Dungeon Scrawler

Traps are a staple of dungeon crawling. "Trap" is slightly limiting though; personally, I prefer the broader category of "hazards". Why? Well, simply put because "trap" invokes things like spike pits and swinging blades, but "hazard" includes mechanically-similar-yet-aesthetically-different things like "the air is full of deadly spores". (The distinction, maybe, is "was this constructed by something for the purpose of getting you, or is it naturally occurring", but the line there can be pretty fuzzy and, in practice, pretty unimportant if you ask me.) See, if all you think about are "traps", then brains like mine are railroaded into mechanical constructions, and quickly get hung up on obnoxious questions like "why is this trap here?" and "how does it still function?" and maybe "how does it get reset?". Don't get me wrong, those are good questions to ask, it's just that... it'...

I had some thoughts that don't fit in the template of "variations on a dungeon room", yet which are quite pertinent to the larger goal of thinking about and conceiving dungeon rooms. Today, that topic is darkness . Into the dark In a dungeon crawling context, darkness is practically a given. Just look at the success of Shadowdark , a game whose conceptual premise is that dungeons should be dark scary places. I largely agree with this sentiment, at least in spirit. Undeniably, darkness adds something both aesthetically and mechanically to RPGs.  First, it creates that classic (or shall we say "old school") mood of the horror-survival game, where encounters are often deadly, and dungeons are mysterious and threatening. Second, it creates an actual incentive structure around a particular form of resource management. Players need to track torches, always making sure someone has got one, and that it never goes out unexpectedly. This may or may not be terribly hard, b...