Dungeon Room Index: Entrances

I'm making dungeon rooms.

Per the suggestion of u/BluSponge over on reddit, I thought it would be very appropriate to start with Dungeon Entrances (or "starting areas", as for the most part we're dealing with the interior of the dungeon entrance, not the facade outside).

For the impatient, here are the rooms:

I'll take a closer look at each example with some notes as well, but before I dive in I'd like to take a moment to speak to some of my principles for this project, and creating dungeons in general.

Making interesting dungeons

Many people have had hours of fun traversing a maze of square rooms, distinguished only by their set dressing. This is good. It's good that that's "enough". But, as one who looks at dungeons and draws them, I need a little more. I need the dungeon to call out to me on sight, and entice me to run it. I strive for that in my own work; I want the artistic presentation of a room--alone--to spark the imagination of the person running it.

That's pretty nebulous, and mostly aesthetic though; I have a few principles that are a little more gamey as well:

• There should be big rooms. One of the thing that attracts me to the idea of a dungeon in the first place is that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where they enter that huge pillared hall in Moria. It's the evocative sense of scale, that this is a place you could get lost in. But, more practically, TTRPGs make use of ranged weapons and creatures with ranged attacks. I'd like those features to actually matter in a dungeon crawling context, so I strive to include rooms that are big enough, and/or provide cover for ranged attacker's to hide behind. Not to mention just being able to include big creatures. (I've started using 1/10" graph paper to make this much easier)
• Make use of verticality. There's something special about depth. At a basic level, I love the notion that a length of rope can become a one-time use "key" within a dungeon. Too deep to just jump down, gotta tie that rope to something! Does that mean we have to leave the rope here? We're down a coil of rope? Yes. Or, you yank on that elven rope and now you've successfully descended!... but you're going to have to find another way up. Often though, it's just nice to see a tall room with some balconies--it's a great place to situate some guards with bows and make for an interesting tactical challenge. Balconies, tall open stair cases, shafts. I also like to overlay my dungeon levels and figure out places where a floor/ceiling could have collapsed, leaving unexpected holes between levels. All of this is a little challenging to pull off (I have a light-tracing tablet to compare one dungeon level overlayed on another), but it's not impossible, and I think it's worth the effort.
• Add water. Water is mysterious. Dark, murky water is unsettling; what could be hiding in there? Yes yes, puddles and drips and all that atmosphere, but what about submerged chambers and halls, or a river connecting two rooms? Water is such a simple source of threat and uncertainty. So tactically juicy. It seems a no brainer to me that one should try to incorporate water into dungeons. Just don't drink it; it's probably rancid.
• Ruination is neat. For every statue, or pillar, or mural, there should be an eroded statue, a collapsed pillar, or a cracked mural. Most of the time this information will live in the key, but sometimes you gotta draw that map with a big fallen pillar laying across the floor. This is less of a rule and more of a vibe.

I would talk about jacquaysing and using a larger number of rooms as well, but as this particular project is focused on single rooms in isolation, I'll spare you the time.

A note on usability

After trying many methods of presenting a dungeon at the table (or online) I have come to the conclusion that 1) I don't like providing a map for the players in any form, and 2) describing a dungeon room in words has it's own challenges. I prefer those challenges, but it has taught me this: while I want to draw dungeon rooms that are evocative and interesting to the DM's eyes, there is a counterpressure to make rooms that are easy to explain. It's very authentic and evocative to make a cavern a funky amoeba shape, but it's a lot easier to say "this chamber is roughly a 20x30 rectangle, with some pockets and nooks around the edges". Some of this is being thoughtful in how you describe a room, but some of this starts with the way you draw the room in the first place. Too-intricate room shapes are the first thing that doesn't make the cut, so I will strive for rooms that are simple shapes, or break up naturally into simple shapes.

Details on the goods

Thanks for sticking with me. Let me give you some notes on the rooms I came up with this time.

The Hallway

I wanted to start simple. A long hallway has it's own charm. Perhaps some of the doors are locked. Perhaps all of the doors are locked. Might be nice to put a meaningful trap right in the middle. It all forces choices immediately, without too much noise to distract attention either.

The Sewer

I'm sure I'll be making more sewer rooms in the future, but this is a simple evocative start. I didn't put any bridges over the water, but you might choose to. I think it's a little funny that the first thing someone might do is make themself dripping wet. You could widen out the water and force that outcome in fact (unless the players are very clever). I like that one of the exits to this room is literally to follow the flow of the water. Who knows when they'll get to come up for air that way. On the other end, at the water's source I put a grate. Nice place to hide a plainly visible treasure; now they'll want to find a way to the other side of that grate.

The "Boss" Door

First thing you see is a big door. It's locked by some special mechanism. Lockpicks aren't going to cut it. So either you go hunting for keys or you blow that thing up, drawing everything down those halls in on you all at once. It's a nice focal point. Something to latch onto; where does the door lead? Well, it could be a treasury, a legit "boss" encounter, or just the next level of the dungeon. Maybe it's fake! Wouldn't that be funny for you? I wonder if the players would laugh...

The Bridge

This is one of my favorites. A ruined bridge once spanned a wide chasm. You can see there's something significant on the other side, but chances are good you can't quite get there. Maybe someone risks a long jump; perhaps they make it, or perhaps they die. Immediately. Or we spend some magic or whatever. Many, many possibilities here. At least there are adjacent doorways on both sides, so you can suppose there might be another way over there. (Frankly, it might be more fun if there isn't. Add a little Metroidvania to your dungeon. Something to come back to when they find the "boots of incredibly long jumps")

The Descent

I could have called this "The Statue", but I'd like to emphasize the idea that maybe there's this big grate in the basement of the local shrine. You drop a torch down and discover its deep, as your torch bounces of the head of a big statue and keeps falling. So you open this grate and rope your way down past the face of a mysterious statue-woman in a long shawl, hands outstretched and face inclined upward in supplication. Criss-crossing walkways span the void, passing through the body of the statue. (Cuz it's beeeg.) You could put an entrance anywhere in this room, but I liked that image.

The Waterfall Cave

This one is lifted right from my in-progress megadungeon, but I think it's a really good idea, and if I never finish mine, at least maybe you can make good use of it. A river/waterfall pours into a cave mouth. From there, the water spill even deeper into the earth. Some statues suggest something is here, and a passageway on the other side of the water's flow entices exploration. (Really, players should assume that the riskiest paths always hide the greatest rewards. So go ahead and fall in that river by accident!)

The Dead End

A room with some statues and no apparent doors. Naturally, they're all secret doors. Start training the players early to look for secrets! Of course, one of them is actually trapped. Watch out!

The Pillared Entry

Pillars are great. Use them plentifully. (They hold up the roof, for one.) Pillars are great for cover, hiding things. They can be simple, intricate, round, square, blank, or carved with delicate patterns. Just a great bit of set dressing. See my comment above about Moria. Maybe they just feel right to me. It's certainly more interesting than "the room is square, with doors on each wall". Now it's got pillars, too!

The High Stair

Stairs are great, too. They're a vantage point, a choke point, a falling hazard (or a place to push goblins off of!). If you haven't noticed, I like a good descent down into the darkness.

The Ledges

Caves and burrows are great places for ledges that you don't really have to explain. And ledges are great for the same reason as stairs and chasms. In this case, placing a tunnel entrance on top of a ledge gives a reason to try to climb up there, and that's a good reason to carry a grappling hook or similar implement, and any time you can fill up players inventories with things, I think that's a good thing. Even better if they didn't bring it! Wouldn't it be great if they made a mental note to come back again next week with different equipment so they could access new parts of the dungeon?

The Wall of Doors

I've stuck to mostly 3 to 5 exits to rooms so far. But what if there are a ton? Not all of them have to lead somewhere. Perhaps several are 10 foot hallways to dead ends. Perhaps some are trapped. Perhaps some have something nasty sleeping in them. Maybe lots of them go to the same place. The fun is just in how insane it is. And whatever you do, don't hold the players hands: if they come back later and can't remember which door led somewhere useful, that's squarely on them!

The Room of Portals

Similar to the Wall of Doors, but you can do much sillier (and more annoying) things. The portals are swirling mist. You don't know where they go. They might drop you right into a monster's lair. They might send you somewhere deep in the dungeon, without a portal on the other side to bring you back. They might be totally reliable, consistent, two-way portals, or totally random! Make them sweat a little. I added some statues in this room to potentially conceal some secret doors that can only be opened from the other side (the rest of the dungeon has to connect back to this room somehow).

The Dive

Similar to the High Stair, or the Descent, this relies on substantial height for it's effect. This time, however, a rope shouldn't be able to do the trick, and for all but the cleverest and most well equipped parties, this is a one way door. You have to jump, far to the water below. Don't worry, it's deep enough to break the fall. When you arrive you can swim down a side tunnel, or pull yourself up onto land at the other end. There's even a submerged passage that can be put to good use hiding treasure or a monster or just a hidden path to somewhere interesting. It's essential with an entrance like this that there is either another exit somewhere else, or something within the dungeon that can guarantee the party's ability to escape. Either way, the message should be clear: if you want to get out, you have to do deeper.

Something extra

Who knows if I'll keep this up, but while I was at it I had a stroke of inspiration to make something a bit more purely evocative. Aren't dungeons cool?