Dungeon Scrawler

Lore . That which many a game master delights in and players frequently pay little attention to. I can't solve that problem for you, nor am I going to speak to what makes good "Lore", or how to come up with it. No, my focus is on dungeon building (and making dungeon rooms interesting), so my intent here is to talk about ways to give dungeon rooms a feeling of being embedded within a historical context. That is, I'm not talking about Lore  in the weighty, campaign-making sense, merely in the sense that people walked these halls once --we're not talking about " L ore", we're talking about "lore": that which gives  flavor . Canvases First, lets think about where  one can plant historical information. The surfaces you can paint on, as it were: Murals, reliefs, and mosaics. Tapestries. Paintings. Be that on canvas in a frame, or on a cave wall with dye (or blood...) Statues/Statuettes. Books/Scrolls. Pillars. Doors. Clothing.  Armor. Weapons. J...

One of the great joys of exploration in a fantasy adventure game is the chance to discover secrets. For myself, I love  the feeling of "double clicking" on a scene and learning more; it's something about the way my mental picture slowly fades into color and detail. Much of the reason I play TTRPGs is for that very experience. You might enjoy that process in and of itself, but generally the standard incentive to engage in this sort of behavior is because it will yield something  of use, whether that be simply information, or treasure and magic items. As a player this is good fun, but as a game master, this is work , frankly. It takes work and thought (or a very  good content generator) to come up with hiding places for these sorts of secrets (not even to mention coming up with the secrets themselves!). So, in the interest of serving this need, today I want to explore secrets (and where to hide them). Setting the scene Before diving into good hiding places for your secrets,...

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...

(My last entry, Entrances) Initially, I thought I'd run through my room list alphabetically. But inspiration is a fickle thing, so today's focus is libraries . As I did last time, I'll start by giving you the rooms, and save notes and bonus surprises for the invested:

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).

So, I guess I'm starting a blog. For now, I don't know that I'll really do much actual  writing here, instead let this be an introduction to a simpler project: I'm going to draw as many different instances as I can imagine of as many different dungeon rooms as I can think of. In practice maybe "as many...as I can imagine" is probably an exaggeration. I'm not going to sweat a lot about trying to eek out that one more room, but I do  hope to finish this project with a big collection of examples I can peruse over when I'm hit with "mappers block".  Since I like feeling helpful, I'm going to share my work here so it's "public". I will call this project the Dungeon Room Index. Wish me luck!