Dungeon Scrawler

Mines As always, here are the rooms: "And they call it a mine!" When I think of mines in the context of fantasy adventure games, two very different pictures come to mind. First, there is the simple, literal sense of a "mine"--more or less a human made cave chasing gold or whatever. Second, is the classic dwarven mine--part mine and part underground empire. Needless to say, the two images don't actually have a ton in common. Additionally, the second sense of the word also functions a lot like our entry on Sewers : it's not that you think up endless "mine" rooms so much as you embed other kinds of rooms in and around a kind of dwarven-mine-aesthetic. (Or, whatever other mine-empire-creating civilization you've cooked up.) Anyways, I've tried to do a little of both for this one. As such, some of these rooms were conceived by first considering a previous room category in the context of a fantastic...

(Note: to my "usual audience", the next entry in the Dungeon Room Index has been slowly moving forward for months now. New baby is starting to settle into routines, so I hope to get back to completing the Index sooner than later, but who knows. I can't make promises right now. In the meantime, this piece has been mostly done for like 9 months, and a recent flash of oomph inspired me to cut it in half and publish the first part. Enjoy!) Welcome to a new Dungeon Room Index category: Opinions! Where my usual focus is to provide lego blocks and inspiration fuel, this is going to be more of an examination of some especially  subjective principles. I hope it will still be helpful. Introduction If you make dungeon crawling a serious part of your fantasy adventure games, then the question will inevitably arise "should I make my players draw the map? Or, should I give them one".  My opinion is this: you should make your players draw the map, and  you should push them t...

I'm pretty averse to most social media, but I usually give some relevant life context when I share my blog posts on Discord servers or on Reddit. If you dislike social media like me, or found this blog through other means, I just wanted to let you know why its quiet recently: we had a baby! At first I was enjoying some caregiver leave, so I had more time in between all that caregiving for working on the blog . Plus, in anticipation of limited time I had several blog posts in the queue at various stages of completion to give me things to release at regular intervals. I've pretty much run through those though, and I'm back to working full-time. All that said, I'm still here, and intending to finish the Dungeon Room Index this year! My other indexes will come along too, but it will probably continue to be quiet around here for at least several more weeks while our baby settles into a better sleep schedule and I get more rest. Thanks for sticking with me!

Long overdue, we have Audience Halls. This is a broad category it turns out, including such things as throne rooms, debate halls, courtrooms, and theaters. Here are the rooms: Playing to the audience I've done something a bit sneaky here. I started with one sense of the word "audience" and by the end my ideas bled into the other. I started with the "audience with the king" sense--a place where one might get the chance to meet with some important person--and morphed to the sense of a place where an audience of spectators gathers for some purpose. Underpinning both is the idea of a special purpose room where someone gets to speak their piece. If your dungeon builders were at all social, hierarchical, philosophical, or theatrical, they might have had purpose for audience halls! These room would probably be situated at nexus points between "public" spaces ( Great Halls and the like) and private spaces (such as Living Quarters ). Important messages are pas...