Sewers! And other watery places. At the very beginning of this series I specifically called out water and how I think it can elevate a dungeon. Today, I hope to vindicate that idea. Here are the rooms: ...and this sneaky devil that I missed on my first pass transcribing my rough notes Sewers as a category I love sewer dungeons. I think there are a few broad archetypes for dungeons out there: "cave" , "prison" , "tomb" --many of the room types I've covered so far can readily be expanded into a whole dungeon concept. (Some more readily than others--I'll be impressed if you can make "kitchens" into an entire megadungeon.) For many of those, I think when you pick the broad archetype you can readily come up with actual rooms to stitch together (even if there are just a lot of rooms with more coffins in them). I think sewers, on the other hand, are kind of the opposite: I don't really think of a "room" when I think of sewer...
I recently read an interesting blog series about city-crawls and why they don't really work. The basic argument, as I understand it, is that cities are rarely suitable for spatial exploration mechanics. As cities are generally safe, and the activities that take place there are typically supplemental to the more exciting activities of delving dungeons and exploring wildernesses, it's just not generally desirable to employ a procedure for walking two blocks and hooking a left down an alley to be assailed by thugs on your way to buy extra rope. This argument really piqued my interest and got me thinking though: if a city is not suitable for exploring in terms of it's spatial qualities, might there be some other sense in which a city can be generically "crawled"? Can you crawl a settlement in a less physical sense? The epiphany: can you crawl a social network ? And would that even be fun ? Crawling through graphs I have to take a moment to reinforce the basic i...
(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...
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