Dungeon Room Index: Galleries
"Galleries" are rooms intended for the display of objects. That may include true "art galleries" (displaying paintings, tapestries, etc.), statuaries (displaying statues), or museums (displaying artifacts, bones, etc)
Here are the rooms:
On Display
At it's most basic, a gallery exists because some creature wanted to show something off, or preserve something for a general audience; a gallery implies an at least moderately intelligent and social entity.
Galleries are great rooms for showing off some flavor and lore! Don't miss out on a fun opportunity to tease other parts of your world. (I for one take great pleasure in coming up with something fantastical to slap up on those walls.) If your galleries incorporate physical objects, then they're also a great place for handing out fun magical artifacts and the like! (I love to hide a genuinely useful or interesting artifacts in the midst of a bunch of junk and knick-knacks.)
As you might expect by now, you might begin thinking about your dungeon gallery by asking:
- Who setup this gallery? A mad wizard? A dragon or beholder? A sadistic prison warden? A scholar? The patron will set the mood for this gallery.
- What stuff did they want to display? Informed by the previous question, what do they find interesting or impressive or valuable enough to display? Ancient totems? History? Religious figures? Rare treasures? The bones of their enemies?
- Why are they displaying it? Is it to vaunt their wealth? Or their conquests? To intimidate? To preserve ancient things for "modern" appreciation? Private enjoyment?
Of course, you never need an excuse (in my opinion) to just fill a hall with statues!
Room Notes
Art galleries
The simplest sense of a "gallery" in my mind is a place
hanging paintings (or similar). So these rooms are sort of walkable spaces with a lot to look at. Perhaps the one on
the left contains many scenes from the (editorialized) history of a noble family. The one on the right might have
dramatic scenes featuring great hunts, or ships on the sea.
Remember, paintings make for great hiding
places! And no doubt they might exist here in various shades of decay. These pictures could be rotted or
tattered. A portrait that has been slashed by massive claws could foreshadow some threat within this dungeon.
It's nice (though not necessary) if the layout harmonizes
thematically with what the gallery displays. So, this room's pictures might create a panoramic image of the nearby
region (perhaps displaying a monument or structure that no longer exists there in the present, pointing to a future
dungeon!)
Aside: I'll touch on this again, but one of my favorite applications of spaces like these is to reveal the world, and especially future hooks!
Aside: I'll touch on this again, but one of my favorite applications of spaces like these is to reveal the world, and especially future hooks!
Three large paintings depict three events in the life of a
famous king. First, his triumphant conquest and coronation, second the height of his reign over this conquered people,
and third the day of his assassination at the hands of the starving masses...
Seven massive pillars are carved with highly stylized
reliefs, depicting the seven days of the end of the world, and the seven demons who preside over them, each bringing
a different plague to herald their coming.
With unnecessarily high ceiling, and glossy smooth pillars rising from a reflection pool, clearly this gallery
was meant to be breathtaking. The only thing breathtaking about it now is the stench of stagnant water and mildew. (Stagnant water is where brain-eating microbes fester. Lean into that.)
The south entrance opens onto an elevated viewing platform--elevated for proper appreciation of an expansive
and intricate mosaic that pans across the north wall. In exquisite detail is a scene of a massive battle taking
place across sea and land.
Museums
You might think "museum" is a word that feels a little
odd applied to a single room. I would agree; but the word is useful in evoking a particular sort of
gallery. Not just one of images, but one of objects. Not just for pleasant viewing, but for preservation.
In this simple layout, rows of busts sit atop
pedestals between towering columns. Perhaps the heads depicted on these columns have totally foreign shapes and
features to what you would expect of humans.
I hope you like taxidermy. This room has a wide
variety of stuffed creatures in dramatic poses. Perhaps they are rotting, or filled with bugs (like a hive of angry
hornets!). Perhaps they are animated, and will come to life if prodded. Perhaps a living creature hides among
them, waiting for the moment to strike a passerby. This could just as easily be a "museum" exhibit for historical
purposes, or some hunter's trophy room where they displayed their kills.
A single towering skeleton dominates the center of
this exhibit, hung from the ceiling by thick wires. The creature hung there is like nothing you have ever seen
before. Is it even real? Perhaps the skeleton will come to life, or perhaps something valuable has been hidden
inside the skull.
This
is a trope I can't get enough of: hint at the kind of creatures that might be found in this world, in
some far off region. I always wanted run a game in which inter-regional travel would be an important element,
allowing for contact with entirely different biomes, creatures, and cultures. I got to do it for a short time
once, and I used a room much like this one to allude to the giant sand worms that were found in the far away
deserts.
Central exhibits are surrounded by
smaller, adjoining chambers. Perhaps some remains of a lost people, and each auxiliary rooms serves to highlight a
different element of their long lost life-style. Adjoining rooms like this strike me as a great place to hide--whether
that be some lurking creature waiting to ambush, or the players themselves to similar purpose.
If it isn't obvious yet, I just love an opportunity to subtly point at places the players have never been! If
you wanted to be a bit more on the nose about it, perhaps the disk carries an inscription with a cryptic message
alluding to some treasure at the place under this sky.
(Did you know that a starry sky can be used to indicate not just a location, but also a point in time?
You can pack a lot of lore into such a simple image!)
At the center of this grand, circular chamber is
model of the planets in enormous spheres of brass. Walkways rise up around the edges of the room, and the model
appears to have been suspended within a large tank of some kind of liquid, perhaps meant to represent the vast
Aether. The tank has since broken, leaving only a pool of sludge at the bottom. The spheres might be valuable
if you could find some way to haul them out of here.
This expansive hall is characterized not just by it's massive skeletons of ferocious looking creatures, but
also by it's crumbling upper balconies.
(I want you to appreciate that this single room would take up about a quarter of a single piece of US letter
size graph paper. With a standard 1/4" grid, on 8.5"x11" paper, this room is nearly 4 by 4 inches. This is why
I'm a convert to 1/10" grid paper.)
More of a "backroom" in a museum-like area; this room is full of tightly packed shelves with all kinds of tagged and sorted knick-knacks. Hide a surprise magic item in here, or a map to another region for your players to discover!
Statuaries
I'm a sucker for a statue. To my imagination, they accomplish so much with so little.
A simple hall of statues in a line. The statues
could follow a similar theme, as though part of a set, but they could also simply be from a similar place and
era, gathered here together. Perhaps these eight depict a philosopher in the throes of eight different
emotions on their path to enlightenment, or perhaps these eight are the gathered work of eight famous stone
carvers from a particular region over a period of several hundred years.
For whatever reason--and despite the comparative difficulty of stone carving as compared with pottery or what have you--within a fantasy context I think statues can easily take on the feeling of a dungeon commodity. As such, it's perfectly reasonable to my imagination for statues to line hallways, less as a primary feature and more as a decorative one. In such a context, I would expect the statues to more or less match, though, as usual, it's an excellent bit of stage direction for one of these statues to contrast with the others. In the left hall, for example, I imagine stoic and stiff figures in a line, but at each junction the statues instead point dramatically and accusingly down the adjacent halls.
Statues on opposite walls rise up on staggered terraces, all glaring down judgementally towards the center of
the room. One statue on an upper ledge--noticeable to anyone who cares to examine the room--instead turns their
head away in disgust. Naturally, there is a secret door behind this statue.
A passageway is interrupted by a long, dark hall. At the end is a large, crouching statue--a basically
humanoid, though twisted looking creature, with a wide, wicked grin and a blindfold. Two braziers at either
foot would have cast quite a dramatic light on this piece. One who approaches feels almost as if the ground
begins to slope, drawing them ever closer, and the grin seems even more fiendish and malevolent up close.
The statues in this room are of absolutely exquisite
craftsmanship... from what you can tell. They stand on top of fifteen foot high pillars, elevated above
passersby. Any one of these would surely prove valuable to some rich patron, assuming you can get it down
without breaking it and haul it out.
Statues adorn terraces, drawing the gaze of those
walking through the north-south channel upwards. This room is essentially an elaborate crossing between
orthogonal passages.
The possibilities with statues are just infinite,
aren't they? (har har)
Here I picture the statues depicting some old and
wizened scholars, as though marching in a never-ending procession, staring intently at a large tome in their
hands.
The southern walkway is punctuated by a wider platform at the center of the south wall, the best observation
point for the three otherworldly and beautiful beings carved, rising from the water here. The water is
remarkably clean immediately around them, though otherwise choked with algae.
The patron who commissioned this chamber was no
doubt a narcissist. The central, enormous statue depicts this figure with an air of nobility; the central raised
platform is surrounded by statues of intimidating looking guards; the outer wall is crowded with statues of
barely differentiated individuals in servants' garb. The quality of the craftsmanship drops off steeply at each
layer of the room as well.
The walkways are elevated above water--because
that's cool--and the statues rise up out of the water--because that's cool too.
A large central statue exhibit depicts a noble
creature--perhaps a horse or unicorn of some kinds, or a lion or gryphon. Three adjacent terraces house various
other configurations of statues. Each terrace is grouped by a loose theme, and connects to an adjoining hall.
Sadists
I mentioned these ideas earlier, and they deserved an
example! This hall is lined with cages, each cage contains the skeleton of an old foe, pinned up like trophies--a testament to the original dungeon owner's cruelty.
The entrance to the dragon's lair is lined with large pits piled high with charred black bones. There must be
hundreds of bodies here, lives snuffed out in an instant, without a second thought. It's a simple intimidation
display, but it's effective.
Bonus: things to display in a gallery
Need ideas for things to show off in your own dungeon gallery? Try these tables:
| d6 | Form |
|---|---|
| 1 | Art piece |
| 2 | Art piece |
| 3 | Artifact |
| 4 | Artifact |
| 5 | Statue |
| 6 | Remains |
| d6 | Medium | Subject (roll twice) |
Action | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Painting | Nobility/Notables | Unity/Peace | Crude |
| 2 | Tapestry | The Gods/Cosmos | Conflict | Good |
| 3 | Mural | The People | Symbiosis | Good |
| 4 | Relief | The Land/World | Exploitation | Fine |
| 5 | Mosaic | The Wild/Elements | Meeting | Fine |
| 6 | Ceramics/Pottery | The Unknown/Fear | Separation | Exquisite |
| d6 | Type | Clothes (1) | Tools (2,3) | Records (4) * | Jewelry (5) | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Clothes | Hat/mask | Artistic/artisinal | Scroll | Necklace | Utilitarian |
| 2 | Tools | Tunic | Agricultural/ Culinary |
Codex | Bracelet/ manacle |
Utilitarian |
| 3 | Tools | Footwear | Musical | Books | Ring | Ceremonial |
| 4 | Records | Gloves | Medical | Woodcut | Crown | Ceremonial |
| 5 | Jewelry | Dress/robe | Hunting/ Trapping |
Stone carving | Brooch/ pendant |
Martial |
| 6 | Figurines (roll a Statue) |
Cloak | Weapon | Metal plate | Earrings | Decorative |
| d6 | Subject | Style | Mood |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nobility | Simplified | Stoic |
| 2 | Heroes/Saints | Rough | Dynamic |
| 3 | Gods | Exaggerated | Angry |
| 4 | Archetypes | Literal | Serene |
| 5 | Enemies | Intricate | Afraid |
| 6 | Creature (roll Remains) |
Eroded (roll again) |
Somber |
| d6 | Preservation | Origin | Form | Rarity | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Skeletal | Local | Bestial | Common | Tiny |
| 2 | Skeletal | Local | Bestial | Common | Small |
| 3 | Skeletal | Neighboring region |
Bestial | Common | Medium |
| 4 | Taxidermy | Neighboring region |
Humanoid | Uncommon | Medium |
| 5 | Taxidermy | Exotic | Humanoid | Uncommon | Large |
| 6 | Floating in fluid |
Exotic | Bizzare | Rare | Huge |
For more exhaustive ideas along these lines, see History, and Flavor, from which some of these ideas
were adapted.
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