order to maintain their alliance. If a player character died, their meat might be sold in a cannibal market, or the necromancer 3 rooms over might raise them as a vampire to go hunt down their former compatriots. Restocking like this is how the players get to see their impact on the game world. I don’t get the opportunity to be a player very often right now, but when I do play, it’s this sort of thing that keeps me coming back to a campaign session after session.

In the same vein I also have a notepad where I record all the seeds my players plant. For example: if the party kills a group of goblins but lets one get away, I’ll record the existence of this goblin in my notes. Next time they roll a goblin encounter I might choose to double the number of attackers, and have that escapee leading them in an ambush. If the party funds a troupe of musicians, later on the party may go to a bar and discover those same musicians are performing on stage. Or maybe they won’t. Some seeds never bear fruit, and that’s okay. Simply restocking rooms and noting player seeds takes care of the vast majority of prep work I need to do for future sessions.

Eventually, if the game runs for a very long time, or if I get bored, I may expand the dungeon. I’ve already placed a second elevator shaft somewhere on the bottom-most level which could eventually lead to another 6 floors. Smaller expansions might be accomplished by having a wall collapse somewhere to reveal a whole new area beyond it, or some wizard could open a magic portal to a far-away locale. It depends very much on the direction the campaign takes over the coming months. For now I’m happy to ride the wave of the player’s throwing themselves at what I’ve created.

Monochrome green image of a dungeon door. A text prompt asks "ENTER THE DUNGEON?" Someone has typed "hell yeah" in response.

I must thank Ava, Anne, and Elias for prompting me to write this. I didn’t think I would have a lot to say when they first suggested it, but it got me digging deep and forced me to put words to some concepts I hadn’t bothered to articulate before. As it happens I’ve been working on another daunting project, a set of d100 tables that would serve as prompts for building better dungeons. It’s turning out to be the most substantial project I’ve ever worked on for Papers & Pencils, but in retrospect this post will serve as a good introduction. Those tables still need a lot of work, but they’ll likely be the next thing posted here.

Thanks for reading. I hope everyone is staying safe. Black Lives Matter.

Developing a Setting: My Trouble with Dungeon Moon

In my experience the success of a campaign is inversely proportional to how much thought I put into the setting before play begins. When I’m gearing up for session 1 of a new game I have two basic priorities:

  1. To come up with a central conceit which is wild enough to be memorable, and open ended enough to accommodate any sort of adventure I want to run in it.
  2. To do as little work as possible justifying that conceit.

On a Red World Alone is a good example of this approach:

  1. Game is set in a post-apocalyptic biodome city on Mars. There’s mutants and magic and factions squabbling over territory.
  2. The apocalypse was so long ago that nobody understands or has access to technology. That way we can still use the LotFP equipment lists.

It’s a cheap attempt to have my cake and eat it too. I wouldn’t accept that sort of shallow setting design in a published product, but it’s a good way to get a new campaign off the ground. As the game progresses tweaks and retcons can be made here and there to develop the setting into a more well rounded whole. Anyone perusing ORWA’s play reports will see that technology has been a prominent part of the game for awhile.

Which is a very roundabout way of introducing a question that has been floating about in my brain for years now: what do I want to do with Dungeon Moon? 

For the uninitiated: Dungeon Moon is a campaign I ran back in 2013~2014. It was set on an artificial moon built by a wizard who had decided a mere tower was beneath his dignity.  Eventually the wizard disappeared, and the inhabitants of his flagstone moon were left to fend for themselves. The PCs are the great grandchildren of his cooks and gardeners and such. They live in communities surrounded on all sides by horrible monsters and evil experiments. They venture out of the magical barriers that protect them in search of whatever comforts they can bring back to their community.

Dungeon Moon has all the makings of great setting. It’s the first time I really nailed it in making something “wild enough to be memorable.” The plan was always to develop the setting further, and eventually make it into a book. My problem is that Dungeon Moon was (and is) an absolute mess. Every campaign is a mess, but Dungeon Moon was particularly bad. Realistically the only salvageable thing I have from that campaign are the ideas it was based on. Everything I actually developed was trash.

I was in the grip of some really stupid ideas at the time. I had this obsession with creating complex areas described down to the color of the drapes. I had fat stacks of graphing paper that were dense with rooms, cross referenced a dozen different ways, and none of it was done clearly. Remember my old Deadly Dungeons posts? Imagine that, but for every single room. The information was too dense to use at the table, and writing it was too time consuming to keep up with the player’s rate of exploration.

That same obsessive over-documentation prevented me from making all the little tweaks and retcons that have allowed ORWA to develop beyond its early flaws. ORWA has no secret 30,000 word bible that I’ve bled and sweated over; which has allowed it to be agile in a way Dungeon Moon never could be.

I’ve actually made two attempts to fix Dungeon Moon. The first was in 2014, shortly after I stopped running the campaign, and is still burdened with many of the flaws that weighed down the first iteration. The second, in 2016, led to a fun few sessions, but wound up getting pushed aside in favor of other projects. It did result in the development of Flux Space though, which I still think is  the best way to model the idea of a moon-sized dungeon.

I think what I’m going to do is spend the next few P&P posts exploring the individual ideas that made up Dungeon Moon. I want to figure out what the setting needs, how to approach it and make it the fun and playable and shareable setting it always ought to have been.

Some topics to cover:

  • Town generation, management, and development. Dungeon Moon is very much a setting where the party will have a home base they return to and improve over time.
  • What is treasure? One of my biggest regrets is that I stuck with traditional treasure in a setting where pillows and meat should have been valued more highly than gold or silver.
  • Culture and faction development. It’s a longstanding conceit that human life is cheap and cannibalism is commonplace on Dungeon Moon. What other weird habits and communities have developed given the oddity of this particular apocalypse scenario?
  • A lot of ink has already been spilled on the subject of megadungoen design, but I might waste some time retreading old ground just to figure out what exactly it means to effectively expand the endless chambers of Dungeon Moon specifically.
  • History and cosmology needs to be explored in greater depth. Aside from a few details about the wizard who built the place, I never really explored the context in which Dungeon Moon exists. That would help provide some direction to the way the setting is developed. For example: what world does Dungeon Moon orbit?

The Core Mechanic of D&D

Learning to play D&D is more a study of philosophy than it is of rulebooks. Character classes, and saving throws, and combat mechanics are all just subsystems for resolving edge cases. The core mechanic of the game is conversation. Specifically, a Three Step Conversation.

1. The referee describes an environment.

2. The players describe their actions within that environment.

3. The referee describes how the environment changes.

In my experience, this back-and-forth effectively describes the vast majority of good play. For example:

1. “You are in darkness.”

2. “I light a torch.”

3. “The torch illuminates a windowless, brick-walled room with a single door.”

2. “I look around at the ceiling to see if I can find where we entered from.”

3. “The ceiling is vaulted. The hole you fell through isn’t actually up there. It’s on the rear wall, about 10′ off the ground, angled upwards into a chute.”

2. “CRUG THE DESTROYER HATE TINY ROOM! CRUG SMASH DOOR WITH AXE!”

3. “The door’s wood was not particularly strong, and is easily smashed to bits beneath Crug’s mighty blow.”

1. “You see a hallway beyond.”

(See also: “Example of Play for Running Traps Without a Search Check“)

I came up with this formulation a little over a year ago, and have been smugly satisfied with myself ever since. Then, the other day, I was talking with John Bell of The Retired Adventurer. We were discussing refereeing advice, and he suggested following a pattern of Question Answer-Question, something he’d written about back in 2012. To quote the most relevant passage from his post:

I recommend that you, whether a player or referee, end almost any and every assertion you make, especially one that answers another player’s question, with another question, one that either asks what their response is, what further information they want, what the foreseeable consequences of doing something would be, even just confirming their choice.

Question Answer-Question pairs well with the Three Step Conversation. I’m going to work it into the way I referee from now on, and I anticipate seeing some improvement to the flow and momentum of play. If nothing else, ending on a question is a clear signal to the players that I’m done talking. It ought to cut down on awkward pauses where the party waits to see if I have more to add. Moreover, I can occasionally direct my questions at specific players like a vindictive primary school teacher. It could be a useful tool for involving folks who are normally too shy to speak up.

During our talk, John further suggested presenting the players with specific options, not unlike old video game RPGs. “You’ve entered a square room with a door on each wall and a statue of a goblin in the center. Do you want to press on through one of the exits, examine the statue more closely, or look around the room for anything subtle you might have missed?”

Initially this seemed limiting to me. An act of reducing the player’s infinite number of choices down to whatever handful are most obvious to the referee in the moment. That assumes, though, that players will respond to a given list of choices by accepting them as a limitation. That’s generally not how these things go.

Presenting a person with an infinity of options, (“You’re in an open field, what do you do?”) tends to create analysis paralysis, and prompt “safe” responses. Conversely, having the referee put forth some of the more obvious choices could encourage players to look for something outside the box. Even experienced players, who might not always appreciate this sort of presentation, can occasionally benefit from a nudge. And for new players it could be a great way to get them into the adventuring frame of mind.

The method also dovetails nicely with the principals I described in Obfuscation Through Volume, one of the oldest posts on this site which I still stand behind. (The advice, that is. The writing is awful).

Bit of a shorter post today. Sorry if you feel cheated. There’s not a lot to say about this idea, but it felt valuable to share none the less.

Advice for Running Long-Term Campaigns Online

The other day, all-around likeable dude Chris Wilson sent me a message:

“I know you’ve been running a successful Google hangouts campaign for awhile now, and I was just wondering if you have any advice for me to get a similar campaign started?”

This isn’t something I’d ever really thought about. After two and a half years, On a Red World Alone definitely qualifies as a long running online campaign, but that’s not something I set out to accomplish. I have no program for keeping it going aside from simply responding to problems as they’ve arisen. None the less, Chris seems to have found the conversation useful. Perhaps the same advice can be helpful to others as well.

The most important thing is to Keep Showing Up. Everything else I have to say could be distilled down to this single point. Campaigns end when the referee gives up on them. If you surrender to your first bout of “setting fatigue,” your campaign will be lucky to last 6 months.

There have been times when ORWA bores me. Days when I just don’t feel like running very much. I push through those times because I enjoy hanging out with my players, and because I know my boredom is temporary.  I know that in a month I’m going to come up with a cool new idea. When I do, I’ll be happy I still have my weekly ORWA session to inject it into.

On a Red World Alone will end someday, but it won’t end because I’m bored with it. It will end because I’m satisfied with it.

It’s also essential to understand that Your Players Won’t Keep Showing Up. That’s not a judgement on them, it’s just a fact of life. No group of adults will be able to consistently keep the same night of the week available for years at a time. People drop out. Presently, ORWA only has one and a half of its original players. I lost most of my starting group within the first 6 months, and since then there have been multiple “generations” of the party. Some of the later players have become more essential to my idea of what the game is than the people who were there with me at the beginning.

If I have more than a couple sessions of low, or no attendance, I go recruiting. I get out there on g+ and let folks know there’s room for them at my table. Sometimes it takes a couple weeks to find someone, but it’s worth the effort. I’ve had 16 different players in ORWA over the years: some dropped out after a few weeks; some are still new recruits themselves; some played for many years but have moved on to other things; some have returned to the game after long absences. Only one player has been part of the game consistently since its beginning.

To mitigate players dropping off, I do my best to Make The Game Part of Everyone’s Routine. In my experience the most common time to lose players is when the schedule is unpredictable. On a Red World Alone happens every Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm PST. That time has never changed, nor have I ever taken a hiatus away from it.

That isn’t to say we’ve never missed a session. In the 132 weeks since we started playing, we’ve only played 101 times. Sometimes Wednesday is a holiday, and we cancel the game so people can be with their families. Sometimes I can’t avoid needing to work during our normal game time, or I’m too sick to play. Sometimes I show up, but none of my players do.

These things happen, but it’s always handled on a week-to-week basis. The session is always assumed to be on until something disrupts it.

In terms of Organization, my games work pretty much the same way that everyone’s games do. I set lofty goals for myself and constantly fall short of them. Somehow the game hasn’t completely imploded yet, and is still a lot of fun, so I can’t be doing everything wrong.

The first step I take in any new campaign is to create a new community for it on Google+. A place where the players and I can talk about the game without any distractions. It is insanely useful, and is easily my #1 organization tip. Beyond that, I can divide my campaign documentation into three groups: the player’s guide, the public records, and my private notes.

The Player’s Guide is a document I throw together which contains all the house rules we will be using. I don’t have any of the ORWA guides available for easy sharing, but the guide I wrote for Fuck the King of Space is a good representative example. Don’t be intimidated by the 23 pages of writing I did for that game. I use a TON of house rules. The original ORWA player’s guide was much less impressive.

Public Records start with the play reports, where I note down everything important that happened during a session. I acknowledge that my style in this is wildly excessive, and creates a lot of useless documentation that nobody will ever use. Do not emulate the way I write play reports. A good play report can be much simpler than the ones I write.

Out of these play reports I copy some information into various threads. Some are more useful than others. For example: any time a new spell is created, I write it up in the play report, but I also copy it into the Spellbook thread. I do the same thing for any guns that are discovered. I have thread for recording the player’s activities during their Haven Turns, and threads for recording which sessions various NPCs have appeared in.

Finally there are The Referee Notes. Nothing too surprising here: it’s a document with all the tables I use, as well as a few notes about what certain NPCs are plotting, etc. Most of the details about the world just live in my head, same as any other referee. Occasionally I’ll need to stat up a monster or doodle a map. I have a pocket notebook where I write all that stuff.

Some issues are unique to running games online. I use Google Hangouts for a few reasons. Habit is the biggest one, but it’s also easily accessible to people I know through Google+, it’s good at supporting multi-user video chats, and is more-or-less reliable. That being said, Google has definitely been treating the service like an ugly stepchild, gradually making it less and less and less useful over time. I’m hopeful that Discord will be able to replace hangouts, but last time I tried it they still had way too many issues with multi-user video chats.

(Please: no one proselytize to me about Roll20. I do not care.)

In an online chat it’s important to realize that everyone’s voices are being pushed through the same set of speakers. Because of this, everyone gets flattened out to the same volume. It’s not possible for two people to lean over and have a side conversation, or for multiple people to talk at once and remain intelligible. The group needs to be good at giving one another space to speak. They also need to acknowledge that this puts increased pressure on people who are shy. If someone looks like they’re trying to say something, do what you can to give them the space to speak.

Don’t make a big deal about not being able to see people’s dice. Some folks get completely bent outta shape over this, as though it’s impossible to play unless there’s some shared dice roller application. It is pathetic. We’re playing D&D, not craps. There’s no money on the line. Who cares if someone fudges a roll? All they’re doing is damaging their own experience.

If someone showed up at my table saying they rolled an 18 in every stat and a 20 on every attack…so what? It’s not going to save them from making stupid decisions, and the only one who is gonna have any less fun because of it is them.

Audio issues happen. People are going to cause some echo or some static. It can be pretty dang frustrating, but you gotta be understanding. Take some time at the start of the session to let people know they’re causing an issue, and give them a chance to fix it. Often having them put on headphones is all that is required.

If it can’t be fixed and it’s a minor issue, try to live with it. Sometimes people live near the train tracks. It annoys them more than it annoys you, so try to be cool. If someone has a major technical issue which is disrupting play, it’s okay to ask them to leave until they can get their gear working.

People are absolutely going to get distracted. They’ll have you open in one tab while they’re looking at their g+ feed in another tab. It happens, just roll with it.

Finally there’s Mapping. At some point you’re going to need a way to communicate the environment to your players visually.

I’m fortunate to have a 25 square foot white board on my wall which I can easily direct my camera towards. It makes mapping a breeze. By far the simplest method I’ve ever seen in many years of online play. If you can set something like this up, I highly encourage you to do so.

If you can’t, some folks screen share their maps using an image editing program like GIMP. If you add a black layer on top of the map, you can slowly erase it as the players go along, revealing what they see. I’ve always found this method painstakingly difficult, because you can’t see the map any better than your players can. There’s always the risk of revealing something you don’t want.

There’s also Digital Whiteboards, such as RealTimeBoard. It’s a powerful tool. Not only can you draw on it, but you can also upload images & PDFs, place post-it-notes, etc. I’ve played in games that were run entirely through the RTB. John Bell has spent a lot more time with the service than I have, and has a few good posts describing the best ways to leverage it for your game.

The downsides to RTB is that everybody needs to create an account, and will need to be invited via email before they can access the board. Also, the company has been scaling back their free service gradually over the years in favor of a paid subscription. It’s not terribly expensive, but it may not be something you want to do just to play D&D online.

That’s all I can think of. I hope it is helpful.

Questions to Ask Yourself After a Session

The most important preparations I make for my D&D games happen after the session. Making dungeons and monsters is fun and valuable work, but it’s important for the game  to respond to the PC’s actions. Right after a session is when the events of play are fresh in your mind. It’s the best time to think about what consequences might arise in the future.

I think it might be a useful tool (for me, if not for anybody else) to put together a post-session questionnaire. Something to prompt the referee to examine the elements of the session most likely to bear interesting fruit in the future.

Who did the characters wrong during the session?

Do the wronged parties know the characters are responsible? If they don’t know, will they care enough to find out? How will they try to get back at the party? Will they try to hunt them down and take violent revenge? Will they attempt to pressure the party legally or socially? Will they concoct elaborate schemes, or take a more direct approach?

Don’t limit yourself to NPCs who’ve appeared in the game. If someone died, did they have a family who will want vengeance? If the characters won something, does that mean there’s someone else who lost it? Good deeds earn the ire of villains as easily as evil deeds earn the ire of goodly folk.

Did the characters do anything stealthily during the session?

Did they go anywhere they weren’t supposed to be? Did they leave behind any clues that might make someone want to find out what happened, or to improve their security? Just because nobody heard the characters prying open a door doesn’t mean the damaged door won’t be discovered later.

Is there anyone, aside from employers, who benefited from the character’s actions?

Do they regard the party as selfless and heroic, or do they take a more cynical view? Just how far does the party’s good reputation spread? Will they admire the party? Seek to aide them in the future? What is the most interesting way they could show their appreciation? Can they provide the party with information, services, material, or future jobs?  Will the party inspire them to become adventurers in their own right? If so, will they attempt to join the party as hirelings, or will they pop up in some future adventure to aid the party?

If anyone died in the course of the party’s adventure, what sort of hole did they leave behind in their community? What effect did they have on their environment which will be lost now that they’re dead?

Did people depend on the person who was killed? Will they lose their jobs, or become vulnerable to attack, or have their legal system disrupted? Will someone rise to fill the vacuum they left, or will there be a period of chaos followed by a significant change in status quo?

The same questions might apply to any objects the party stole.

What information did the party spread around?

Did they make any new discoveries, or reveal any secrets? Will the people who know this new information keep it to themselves, or will it quickly become public knowledge? How can the information be exploited for personal gain and profit?

Did the characters do anything which the authorities, or the public at large, will have feelings about?

Did the characters engage in any public violence in a normally peaceful space? Did they flout local custom in some particularly egregious way? Did they rile up a mob? Did they make anyone afraid? Did they make shows of wealth in front of the poor, or shows of poverty in front of the rich?

Are the characters known to be the cause? If so, will there be legal consequences? If not, do people want to know who is responsible? In either case, will there be some change to the local laws or attitudes?

Did the players express any desires or interests you might use to engage / hook them in the future?

Did anyone mention a goal that they have? Perhaps an item or territory they wanted; a power or social status they wished to achieve? Did they particularly like an NPC who could reappear as a friendly face / be injured to make the players angry? Did they particularly hate an NPC who could develop into a bigger antagonist just to annoy them?

Example of Play for Running Traps Without a Search Check

My ORWA players recently invaded the sanctum of a villain known for their love of elaborate traps. I figured I’d share a transcription of their interactions with those traps. Hopefully it will be a useful tool for folks who aren’t clear on how this sort of play is done.

Trap #1: Acid Bucket

“You enter the building through the hole you blew in the wall. You’re in a T-shaped hallway with an elevator to your right, and a number of doors straight ahead. The blast is obviously going to draw attention, but there is no one in sight for the moment.”

“We make a beeline for the closest door. What does it look like?”

“Solid wood, lever-style knob, opens into the hallway.”

“I stand to the side of the door, and push down on knob with the Inanimate Carbon Rod.”

“It turns downwards, as you would expect a normal knob to do.”

“I pull the door open just slightly. Only enough so I can peek through the gap with one eye.”

“You see a cord crossing the gap. It’s attached to the door, and goes up somewhere ought of sight.”

“Can I tell what part of the door it is attached to.”

“It seems to be attached just above the knob.”

“You said the door opens out into the hallway, right? So the hinges are on this side?”

“Yes.”

“I remove the hinges.”

“Easily done, though at this point your examinations and tinkering has taken some time. Roll an encounter check.”

“Got a five”

“It seems that, despite the explosion, no one is rushing to see what happened. At least, no one you’ve detected. So, you’ve got the hinges off the door, what do you do now?”

“I’d like to open the door just slightly on the hinge side. Enough to stick my spear through the gap and cut the string.”

“The string is cut. Now what?”

“I’ll open the door enough for us to walk through.”

“Alright–“

“But I’m standing off to the side!!!”

“Hah, okay. You get the door open. Nothing happens.”

“Let’s get everybody out of the open first. C’mon guys, through the door! Can I see what the string was attached to?”

“There’s a steel bucket mounted on a pivot above the door. The string was attached to a latch holding the bucket upright.”

[Later, the players would use this acid bucket to defeat the first wave of enemies who came after them.]

[The bucket had an extendable sluice grate on it, which ensured maximum acid coverage on anyone standing near the door.]

Trap #2: Don’t Touch My Documents

“The room is full of office-style filing cabinets, 5 drawers tall, each standing a few feet apart from the others.”

“I open one to see what sort of documents are kept here.”

“When you pull on the handle, instead of opening the drawer, it simply slides out like a pull switch. You, the cabinet, and a 3′ by 3′ section of floor all drop down six feet, and bars snap into place above your head. Additionally, you hear five clicking sounds as each of the filing cabinet’s drawers lock.”

“Oh…it’s that kinda dungeon.”

[To get the drawers open, the handle would first need to be turned so it was vertical. In fairness, the players were warned that this dude was almost fetishistic about trapping everything.]

[The player later escaped when another character literally sold their soul for a wish to get them out. Kinda drastic I think, but I like the moxie.]

Trap #3: Missing the Heavy Key

“You’ve reached the area where the slaves you want to rescue are being held. They’re divided between two rooms behind barred doors.”

“Barred how?”

“The doors themselves are like others you’ve seen: wooden, lever handle, open out into the hallway. On either side of these doors, though, are metal hooks built into the wall. There’s a metal beam resting on the hooks, blocking the door from being opened.”

“I ask the guard we took prisoner how they got into these rooms.”

“He says that whenever he was sent into one of these rooms, he was given two heavy metal blocks, and instructed to slid them in place as he removed the bar from across the door. He was told that it was very important the hooks always have a consistent amount of weight on them.”

“What happens if they don’t?”

“He doesn’t know. Remember, he’s only been working here 2 months. They only told him what he needed to do his job.”

“Ugh, fine. Ya know what? We don’t have time for this. I cast Cone of Cold on the door. Would that freeze the mechanism?”

“Assuming the trap works mechanically, yes. The mechanism would be frozen.”

“I remove the bar.”

“How are you going to do that? It’s stuck to the hooks by the same ice that’s freezing the mechanism.”

“Can I yank it off?”

“You probably could, though doing so would also have a chance to activate the mechanism you were trying to freeze.”

“Uhm…oh, ya know what? I still have my old blowtorch with me. I’ll use the heat from that to melt the ice on the beam, then remove it.”

“Alright, you do that. The beam is removed, the door is unblocked, and no trap is activated. This won’t last forever, though. The ice in the gears is already starting to melt with the heat from your blowtorch, so I’ll be rolling every so often to see if the trap activates.”

“Okay, I open the door. Is the baby Lamataur in here?”

“No, but the 12 other slaves in here are super happy about being rescued.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. Now we need to get the other door open, it’s the same, right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have another Cone of Cold, though, so we can’t do that again. Ummm…what sort of building is this?”

“It seems like it was probably an office building before the apocalypse.”
“What are the walls made of?”

“Sheetrock, covered with torn wallpaper.”

“Oh, sweet, I take my knife and hack open the wall next to the hooks on that second door.”

“Okay, but that’s going to take a little while unless you have a better tool than a knife. You okay with an encounter check?”

“Umm…yeah, okay. Gotta do it. I’ll roll the check….a 3.”

“Fortunately for you, that’s no longer an encounter after you defeated that previous group of guards. You manage to saw open the wall.”

“Can someone else do the same thing on the other side while I do this?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, so what do we see?”

“It’s hard to get a good look. The hook is definitely attached to a lever, which holds a wheel in place, which is attached to a chain that goes down further into the wall than you can see.”

“I’ll try to jam my knife in to keep the chain from moving, can I do that?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay, let’s do it on both sides, then pull the bar off the door and open it.”

“You hear some squeaking as the chains strain against your knives, but the jam holds. Nothing happens. Inside the room you immediately spot the baby Lamataur.”

“Sweet! Time to get out of here.”

[Incidentally, had they activated the trap, a small trap door would have opened in the floor, and a crystal ball would have been launched out by a spring. Everyone would have to make a saving throw versus Magic to avoid becoming mesmerized by the thing, which would issue a command to “go into the cell and sit quietly until someone comes to get you.”]

A Response to My Post About Spotlight

Recently I wrote a post deconstructing the idea of Spotlight in tabletop games, and why I don’t like it. Red over at the blog “Blood, Death, Satan, and Metal” has written a direct response to my post which I think is worth reading. Please check it out if you’re interested in the subject.

I think our disagreement is largely semantic, in part because my original point is semantic. I dislike terms such as “spotlight” and “cinematic” (another word Red uses in his post) because of their obvious thespian roots. My perception is that most people regard thespians as “doing it right” when it comes to tabletop games This annoys, and I think it is harmful for reasons I’ve discussed at length elsewhere, so I push back against the intrusion of their language into my spaces. It is entirely possible that I am being silly and stubborn in doing so.

In particular, Red’s post is worth checking out because he played in my ORWA campaign for many years. He has a unique position from which to criticize me: that of having actually endured the application of my philosophies first hand. Moreover, he and I made a game together last year which may (Satan willing) someday finally get released. So, in addition to enduring me as a referee, he also had to battle his way through multiple arguments with me over what would be included in that book.

I have nothing more to say. Red is good people. Read his post.