Posts

Dungeon Room Index: Hallways

Image
(I will no longer robotically announce what I did last time; there's a page now; use that!) I'm doing Hallways! Ha! I bet you think those aren't rooms, but my brain caught an itch and I must follow this inspiration. Here's the thing though; hallways are  different enough that I don't know that I can really follow my usual shtick of just dumping the drawings up front. Instead, let's talk a bit about hallways. Hallways as "whitespace" In practice, hallways are often an afterthought. So much so, that the definition of "hallway" in a dungeon could nearly be "everything that's not the rooms; y'know... where actual stuff  is".  Like the whitespace (greyspace?) on this page. You don't generally key hallways when writing your dungeon content. As a result, there are even a lot of dungeon generators out there that elide thinking about hallways into little more than "draw a line between these two rooms". And you know wha...

Dungeon Room Index: Tombs

Image
Last time I did Shrines. Today I'm doing tombs. Graves, crypts, mausoleums, so on. Places where dead things are laid to rest. (Or in games like this, to guard their earthly spoils from would be grave robbers. It doesn't sound that restful to me...) This is a classic staple, I think. Here are the rooms:

Dungeon Room Appendix: Traps, and Hazards

Traps are a staple of dungeon crawling. "Trap" is slightly limiting though; personally, I prefer the broader category of "hazards". Why? Well, simply put because "trap" invokes things like spike pits and swinging blades, but "hazard" includes mechanically-similar-yet-aesthetically-different things like "the air is full of deadly spores". (The distinction, maybe, is "was this constructed by something for the purpose of getting you, or is it naturally occurring", but the line there can be pretty fuzzy and, in practice, pretty unimportant if you ask me.) See, if all you think about are "traps", then brains like mine are railroaded into mechanical constructions, and quickly get hung up on obnoxious questions like "why is this trap here?" and "how does it still function?" and maybe "how does it get reset?". Don't get me wrong, those are good questions to ask, it's just that... it'...

Dungeon Room Index: Shrines

Image
Last time I did armories . (Sorry this one took a little longer than expected! I got images scanned and ready and realized I'd missed some of the coloring.) Shrines. I'm using this term as a catch-all for any kind of chapel or temple. Holy places. Places of worship and veneration. Here are the rooms: Shrines I started with "chapels", and just found that that term was too limiting. Constraints are good for promoting creativity, but "chapel" was a little too  constraining for me. So I went with something that could give me a little more room to breathe. Shrines are a wonderfully evocative kind of space. Unlike armories, shrines are almost anti-utilitarian; not to say that they don't fill a function (we're not doing the classic archeologist bit: "we don't know what it's for; it must be religious!"), just that they are wide open to including features for mostly aesthetic reasons, and that's always fun . (They are, of course, also a ...