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Dungeon Room Index: Arenas

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Arenas, combat pits, and coliseums. Places where duels, battles, and similar sport take place! Here are the rooms: Let them fight Perhaps it's a bit contrived to set an arena or coliseum in a dungeon. Given how much of classic dungeon crawling entails fighting monsters, what, we stumble into a formal space for fighting monsters ? Especially considering how much classic dungeon crawling entails avoiding  monsters, are we really just going to waltz into an arena and face on down? Well, maybe! But really, I think there are a two main ways to think about an arena in a dungeon: In current use . This arena is a place where a local dungeon faction stages fights for sport. These bouts may be friendly (or at least non-lethal), or may entail setting up captured intruders to duel the factions' local champion. Perhaps the faction keeps a monstrous "pet" and feeds victims to it. Long abandoned and repurposed.  Just like our Great Halls from a previous post, this large open space ...
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Dungeon Room Index: Stairs

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This will be a little shorter than my usual room contributions (I felt better about it when I was expecting to have this published days ago!); today I'm focusing on stairs, pits, and other descents. Here are the "rooms": (I have no clue what's causing this blur; maybe I need to clean my scanner or something) ...Stairs? I was recently reading through  The Vast in the Dark  because I was intrigued by it's dungeon generators. There is much I could say about it; I was quite impressed with both the content and the presentation! But, the point is that one interesting feature of those dungeon generators is rooms that explicitly connect to deeper levels. As it is a generated dungeon, it seems that those deeper levels more or less "don't exist" until you find a room that connects to those lower levels. The overall conceit assumes that you want to push deeper and deeper into the dungeon to find something in particular (I won't spoil it for those who want t...
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Dungeon Room Index: Animal Rooms

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Today we're looking at animal rooms: stables, zoos, aviaries, apiaries , hatcheries, and so on. Here are the rooms: Life finds a way Animals are one of those touches that breathe life into a fantasy world. After all, if the only things alive in this world you've imagined are the people , how "living" and "breathing" is this world really? We'll address that  a little more at the end, but for now it's enough to say put some animal rooms in your dungeon. Animals are all around us, and we thinking-beings do a lot to keep and cultivate them. Just think of all the different reasons to keep animals: For labor. Whether to ride them, or to pull a cart or plow. For study. To learn their behaviors, to glean some insight into or from their survival mechanisms or biology. For testing. To test human remedies without risking human lives. For harvesting. Whether it be gathering their fur or milk, or their silk or honey. For companionship. Some people gotta have...
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