Dungeon Room Index: Hallways

(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 what? I think that's ok. But...

...that doesn't mean you can't do anything interesting with hallways, or that you shouldn't; and in fact my purpose today is to prove that you can do an incredibly small amount of thought-labor and get a lot more out of hallways.

Hallways with purpose

Fundamentally, it must be recognized that hallways can do more than just connect rooms and break up keyed content. Most hallways may simply be a clear passage between two or more rooms, but it can be appropriate and interesting to do something different with them. All on their own, hallways can:

• Present a challenge. Is the hallway too narrow? Too short? Is it flooded or impeded in some way? Is it trapped?
• Stage a strategy. In some situations, hallways are an obvious choice for choosing a battlefield. Outnumbered? Perhaps a narrow passage can level the playing field.
• Deliver flavor. Rooms are sometimes swallowed up in their room notes, but if you want to say something creatively through the architecture of your dungeon, hallways are where those details can really stick out without the distraction of keyed room content.

That may not seem like much, but with that introduction, let's look at some hallway attributes and talk about how they can combine to make interesting contributions to your dungeons:

Hallway notes

Shape

Let's start simple. What is the shape of your hallway?

I think we all generally default to these standard shapes. They're grounded and sensible. In general, I wouldn't say these particular shapes add much. That's quite often acceptable, but at the very least you can contrast dungeons (or sections of a dungeon) by changing up these shapes.

Where the previous shapes are the default setting, these are the interesting mixups. Round hallways are especially suited to things like sewers, but can raise interesting questions in other dungeon's as well. Diamond shaped hallways are inherently strange, and will immediately give a foreign vibe to your space.

Caves should not have regular passages. They should not be level, they should not be straight, and they should not be uniform in their width. Have you ever considered that, with the exception of the only the most frequently traversed portions of a cavern, that basically every walkable surface ought to be considered rough terrain? Watch any video of people exploring caves: they do not run down those passages. A smoothly carved tunnel within a cave should trumpet it's presence by it's contrast with the natural environment.

Dimensions

In my prior play experiences, I find hallways generally assumed to be a more or less comfortable experience. Whether because we implicitly default to our own common experience, or because graph paper really encourages five foot increments, I can't say for sure, but this deserves to be challenged.

The default for hallways in homes seems to be somewhere around three or four feet wide. Nicer homes might push for the full five suggested by a typical dungeon map. Three feet is verging on cramped, and five is quite comfortable. In these hallways you can generally pass around someone with at most a little effort. The standard ceiling size in American homes ranges from seven to ten feet high. Comfortable indeed. Now, let's diverge:

How does a cramped hallway play? Can you reasonably swing a sword in a narrow hall? What about a maul? Surely a spear is abnormally enhanced in such a space. How well can you really avoid harm in a narrow hall? There isn't exactly a lot of room to dodge... so perhaps spears and bows are enhanced within these spaces, and saves against things like a dragon's breath should just fail automatically. At the same time, a shield, especially a big one, might be unreasonably effective in such a space. Do you think you're going to get the upper hand in a narrow hall on someone with a tower shield?

What about marching order? In a narrow hall it is unreasonable that anyone should be able to switch places or "double up". The player in the front is absolutely taking the brunt of any attacks, and probably doing most of the attacking, too. The next person behind them might be able to stab with a spear or shoot a crossbow or a shortbow, but anything else is surely impaired by the lack of space.

What about a hallway with an especially low ceiling? Perhaps the builders of this dungeon were dwarves or goblins; they had no need for all that head space that humans would require, so in these halls you're constantly crouching. There is no moving quickly in such halls (unless you're a dwarf yourself!), and again it's going to be difficult to dodge. I would consider such a hallway as difficult terrain at least.

Push those short or cramped hallways to the extreme. These hallways may require you to completely remove equipment or armor to even pass through them, leaving anyone incredibly vulnerable if caught by an ooze or a giant cockroach, or even just by something lairing immediately on the other side and ready to pick off a completely unarmed player. Of course necessary corridors should rarely be so narrow. But short cuts and hidden places can be locked behind these interesting hallways.

Push even farther. This hallways is simply not traversable by a normal humanoid. Why not? All sorts of creatures might be able to come and go freely from these passages, but a human would have to turn themselves into smoke or liquid, or shrink themselves down to move freely. (This can be great encouragement for interesting utility spells! Or a great "lock", with the "Boots of Shrinking" stashed somewhere else in the dungeon being the "key".) So many oozes and other creatures are noted to be able to slip through tight spaces, yet how often do we utilize this?

Tall hallways add an interesting element all their own. We need more creatures that crawl on the ceilings and rain down punishment from above! What will an ill prepared party do when they find their melee weapons are completely useless against the eight-legged venomous chameleon with it's lightning fast sticky tongue and gecko-like climbing ability? This is even better when combined with the cramped hallways described above; at least now if something attacks from above multiple members of the party can take a crack at it, and ranged weapons like thrown axes or firebombs can be used at their effective range when there's more headroom for a natural throwing arc. (Have you ever considered the effect on range that even a normal hallways might have?)

Expansive or multi-lane hallways verge onto the Great Halls previously discussed. There's plenty of room here to change position, and depending on the layout, there may even be opportunities for cover as well: pillars or intermittent walls really break up the space. Such a hallway lends itself well to larger encounter distances, and this is a space where you bringing along a cart or other vehicle for hauling off goods is believable.

Layout

The default here is straight halls with right corners. This is all well and good. Corners, and especially intersections, make for good ambush points. At sufficient encounter distance, a corner can reveal light or voices of potential foes before actual line of sight is established. This can be trouble for the party, but if its the foes who give themselves away, quick thinkers will have the opportunity to react and stage surprises of their own.

Rounded halls are a meaningful change of aesthetic, and may inherently limit opportunities for ambushes.

What if there are never bends in the halls? Every hallway is more or less a straight shot between two rooms? Ranged weapons will be especially advantageous in such a hall.

These hallways are simply erratic. This may come up most frequently in a cavern environment, but used elsewhere it lends a certain madness to a dungeon that you might find highly desirable. Functionally, it's very similar to standard hallways, but aesthetically it's weird.

More of a sub-category, but hallways can also be winding or "wasteful"; orderly perhaps, but "inefficient" and full of switchbacks or dead ends. Why? Well, dungeon builder's should be mysterious sometimes. Perhaps it was to disorient would be invaders. (And if it's a cave, well, because. Why should caves always lead somewhere? It would give me a chuckle once in a while for a party to descend down a chute and follow a path only to find they've wasted their time. I certainly hope they weren't running away from anything...)

Construction

This is simple and verging strongly on vibes over mechanics, so I'll keep this one to a brief bulleted list. What are the hallways made of?

• Small, tightly packed bricks.
• Haphazard, cobbled arrangement of stones, cemented together.
• Large carved stone blocks.
• Hard packed dirt. Perhaps supported by wooden arches or other means of supporting the tunnel.
• Carved directly into the stone, rough.
• Carved directly into the stone, unreasonably smooth.
• Carved directly into the stone by acid or unusual means.
• The stone is warped, as though it just moved out of the way. The texture might be smooth, or spiraling, or undulating. It's as if the stone simply retreated to form these tunnels.
• Metal. Common in a sci-fi RPG, but rare enough in a fantasy setting to be interesting and notable.
• Clay. Like, the interior of a large clay pipe. They used to do that you know.

Atmosphere

Again, simple and vibey. Is the hallway:

• Empty? Completely clear? Is there an ooze around here?...
• Excessively dusty and cobwebbed? No one travels here. Why? Or, upgrade those cobwebs to full webs. These halls are absolutely choked with webs; complete with bats and other things trapped in them.
• "Dusty"? Like piles of dirt or dust clumped up in places, like the way the wind piles up sand dunes.
• Littered with bones or scrap wood or any other garbage?
• Covered in roots or tendrils? Plants or trees if near enough to the surface, or perhaps thin white fungal filaments hanging down or snaking across the walls.
• Wet? The ground is perpetually covered in water. And/or the ceiling is constantly dripping water from somewhere (depending on what this tunnel is made of this will either raise eyebrows that this tunnel has survived as long as it has, or else raise alarm bells that it won't be here much longer...)
• Submerged? Perhaps better suited for a cavern, but a hallway that descends into water is an ominous prospect. Does this passage even go anywhere? Does it ever come up for air? Without an alternate light source or the ability to breathe under water this should be an impossible obstacle in most cases.
• Blocked? Minor collapses have left this hallways either partially or totally obscured by fallen earth or stone. Either the passage is cramped to some degree, or downright impossible to pass without first moving some of the debris. That might be terribly risky though unless certain precautions are taken. Of course, put some creatures in here for whom this debris is little more than an inconvenience! A collapsed tunnel is sometimes a nice fail-safe for my hyper-pragmatic brain to get me out of leaning into hyper-realism. Do you find yourself asking "where should I put the bathrooms?" when building a dungeon? I do. It's a curse. Well, now I don't have to think about it "it was somewhere over in that collapsed section. It's just a dead end now."

On drawing and keying hallways

I don't want to create the impression that your dungeons are lacking if you don't fill your key or your map with a lot of these details. On the contrary, I think keyed hallways should be exceptional. That said let's briefly discuss how to efficiently convey some of your hallway variety.

Drawing on a grid can be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it makes it very easy to make tidy straight lines, and gives you great consistency of scale. It's clean and readable. Real life is less uniform however, so let me say this: maps are ultimately representational--they need not necessarily be literal. So, you might draw your rooms or hallways to fit precisely on a five-foot-square grid, but you don't need to enforce those dimensions. Look at these examples:

For a dungeon, I might decide that all my hallways are of two widths: narrow three foot hallways, and wide five foot hallways. I could decide to represent those fairly literally, as in the left example, or I could go for simple contrast: a solid line for the narrow halls, and a square-width regular hall for the wider hallway. Do what works best for your hallways and the scale of your map.

That's all well and good for the drawing. What about including all of these interesting vibey/mechanical differences for my hallways? Well, personally I'm a believer in very focused, terse dungeon keys (I have a work in progress post on this very subject) and I think it's a great idea to include a small prelude to your dungeon key that describes some of these defaults. Something like this is more than adequate:

 

Hallways as inspiration

Finally, I'm going to leave you with some spark tables for random interesting hallways, and here's why: inasmuch as hallways are sort of the "bones" of your dungeon, I think starting with them can be great inspiration fuel for the mood and style of the rest of your dungeon. Enjoy:

d6	Width
1	Narrow, impassable
2	Narrow, cramped
3-4	Comfortable
5	Roomy
6	Expansive, multi-laned

d6	Height
1	Short, impassible
2	Short, cramped
3-4	Comfortable
5	Roomy
6	Towering

d6	Shape
1	Standard, square/pointed
2	Standard, rounded/vaulted
3-4	Natural (cavernous)
5	Round
6	Polygonal (triangle, diamond, hexagon)

d6	Layout
1-2	Square
3	Rounded
4	Straight
5	Erratic
6	Winding (roll again and combine)

d6	Construction
1	Bricks
2	Cobblestone
3	Blocks
4	Dirt
5	Carved
6	Unexplainable

d6	Craftsmanship
1-2	Rough
3-4	Acceptable
5-6	Exquisite

d6	Atmosphere
1	Empty
2	Dusty/dusted
3	Littered
4	Wet/submerged
5	Roots/tendrils
6	Blocked

Roll seven or or eight d6 (twice on atmosphere could be interesting) and off you go!