Public Domain Dungeon Map Icons

I've been a bit distracted lately with non-blog stuff, but have some public domain icons for your dungeon map.  These are intentionally rough and gritty:

A door

A trap

A secret door

Stairs

And maybe less generally useful but something I've been looking for for a while, animal tracks:

Bear tracks

Wolf tracks

Mountain Lion, puma, or cougar tracks

And, not an icon, but a canvas to place them all on, public domain graph paper:

Haha, yes I'm laughing at myself, but, again it is more about the gritty, uneven feel I was going for, than just reinventing the wheel.  I've been working on a revision of my Dwarven Outpost Kit dungeon with this as the background and I like it.  I lower the levels on it, first, so it's more grey and unobtrusive, but it gives a more hand-drawn feel to the affair.

That's all for now.  I'll share more as I find them and eventually add all these to the borders and Misc zip file that I have on my public domain art page.

Let's Make a Dungeon - Map

Want to make a dungeon with me?  I'll show you a method that is quick and easy and yet still a good stand in for natural caverns.  If you get tripped up on your own perfectionism or are just too tired from work to make a dungeon come game night, this is dedicated to you.  I'll break this up into several posts because blogging about the process actually takes longer than using it.  So, today we'll just do the map.

Get 12 dice of various shapes.  Make about half of them visually distinguishable from the rest.  I chose dark and light:

Whoops, my d10 with the dark 7 should be on the other side

Toss the dice on the paper.  If  some roll off the paper just move them back to the closest edge:

I use blank paper but if you feel more comfortable using graph paper go right ahead.

Now trace the dice in pencil as you remove them and write down the number they rolled.  Light, sloppy, and fast is good.  If several dice clump together, trace around all of them like its one lumpy room.  Also put a little dot for the dark dice:

Now, draw connections from odd numbers to odd and from even numbers to even.  Not all of them have to connect but try to avoid a a simple circle. or completely linear arrangement:

If there is no connection between the even and odd caverns you'll need to arbitrarily make one. (luckily, our clumpy room connects the 3 even elevation rooms here.)

Now, clean up the connecting passages and draw little curved lines to indicate differences in elevation.  I draw them like little steps leading from the lower areas to the higher, each indicating a rise of 10'.  If a difference is too much, make it a sharp cliff:

Now, those dotted areas where the dark dice fell are "Fat Man's Misery" type passages, they're passable, but just barely.  Characters will either have to crawl on their bellies, or sidle along sideways. The chambers can be very low-ceilinged or choked with stalagmites. (I decided to make the passage from the elevation 3 room to elevation 13 very narrow, and make the 1, 3, 10 elevation rooms with dots have low ceilings)

One last thing.  If we roll a 12 sider and just count clockwise (roughly) to pick a room, we can place a water source and see what it does.  If there are lower elevations nearby, let it flow along.  If not, it can be a pool, or you can disregard- not every cave has to have water.

The largest numbers are the exits to the surface. So, here the 15 and 13 have entrances from surface caves or sinkholes.

Now we have some treacherous terrain to explore: narrow passages, long drops (one 60', one 100'), and even a dry cave hidden by a nearly impassable underwater one.  Next we'll place some monsters.

The Maximalist Dungeon

A few posts back a commenter was not too happy with the push toward minimalism in some parts of our hobby.   Since then I've been thinking of what the opposite would look like.  And, while it would be easy to be snarky, I want to do this seriously: what would a maximalist dungeon look like?  And by that I mean a maximalist dungeon that I, the lover of small and streamlined, would really want to see and use?

I think if you're getting a dungeon from someone else it should be giving you something you can't do yourself, either because you are unable to do it or you don't have the time.  This could be several things including ideas you might never have had or DM experience you don't yet have cooked into the design of the place.  But I think the two most obvious are drudge work and art work.  I'm not an artist so that's something I could get from someone else.  And there are plenty of things that might be worth trying at the table but which take so much prep time you never get around to them.  Let's think along those lines a bit.

The Maximalist Dungeon could have:

1. Illustrations of every room.  There's precedent with the image booklets in some of the TSR modules like Tomb of Horrors.  I think a lot of those were produced because a trap needed visualization, but even just an illustration to show you the decay and layout of the rooms would be cool.  As a kid I loved David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries and the detailed images of those rooms, in what was essentially a dungeon, unearthed.
2. Illustrations of cluttered crime scenes.  This is related to the above, because once you have high enough level of detail and once you have illustrations of every room, so that showing an illustration isn't a tip off of importance, you can hide clues in plain sight.  Keys, notes, scraps of cloth.  I have always been interested in solo play and I remember reading about (but never seeing) a solo gamebeook that had some full page illustrations for this kind of close examination/exploration. If you know what it was called let me know.  Of course traps can become more brutal too, if the trip wires or pressure plates are right there in the picture.
3. Illustrations of every monster, or at least every new monster.  We are limited in our ability to imagine based on things we've seen before.  But if you show us a picture your new monster can look like whatever you can draw.  If you've followed my blog you know that I've tried to come up with new monsters through lots of different angles.  This would be one I haven't tried: something hard to explain or describe but that you can easily understand by looking at a drawing.  There could be all kinds of dreamlike, nightmarish, warped possibilities waiting for the right artist to unleash them on us.
4. Portraits of every NPC.  Without a face players don't have much to remember NPCs by, an accent, a cliched personality.  Portraits could help with that.  With portraits you could get a sense of class, wealth, general demeanor, scars, familial resemblance etc.
5. Illustrations of treasure items.  This is pretty simple, one way to make the +1 magic swords unique is to make them look different.
6. So these have been about art so far how about the drudge work?  Well, related to the NPC portraits above would be NPC personalities fleshed out for all the folks in the adventure/dungeon.  I don't think I would personally need a whole backstory, because after a certain length I'm probably not going to read it.  But if the background could inform how they act and make choices that would be cool to know.  If the person was orphaned and has had to struggle alone they might not like the idea of accepting help, for example, and will become irritated if they can't pay for services.
7. Along those lines, if we are dealing with factions, or politics, or romance, illustrated and annotated relationship webs of NPCs would be cool.  What is the chain of command?  Who will rumors spread to first?  Who owes favors to whom?  Who do you need to talk to find out intimate details about a particular NPC?
8. And of course, going right along with the illustrations of treasure items would be unique treasure items with back stories.
9. This is related to having detailed pictures of rooms but takes it one step farther.  I've posted before about the idea of a grab bag store room, where everything in a room is on cards, so imagine if you combine a room's illustration, with small illustrated cards that you could hand players when they ask about particular objects or details.  There comes a point where this would almost be better suited as a video game with items you can pick up and examine, a whole immersive digital world, but even in those, details are sparse or duplicated because of the work it takes to make things.
10. Unique spellbooks is a subset of unique treasure items.  And it doesn't have to be a cheesy facsimile, but having some illustration or physical card with the contents for each spell book found would be cool.  And, of course, each would have unique spell variations.
11. Give me a constructed language and a script or system of runes.  I love this stuff, and I think it adds to the atmosphere in a game, but it takes so much time it falls by the way side in my games.  But having even something that is little more that pig-latin for goblin inscriptions peppered around the dungeon that players can try and decipher would be fun.  Or different aged scripts denoting excursions into a megadungeon at different times, that would be sweet.  You want to talk about something that would be cool but I don't do just because of the amount of work, there it is.
12. Along the lines of musing I did about sandboxes, it would be interesting to have the locations affected by different times of visit.  So, maybe in the wet season this cave is half full of water and there are different creatures here, maybe during festivals this cult encampment has an entirely different population and feel to it.  That is in essence asking for multiple modules.  Yes.  And players are likely to only ever encounter one of these states.  Yes.  But if you want maximal, that's maximal to me.
13. Designer notes is something I don't think I've ever seen.  Presumably, if you are selling a dungeon you have run multiple parties through it, multiple times.  So, what did those folks do?  What choices did they tend to make?  I can see not wanting to read this stuff and experiencing my party's choices with them, but I can also see wanting to go back and read how that compares to the other folks that visited here.  Designer notes would also be cool just to get a sense of what the maker was trying for and how this module/adventure fits in with their experience and other creations.
14. DM notes would be slightly different.  I'm thinking tips and advice gained through experience.  So, this section of the dungeon is invisible, here's some ideas on how to run that at the table.  This monster causes fear, here's a way you might handle what players under the fear power will do.  Etc.  Obviously this stuff isn't necessary to run a night of D&D, but if you are good enough and experienced enough at designing dungeons to sell me one, one of the assets you have is that experience.  So why not share it with me?

What else?  That's all I've got right now.  And I suppose it might seem a little absurd to put so much effort into a single module.  A module you might use with your friends once.  A module that would probably be crazy expensive with all the art and labor involved.  But maybe that's the difference between products and art.  The difference between processed food and a nicely cooked meal.  Anyone can generate random contents for a set of megadungeon rooms, but how are yours notable?

So, yeah, I can envision a module that is a piece of art because of its elegance, how it gives you just what you need to run it and then gets out of your way.  But I can also imagine a module that is a piece of art because of its ridiculous abundance, its richness that spills out at you like coins from a coffer. 

Secret Cult Temples

I love exploration in games.  It was interesting for me to play around with modular dungeons (the Dwarven Outpost) because of how players can get to explore and learn patterns.  So, exploration with some recognition built in.  Learning these patterns lets players get to feel like they are learning the world.

I wanted to play around with those kind of patterns a bit more.  But not with the dungeon itself so much as the dwellers within.  So, what if the dungeon was held fairly constant, say a series of hexagonal rooms:

but what goes on inside varies.

These dungeons should be made out of some type of material that the players will easily recognize, maybe alabaster, or whitewashed bricks or something.   They are home to secret cults.  The cult, trying to remain viable even in the event of partial discovery, has spread its operations out to multiple buildings.  These underground hexagonal temples of hexagonal rooms are located roughly in a ring on the campaign map.

In other words, once the players find one, they will eventually learn how to snoop around to find the others:

Now, the six rooms of each temple could be standard, with a barracks, mess hall, kitchen, ect.  But the central rooms will have the bigger, specialized function.  The library will have a place for the librarians to eat and sleep but the central room will be books and scrolls.  The armory will have a place for the guards to eat and sleep as well, but the central room is all about weapons and sparring.

So, once players encounter this cult's temples (whatever cult it is, though I'm assuming it is fairly lawful), they will be able to learn several patterns.  1) the types of rooms in a temple, 2) the types of specialized temples, and I even think 3) the time schedules of the inhabitants of each temple. 

The cultists need to go out and recruit new members, they need to skulk about and maybe get food and supplies.  So there should be some time of day that a percentage of the cultists will be gone from a particular temple.  I think I will randomly determine this for each type of temple and then record it as a standard.  So if I roll that librarians leave at midnight for book gathering missions, libraries for this cult will always leave at that time.

For this pattern learning by players to be relevant, they will need to run into these cult temple complexes several times in several different world locations.  But I think that should be fine if other dungeons delves and adventuring is spread out between those discoveries. It seems to fit a secret cult's attempt to spread across your world, too.

The interest of recognizing a pattern will always have to be balanced with the boredom of too much of the same thing happening.

What I've written so far kind of assumes the players will want to root out the whole cult.  But that doesn't have to be the case.  Maybe they're on a mission to try and prevent someone from being sacrificed, so they just want to locate the prison or, if running late, the main altar temple.

Maybe they just want to rob the treasury.  That could still be interesting, with players discovering one temple, stealthily observing to figure out which it is, and then knowing approximately where their chosen target would be.

The Player-Built Dungeon

This is related to the Pre-Mapped Dungeon, so if you want you can read my thoughts on that first.

A few weeks ago I gave my good buddy a bunch of tools I made to help in DMing and asked him to use them to run me as a player.  I wanted to see how they might work for someone else.  Another big reason I wanted to do it was to see what it would be like to experience a Dwarven Outpost.  Would it feel different to run through a dungeon that I had made myself?

It was.  It was cool.  My hireling died in the first room to a panda-headed crab-thing and I desperately searched the place for what I knew I would recognize as the treasure corridor.  Once I found it, I was very cautious about the traps I knew to be there.  And once I'd found the weird treasure he'd put in there, I beat a hasty retreat knowing I had most likely found the best the place had to offer.

Because of the last few posts I got to thinking what if players could have that same experience-- not just of a type of dungeon they can become familiar with by encountering them several times, which the outpost kit was meant to facilitate-- but of a dungeon they knew well because they made it themselves?

Now, I don't think it would work to say "design a dungeon and we'll run through it" or even to take the more modern, indie route of "let's design a dungeon together that will be fun to run through."  I think the DM has this role because the fun of exploration requires not knowing what is behind the next door (and also having a single creator probably gives a place a more consistent tone and logic). 

But maybe what we could say is "draw up the manor house of your ancestors" or "make a map of the urban sewers you grew up in."  Then the DM can take that map and apply decay, add monsters, and traps left by the waves of inhabitants that have been there since the character left.  And if the party visits that location the player who drew the map would get a little extra spotlight that session: "The secret entrance should be just past the stables, but the stables appear to be gone . . ."

Now, my experience of uncertain familiarity with the dungeon worked in part for me because 1) it had been months since I made the outpost kit and it wasn't fresh in my mind and 2) the tetramorph aspect of it let it be shuffled around a bit.

So what might work here is to have players make something well in advance of them experiencing it.  I'm not sure about the tetramorphs bit.  It would make "familiar with, but not sure about" work better but it feels like a lot to pawn off on a player.  I suppose if you had enough players with magic-user characters you could ask each of them to decide on a room a typical Mages Guild would have.

Hmm, or maybe I could just design a set of tetramorphs stencils for each class, say typical sewers for thieves, typical church catacombs for clerics, and then give each out to players who choose those classes.  They could even have them in hand as they explore "By the shape of this room I think were are in the central junction."

You would think that high mortality games could cause a problem.  That having a player draw a map of a guild hall and then having that player's character die immediately would make the map a waste of effort.  But the goal here is familiarity for the player, not necessarily rigid narrative logic for the characters.  Heck, you could just say that player's new character had heard tales of such a place.

So, maybe I should have really titled this post The Familiar-to-the-Player Dungeon.

Building in the Dungeon

Just some fun brainstorming coming from the last post's idea of players leaving physical marks on a dungeon in the form of structures.

• Iron ladders of various lengths with mineshafts or alcoves at various heights off the ground
• Dwarven mortar I've mentioned before, but I think every portion should come with instructions and a pile of nicely chiseled blocks ready to build with.
• Also these elf-stick thingies.
• "Mirror" blocks that allow for building walls you can see through one-way.
• Powder kegs that are unstable (I imagine them with chemical growths like old batteries) but still able to clear 1d4 10'x10' areas of solid rock.
• The opposite of everflowing jugs, a magic sponge that will absorb all water in an area. *
• Roll-out rope bridge kits
• Heavy rope nets to allow multiple people to climb a wall at once (like you see on obstacle courses)
• Heavy, cast iron "beacons"* on dollys or wheelbarrows that can be laboriously moved around the dungeon and have area effect magic emanating from them (like silence 10' radius).
• Paint or powder that acts as a barrier to monsters like magic circles or holy water.  Players have a limited amount and must decide what areas to make safe for rest or passage.
• Mobile, magically linked portals.  You can set them up to allow quick passage between parts of the dungeon, avoiding constant travel through very dangerous areas at the risk of sentient monsters moving the destination portal.  Maybe you could leave some guards . . .
• Mobile, one-way, magic barriers.
• Light emitting sand that can be thrown around but dims over time.
• A worm creature or arcane machine that will bore holes through solid walls but at the cost of more frequent encounter check or weird effects on players from the energies involved.
• A portable door.
• A room of programmable Magic Mouths (or something equivalent like talking busts) that could function like a memorial site or message board.
• Dwarven Constructs that can be given simple tasks like "fill any doorway in this hall with brickwork."

Can you tell I've been playing some Minecraft?  * Some of these are straight outta that game so I can't claim credit, but I thought they could be fun for players in our game.  What would be fun for you to build in a dungeon as a player?  Have your players ever tried to make permanent structures in your dungeons?

Pass-It-On Modules

Saw this post on Reddit about people passing on Minecraft maps.  Basically one person plays it at a time and then saves it and gives it up for another person to take a turn.  I thought it could be fun to try that with D&D modules.  Rather than one person playing you start with a dungeon, have a DM run a party through it, record all the marks they leave and pass it on.

Now that I've written that, I remember people doing the same thing with Dwarf Fortress to hilarious results.  (See the saga of Boatmurdered).

I know that an open-table megadungeon or Flailsnails campaign is already pretty close to this.  But the DM's time and resources are still a bottleneck.  With a Pass-it-On module, as long as there's a central location where it's hosted anyone could pick up the latest version and run with it.  (I suppose there might be some technical difficulty with preventing simultaneous turn-taking or enforcing time limits).

It would be cool if each DM would submit a concise post-play summary when they re-post it.  Not long narratives, but "party went left here, lost cleric to the trap" type affairs so there is a bit of context for the next DM to read up before running.  You'd need to provide lists of the gear left on player corpses and explanations of non-standard magic item mechanics as well.

I wonder if this would quickly result in a wasteland devoid of life or treasure?  Seems like tricks, or toy-like dungeon features that can't be moved or used up would work well.  Maybe a slightly higher level would work so that parties coming in bring some of their own magic items and treasure, and some of them die leaving it behind.  Maybe there could be 3-4 factions surrounding this area and players can never fully eradicate them just shift the balance enough that now one faction is ascendant, now the next.

Another thought that comes to me, is that both examples above involve building things so the map constantly has human-made additions.  That might be more analogous to DMs collaboratively making a dungeon by adding chambers and features.  But that doesn't seem as new an idea in D&D to me.  I think I've heard of people doing that.  But what if you could incorporate building into the dungeon by players?

Maybe a location on another plane or completely underground that requires work to secure food, safe lodging, or relatively safe travel from one area to another.  Hmm, has anyone done much with building in dungeons by players?  How long or difficult is it to block off an area with a brick wall, put in a sturdy door and lock, or build a bridge across a chasm?  That might be shifting the game a bit from post-apocalyptic exploration to settling in at the old megadungeon, but could be interesting.

Secret Doors

Secret Doors in a Dungeon:

• might be the ultimate exploration payoff, the exact kind of mysterious feature you were hoping to find when you set off into the unknown.
• are simple machines that still function (unless they don't).
• are the dungeon feature that has the most story built in; someone was doing something they wanted to hide.
• are an important part of the genre trappings.
• might assume players will make several visits to that dungeon and thus have more chance of finding them.
• might assume that dungeon has intelligent factions that can use them as an advantage against a party and help tip off their existence.
• can be a shortcut that makes travel between two spots in a dungeon faster and easier.
• can lead to hidden rooms with treasure items that may never be found.
• can act as "pinch points" that will open up whole new areas of a dungeon once found.
• require thought and effort by the DM to create and place and might never be found.
• are probably the best example of the difficulty of negotiating player vs character skill (well, along with traps).
• might assume a more adversarial DMing style that is trying to challenge clever, persistent players.
• might assume a search of the dungeon 10' by 10' by 10' by 10' section, and a particularly slow and laborious progress through the dungeon.
• might assume players are making detailed maps.
• might assume more experienced players that have been introduced to all these ideas.

This feels like an assignment from DM school: "Write 200 words on Secret Doors.  Due by Wednesday." Hahaha.  Now I'm interested to try these things:

• Design a dungeon as I normally would and then roll randomly to determine which of the doors are actually secret, and then see how that changes the place.
• Make a table of secrets people would want to keep hidden and think about how those might affect the shape / function / location of a secret door.

Mini-Hex Stencils

I thought, "Hey, what if I turned my hexagonal geomorphs into stencils?"  So I did.  Most of the work was already done.  I just shrank them, edited a bit, and cut them out to test.  They worked okay.  I figured something cut by hand would be a little off and they were.  But still a fun idea to play around with.  Here is what I ended up with:

I cut the inner parts first, then the hexes:

I used whiteout to label the hexes and rolled to place them back in the template:

I don't know if it was just my shoddy job or if there is something different about shifting hexes, but the 3D definitely seems off in my test map.

Dwarven Outpost Kit

I was kinda wanting to enter something in this year's One-Page Dungeon contest, but the visual dungeon I had in mind has been requiring me to learn more to even be able to make it.  When I saw Roger's cool outdoor location he entered, though, it inspired me and I really wanted to submit something.  I made a push, but after working many hours yesterday and today I just didn't make it in time.  It wasn't a stocked dungeon anyway, and I still get to share it with you.  So onward.  Let's recap a little:

• To justify using a stencil it needs to do something extra for us or it would be faster and easier to just draw a dungeon by hand.
• I think a few things that stencils might help with are hard to draw shapes like perfect ovals and triangles and such, repetitive structures, and my latest discovery-- adding depth with a pseudo-isometric view.
• Keep in mind stamps and linocuts like here.  I think they would function similarly but be easier to use, while being harder to make.

I tried to combine all these ideas into a cool tool.  It still takes some time to use; it isn't for use at the table, really.  But I'm hoping it could make for some interesting location based explorations missions.  Here is what I came up with:

And here are some pics of me eatin' my own dogfood:

I used a discarded report cover that had a pretty tough but flexible black plastic back.

After the surgery.  Yeah, the fish ponds gave me some trouble.  The good thing is these should last a while so you only have to cut them out once.

Here's me trying them out.  I didn't finish the map, but you can see I added a hallway linking the Barracks to the Smithy.  I tried randomizing, but I think the best way to use these is just arrange one of each tetramorph to taste.  You could put more space between them and intersperse other rooms if you want.  Anyway, let me know if any of you try it out.

The Rule-Based Dungeon II

Work has been trumping blog lately, but I did a little more noodling on dungeons that would change based on certain rules.  I got interested in the Law/Chaos distinction I mentioned last post and tried to envision more specifically what those might look like.

The 1000 Frog Chambers
I mentioned that knowledge of rules could be a potential frustration/problem for players.  I think you can avoid this by making the fact that there is a rule discoverable, if not what the outcome of the rule will be.  What I mean is "This chamber will have a random monster in it every time you shut and reopen the door" is a rule, and players can quickly find out about it even if they don't know what a particular door opening will result in.

I had an idea of a horrible, chaotic dungeon based on a discoverable but random rule.  Imagine a small entrance room with a 10'x10' hole in the floor.  Peering into the hole with a light source, you see a vast space with a slimy, wet mass of frogs of every size hopping and croaking.  Every turn or so a giant frog with an iron chamber strapped to its back will arrive directly beneath this hole with a clang of iron on the stone.  The chamber is basically a hollow cube with a square opening in the ceiling.  If you drop down into this bare iron chamber you can reach a different area of the dungeon by the frog's hopping.  Once under an new opening, players will only have a minute or two to decide to leave the chamber or not before the frog moves on.

Clambering up into random sections of the dungeon will take away some choice players have in the order they want to visit areas, but it might juice up the resource management aspect of play enough to make up for it.

I think the trick would be to have different parts of the dungeon that are important to each other, and the order you find them in.  So, a key in one area opens a door in another which makes survival much easier in that area.  Although, this could turn into a tedious "waiting for the frog bus" epsiode.  I would have to try it in play.

The Tabernacle of Resolute Egalitarians
On the flip-side, a dungeon based on invariant, inflexible law.  Every being will have a 10'x10' of free space around them enclosed by a 10' high solid granite wall.  This moves with them.  This wall trumps other features in the dungeon.  Imagine cloud of war but the "cloud" is a solid stone barrier right around you.  Except, the wall of two beings will cancel each other out. A party walking four abreast will perceive an open hallway 40' wide. 

This might be too fiddly for a DM to track without a computer program, but if you could keep it simple enough it might offer interesting  tactical challenges:

• sources of strong winds that walls will need to be maneuvered to shut off
• foes with distance attacks
• gaping spaces that open up in front of the party
• features you can hear/feel and track toward without seeing

The Rule-Based Dungeon

I have more to do with modular dungeons and stencils but I want to take a little detour to think about what a dungeon location that changes based on certain rules might look like.  This seems risky because a) the rules might be hard for players to discover, and b) it might be really frustrating.  Let's see what we come up with anyway.

Okay, imagine a dungeon with set dimensions, maybe a page of graph paper or so that changes depending on the answer to certain logic statements.  Now we aren't randomly generating a dungeon here; if you make sure the same statements are triggered the dungeon should be exactly the same each time.  What do I mean?  How about, If a cleric is in the party then the Altar room will appear.  Or, if there are more than 2 in a party the stairs to the second level appear.

Who would build such a place?  I'm not sure, it might depend on what rules you set.  In some ways it seems very chaotic-- the shape of the dungeon shifting constantly-- but in others it is the definition of Law-- when these strictures are met the dungeon will always be a certain layout.

This reminds me of Vows, and those could be the rules that are involved, for example if no blood is shed in the dungeon then a fountain will appear.  But it also reminds me of fairy tales: On nights of a full moon there is a city in the bottom of the lake.  Actually the fairy tale route might be a good way to go because by telling players some of these rules ahead of time you might avoid our problems a and b above.  And that would make it more vow-like, because players would know what the rules were and hopefully they would be challenging or amusing rules to try and not break.  Hmm, yeah not very different from that oaths and vows post after all.  But what about coming from the other direction?  What dungeon features might be interesting to pop in and out of existence.

• Access.  In one example above I used stairs.  Doors, bridges, hatches, ladders, stairways to heaven, haha.
• Resource areas: altars, fountains, mushroom fields,
• Geological features: geysers, waterfalls, springs, rivers, pools, stalactites/mites

Hmm, this is seeming more local than I first imagined, but sort of like the invisible dungeon maybe this would be better in small doses.  It makes sense, that if rule knowledge is a potential problem for players you would want to limit the number of rules.  So instead of a whole dungeon that shifts around because of a variety of rules you have a relatively normal dungeon with a very special feature affected by some fairy tale like rule-- "the seven pools will only appear on moonlit nights when a virgin is near."

But maybe we're shutting down possibilities too early, let's backtrack and think of more, non-vow-like things that could trigger dungeon statements:

• I mentioned party #, party make-up, level, gender/age mixture, cultural/ethnic (only a true Women of the West will see the door)
• party gear- if they have magic items, familiars, relics
• time of year, season, weather, day/night, moon cycle
• Whether party uses light, is noisy, camps, eats/drinks in the dungeon
• Multiple visits-- whoa, that's a whole new idea-- the dungeon that shifts somehow with each visit

Now I'm reminded of the idea of "your true heart's desire" from fantasy.  A warrior sees a glorious battle, a mage is met with a vast library.   I could be very dream-like or heaven-like, in that it shifts based on who is there to experience it.  I especially like that idea for a solo adventure.  Imagine a hard to reach tower that players can quest to/enter when they are the only ones to show up on game night, but what is in it differs depending on who it is.  This might be strictly based on class or alignment tendencies, but if you wanted to get a little fancier, you could shape it to what you know about your player-- If Jane like puzzles and everyone else in the group hates them, it's a puzzle tower.  If Bob likes combat, he's like Bruce Lee in the Tower of Death.

What about contexts outside the gameworld itself?  This would be harder to trigger with busy schedules and such, but you might have a dungeon that only has certain features if you go there on the real Halloween.  Or, visit the dungeon on your birthday and the birthday fountain is there, or hah, the Flagon Wagon, travelling brew pub and eatery.  But now I'm drifting more into events than structures (like Santa Claus showing up in Narnia).

Back to how the dungeon might change.  I realize I focused above on what could be true or not, but what about continuums?  These also might change in the dungeon based on certain rules:

• ceiling height
• light level
• temperature
• water depth
• room dimensions
• creature population densities
• wind intensity
• sound/smell

Anyway, what do you think?  Have you shifted a dungeon on rules before?  What shifts might interest you as a player?

The Procedural Dungeon

Take the idea of index card geomorphs, geomorphs that are stencils, dungeons built by certain cultures, and I think you've got a recipe for quick, DIY dungeons with a sense of logic and history.

First, think of a culture that's left structures peppered around your game world.  Let's pick Dwarves.  Second, decide on some features their strongholds/outposts almost always have.  Let's say:

• cave fish pond
• barracks
• smithy
• ore storage
• smelting room with chimney
• throne room
• hidden gem storage
• secret emergency exit/bolt route

Now, decide on the most common design for each of these features-- and they can be tetronimo shaped as long as each fits on a single index card-- and cut them into stencils. I realize that step might be trickier than it sounds but am confident the gross features can be caught even if you have to hand draw in finer details.

Then you should be set for the next time players go off map or an encounter roll calls for creatures to be in lair.  You pull out your stack of stencils for Dwarven Outpost (you can keep different types bundled with rubberbands) roll dice, or shuffle and draw the cards, then trace them on your graph paper.  It might take a few minutes but you'll have a consistent dungeon with a map for your campaign folder.

If it works as I imagine players could learn things about these dungeons that would add a sense of verisimilitude to the imagined world:  "Wait, this looks to be a Dwarven outpost, they almost always have a secret gem room."  Or "These Dwarven outposts tend to have smelting rooms with chimneys, so we might find a small but definite exit to the surface there."

If the stencils work as I hope, the next design challenge would be to make sure all of your recurring dungeons have features that players would find interesting, like the examples above.  maybe cultists have libraries, outposts of the old magic-rich empire always have a brass head mounted somewhere, and tombs of the old empire tend to have map rooms with a diorama display of the surrounding countryside (and the location of more tombs).

(I plan to try to actually produce some of these but I'm currently house sitting for friends so it may be a while.)

Update: I had a hard time titling this, Procedural isn't right.  I think I probably should have called it Template dungeon (but that sounded kind of boring) . Oh, well. That makes me wonder what a true DIY procdeural dungeon would look like, too.

The Pre-Mapped Dungeon

The pre-mapped dungeon has come up a few times in conversations on this blog.  I think one place was regarding heists and the other was involving tactile maps.  I thought of it again in regards to hobo signs and cadger maps (more on those later).  I thought it might be good to think a little about what qualities a pre-mapped dungeon would have that are different than the normal unknown dungeon.  What I'm talking about here is when players receive a map of a dungeon with rooms, traps, and creatures marked on it.

The pre-mapped dungeon is more about strategy than exploration.  Knowing what is in a dungeon means players can plan a course through it and decide which spots they most want to visit.  Or, more likely, which spot might hold the item they seek.  In this sense assaulting the pre-mapped dungeon is very heist-like.

Dealing with dangers you expect lends more of a fairy tale quality to this kind of dungeon.  Knowing there is a roper in a cave you must pass through means you can try to plan for how to neutralize it.  You have to decide what items to bring.  You might perform several side-quests to acquire items and people you'll need to succeed.  Maybe the Flute of Resting will put the roper to sleep, but it's in the Grove of Sighs . . .

Because the point is planning, I think it would be very frustrating for the map of a dungeon to be deceptive.  If, for example, it says "no traps here" on a corridor and you, as DM, decide a new kobold tribe has filled that corridor with traps.  Well, that kinda sucks.  Because you've taken away both the fun of discovering a new place and undermined the player's ability to strategize.  (Also, anything that would make the players want to ignore their map seems counterproductive if you're going to got to the trouble of giving them one)

It could be interesting if players knew that the map they'd been given of a particular dungeon was intentionally false.  They would still be able to strategize, just everything becomes more complicated.  Is the falseness of the map in saying there are traps in corridor 1 because there are none actually, or that the type of traps is incorrect (not pits but darts)?  I don't know that this added complexity is worth it.  It might be based on the context of who gives the players the map and why.

While giving players a map of a dungeon just to screw with what they expect doesn't seem worth it to me, the difference between expectation and reality in a pre-mapped dungeon can lead to surprise, which is one of the joys of exploration.  So, what are some differences that might be more interesting than frustrating?

I think changes that are not due to deception:

• The dungeon has aged
• the environment has changed (wetter, drier)
• a new culture has moved in (elves, social insects)
• the mapper misunderstood (he couldn't read the native language)
• the map is from memory (and some things are slightly distorted)

I also think changes that allow for additional, on-the-spot strategizing could work.  So, if you know where traps are, maybe you can try to lead the ants into them.  If you know water has filled the Southern portion of the dungeon, you can revise your plans.  Was there anything down there worth retrieving?  If so how will you maneuver through the submerged halls?  Does this require leaving the dungeon altogether and returning with more supplies?

Change of function could be a quality to focus on, too.  I'm learning as a DM that a key aspect of exploratory dungeon delving is player recognition of what a place was for.  And there really aren't too many possibilities (probably less than 100 clear functions we humans use places for in a lower technology setting).  One way to change a dungeon that could be interesting is to juxtapose these.  Have what your map says is a shrine be the orcs' jacks now.  The jail is now a menagerie.  The old kitchen is now a crude alchemical lab, etc.  Discovering and interpreting this repurposing adds back some of the exploration element to the pre-mapped delve.

I think you can give players a sense of this repurposing in a dungeon without them having a map of the dungeon but, it's more complicated.  They have to discern both "This looks like their throne room" and "But I think it used to be a chapel."  With a map that has functions like "chapel" written on it, the players can have a sort of narrative of a place-- how a fortification is set up, how creatures lived day to day-- and the differences they discover will emphasize how things have changed, perhaps giving a sense of time passing and verisimilitude. 

Another way to make a dungeon feel real and have a sense of history is to give the map a history.  Where has the map been kept all these years?  Who know about it?  Has anyone used it before?  But most importantly: who made the map?  Were they famous?  Might there be other maps out there made by the same person?  What marginalia or quirks of drawing does this person have?  Did they leave markings or carvings in a dungeon that correspond to the map.  Maybe the map is more than a map-- a whole narrative, a journal, a diary.  Maybe there is no map but a narrative.  This could lead to players having to interpret metaphors "First, fly down the hall of the fire worms"  What the heck does that mean?  This seems like it would be more puzzle-like than allowing for strategy.  The payoff becomes less the sense of surprise than that of understanding.  Not "the altar is  being used as a bed!" but "Oh, the Plate of the God is an altar."

A few ideas to leave you with:

• a map made in stages by generation of monks
• a map recovered from a corpse by their adult child
• a found map that relates the tragic failure of an expedition
• multiple maps of the same dungeon with slight differences
• a metaphorical map: images of serpents indicate halls, birds chambers
• map as a cultural artifact:  like the polynesian maps of currents around islands (maybe dwarven maps focus on veins of ore, not chambers)
• Odd maps: the tattoo, the map woven into beautiful clothing, the map etched in the metal of a sword or shield

The Temporal Dungeon

The dungeon that shifts in time is an exciting possibility to me.  I remember being thrilled when C.S. Lewis had Cair Paravel visited hundreds of years after it was abandoned.  That really made the world seem real to me.   Letting players explore the differences the passage of time makes on a place really makes that place a location too, rather than a one shot plot.  The best way to do this would be to let the natural flow of campaign time effect things.  This is difficult though, you aren't often going to get a campaign with generations of pcs that can revisit a place 100s of years later.  So, time travel.  And a dungeon designed specifically to be explored and enjoyed through time travel.

If I'm learning anything, these focused dungeons should probably be smaller, if not just a few rooms.  I'll assume here that we have about one dungeon level, maybe 10-12 rooms.  Remember, like the tumbling dungeon, the effective room number is multiplied when you apply the special effect.  In other words a dungeon of 10 rooms and four time periods is really 40 rooms.

How to Travel Time
If the dungeon is designed to be visited through time then there should be some way to travel on site.  You could have a mobile means of travel, say a ring.  That would mean players could flick back and forth through the ages while standing right in front of a feature that they want to investigate through time.  That seems interesting and convenient, it also seems like a pretty damn powerful item to let loose on your campaign.  Every battle might be subject to a rewind.  So I will settle on time travel through an unmovable location at the dungeon site.  You might think, should we limit its affect to the dungeon itself to avoid that kind of havoc time travel might play on your campaign?  I'm thinking no.  If you put the dungeon in a remote enough place and the players want to travel all the way back there to try and use time travel to save a hireling or stop an assassination or something, well that sounds awesome to me.

The Time to Be Traveled
Something I managed to get right with my one previous go at time travel in my campaign was that I didn't let the players choose the granularity of their travels.  In other words, they couldn't twist a dial and move back or forward 5 minutes.  I used our game sessions as a unit of time.  I think that idea of you the DM controlling where the party will be dumped in time is essential to this working, otherwise you basically have an infinite sandbox with no real way to prepare.  It will also be too easy for players to just jump around obstacles instead of having to think.

So, I suggest limiting the time in our dungeon to be traveled to 4 eras.  I'll name them after four stages of human age: infant, child, adult, aged.  And I'm going to have to get to work so now some quick brainstorming on what things might be cool to have in each age:

Infant

• The architect of the place, can be persuaded to make some changes
• children to be saved that will apear later as traders or helpers
• places to plant seeds ala Ocarina of Time
• Completly different fauna, the beasts that had to be cleared out to build the dungeon.
• Some basements and parts of the structure started
• a real need for certain structures like bridges or stairs in a cliffside

 Child

• most rooms built, with furnishings, new and shiny
• people living here or using it
• perhaps the ruler of the place to interact with
• maybe different fauna besieging the place
• machines or contraptions that may break later
• fountains and magical devices that have very clear uses in the context of their time, baffling later

Adult

• the default time, first encountered by players
• just abandoned, broken furniture, ransacked
• stiff doors, bandits or unsavory types to interact with, hiding here
• different fauna, maybe vermin and parasites
• hard to reach spots behind portcullises or bricked up walls

Aged

• centuries after the place was being used
• ruined- ceilings collapsed, areas under water
• different fauna, maybe undead or those things that live in stark, barren places
• places difficult to reach without messing about with things back in time like shoring up ceilings or asking the architect to put in secret trap doors
• maybe a powerful hermit to interact with

Invisible Dungeon III

I got a chance to play test an invisible dungeon.  I could have done a better job of describing the environment to players, but even so I think I learned some things that could apply to all invisible dungeon spaces.  Here are some things I learned:

What can be seen?
As with most these things it seems rather obvious but takes some brain cycles, so it would be better to think about before hand rather than try to improv.  So, can the floor be seen?  If not what do the players see?  The earth beneath, empty void, a level below? Can the ceiling be seen?  If not, do they see the floors above?  If multiple levels are invisible does looking across these boundaries just reveal emptiness as far as the party's light carries?

Objects inside a room a most likely invisible (or what's the point?), but what about living things?  You probably want the creepy factor of players seeing monsters through walls.  So are all living things visible?  What about plants?  Molds or Fungi?  If players kill an orc will the corpse become invisible?  If players drop a dagger or 10' pole on the ground will it become invisible?  If so, how long will it take?  And the invisible objects in the rooms, if players pick them up will they become visible?  If so how long will that take? 

Invisible exploration is tiring and time consuming
A hallway with two doors requires a glance and a party decision on whether to open one of the doors or proceed down the hall.  An invisible hallway requires careful prodding with poles, hands on walls, determining dimensions and that it is, in fact, a hallway and then finding the doors.  The second door may never be found.  Whole features of the dungeon may not be noticed.  If your players can explore 12 rooms in 3 hours, they can probably only get through 4-6 invisible rooms in that time.

Oddly, it takes more attention and brain power to build an image of this invisible imaginary dungeon in a player's mind than a visible one.  Eventually, a see-able room will come as a great relief.  In my play test I made some rooms visible that I hadn't intended to be, because I saw the fatigue.  Also, like in cooking or art, variety is important; if all rooms are invisible, it isn't special when you encounter an invisible room.  Because of these lessons learned I have decided that there shouldn't be an invisible dungeon, but invisible rooms in dungeons.

Invisible dungeons require different design
For example, door priority is right out.  Decisions on which way to go will result largely from chance; if the party turned left, while feeling along the wall, they will enter the door on the left, even if a treasure chest sits in an alcove to the right.

Patterns and symmetry might help, though even those are hard to discern unless the party is very thorough.  But certainly there isn't any need to try to obscure patterns.  What I mean is, that in designing my dungeon I made a place that could be livable, with bedrooms, kitchen, dining room and was largely symmetrical.  Then I pulled one of my usual tricks which is to distress that normal layout to make it more interesting.  I collapsed some ceilings and hallways.  But what that left the poor party with was an invisible space that wasn't a natural cavern and wasn't a cleanly cut dungeon.  Very confusing and added to the time exploration took.

The path of the blind on level 2

I don't think normal room filling techniques will work, because the invisible dungeon is not scoured as thoroughly.  My heart ached when a treasure cache I carefully crafted with magic items, potions, and weird spell scrolls was missed because the party decided to enter the room right next to it!  Corpses, chests, and piles of treasure can normally be seen from a distance, here they'll only find it if they literally stumble into it.  In an invisible dungeon you might want to place 2 or 3 times as much treasure and maybe have no empty rooms.  If empty rooms act as buffers to make the eventual encounter more special, the time it takes to unravel the invisible room is probably buffer enough.  Besides, what is the point of an invisible room with nothing in it!?  Nothing to stumble or puzzle over, nothing to feel.

So, with all that, I still love the idea of invisible areas in a dungeon, because the invisible dungeon is the dungeon of the four senses.  It lets players experience the dungeon more vividly through touch and smell than they would otherwise.  But it needs to be used with restraint.  Hopefully in the future I will be able to post some invisible dungeon room that can be used individually-- the invisible library, dining hall, and laboratory.

More Thoughts on Tumbling Your Dungeon

Keeping Track of Things
I talked a little with my most veteran player (and sometime DM) about his experience inside the Tumbling Dungeon and what he would need to run it.  His first idea was to have a separate map of each state of the dungeon.  I told him this is actually what I started with; four maps in my DM folder.  It turned out to not help.  One reason was that I wanted all my notations (monsters, treasure, corpses) on one map for ease of use while DMing.

But the more fundamental reason was that I had no problem keeping track of how the dungeon moved, but of the orientation of the fixed things within the dungeon.  One example is the pedestal in the center of the dungeon that contains the constantly mixing golden elixir.  It would be much easier to say it is levitating, suspended in the very center of the dungeon's central room.  But if you are saying the whole reason of the dungeon is to mix this elixir, then it needs to be attached to a wall.  And then you need to be able to tell the players the pedestal is now on the ceiling, now in front of you, etc. 

Party faces unexplored chambers

The primary non-tumbling feature in the dungeon is the party.  So, as a DM needing to tell the party what is front of them everything changes.  This became most boggling when some PCs entering the dungeon to join the party late came from in front of them, because the parts of the dungeon that were near the entrance had rotated around the original party.

Party needs to turn around to explore

I'm sure the ease at which any DM can manage this varies, I had a hard time of it.

I don't know any solution to this other than a digital map on a laptop or a physical model the DM can manipulate behind the screen.  I contemplated and almost made a little index card-origami model for myself.

The Sand Room
I would revise the sand room if I ran another party through it.  The cool thing about sand is that, unlike water, you can walk across the features it hides and you can't see them.  You might hide furniture, daises, thrones, etc.  The problem is, that the sand will always find the floor, so these features will only be apparent when they are on the wall or the ceiling, not a very useful place for thrones.  What I did was hid a world map, meh.  The party wasn't very excited by this and it didn't seem to utilize the full potential of the sand.

Now, I think I would make it hide work benches, anvils, sorting tables-- things that would be useful for thirty minutes at a time and could be attached to the wall.  You could have shelves too, as long as they were shuttered and the items inside well-secured.

Again, the whole point for me in tumbling the dungeon was not to try to confuse players, which seems like a much easier task, but to pack more exploration and wonder into the same amount of dungeon space.  Having a workshop appear where before there was only a sandy-floored room seems to get at this.  Especially if players begin suspecting something interesting might be hidden under the ten feet of sand.

Escape
Because the dungeon is consistent and only has four states it isn't too hard to figure out.  My players figured out how to get out in about 30 minutes to an hour of real time in which they were paying close attention to things and trying to map.  That being said, with about 15-30 minutes between rotations, it can take some time to ride out the tumbles until the exit becomes usable.  So this can play havoc with the idea that a party needs to end a session outside of a dungeon.  This didn't cause a lot of problems for me-- I just used dreamlike logic to warp different players in and out of the party when they were present to play.  But it might be a hitch if you are using Jeff Rients' table of Dungeon Doom.

One Page Dungeon Contest

The deadline is next week.  Last year I didn't enter anything, don't remember why, probably because work was insanity then.  I wanted to submit something this year just to be a part of the community and let everyone see-- hey here's something I made.  It was this contest that was partially responsible for getting me to blog. 

I was thinking of the Sodden Temple, but it's really a two level dungeon and I don't think I could squash it onto one page.

I was thinking of the Tumbling Dungeon, but after playing it last night I realize . . . it's kinda boring, too linear. I want to revise it to try to fix that.

I was also thinking of this animal island thing I've been working on, but, again I think it is too big for the OPD, just with the random animal/bird/dinosaur tables.

Then I remembered the Undertavern from SAGE last year.  So I submitted that.  Not too exciting if you've been following my blog, but maybe people will see it who wouldn't have otherwise.

Have the club pics on the house. PD.

The Tumbling Dungeon II

Here's a draft of a pretty simple dungeon that rotates around one axis.  To keep it manageable it will have four states.  The first is the way it looks when the party first enters and pokes around the place:

To visualize state two, print this out then pull the title toward you until the page is vertical.  What was hallway BCF now become a vertical shaft.  To get to state three continue rotating the title toward you and down and you get this:

What used to be the floors of all these chambers are now their ceilings.  What goes in those rooms and halls is for another post, but I wanted to try and convey what I had in mind.

Some additional thoughts.  I struggled with doors; at one point I even had a draft map with stairs leading up to the door from each of the four directions.  I think it is simplest to just say the "doors" are square openings in the exact center of the walls.

The central spherical chamber is the reason for the dungeon.  It could be made larger.  I'm toying with the idea of corrugating the walls of those 45 degree halls that become chutes, so that they actually become stairways.  I mean, I'm not trying to make a death trap here.  On the other hand, it might be interesting and nervous-making for players to start sliding down a slick chute.

Update:  Doors are still a problem.  I forgot the rooms as drawn here are 30x30x30, which means a 10x10 opening in the center of the wall is 10 feet off the ground!  I guess we could put rungs leading to the opening from all sides, but that would sort of give away the rotational nature in the first room.  I'll think more about this.

The Tumbling Dungeon

I don't mean tumbling in the sense of rolling down an infinite hill (I'll leave that for someone else to explore), but turning through the vertical plane; "rotating" and "revolving" make me think more of movement in the horizontal plane.

A horizontally rotating dungeon seems to be more about trickery-- the puzzlement of identical rooms being switched out as a means to confound players.  I'm more interested in the dungeon already explored becoming an alien place by being turned-- in essence extending the exploration of the same place by making it new with each rotation.  Well, that and just the wonderment of a huge turning place.

The Rotation
Going along with the idea of extending exploration, I think a tumbling dungeon should turn 1) slow enough so that it isn't trap-like and dangerous to explorers, 2) at predictable intervals, 3) at intervals far enough apart that explorers have enough time to explore each turned state.  The last point will depend on the size of the dungeon, but I'm thinking 1-2 hours between rotations at least.  And this is really important because it places a practical limit on the size of our dungeon.

Dungeon Size
My first sketch of a possible tumbling dungeon was a cube of 5 rooms by 5 rooms.  I quickly found out it would be extremely difficult to not only represent this visually, but for players to form a mental mindscape of it while exploring.

So, I reduced it to a cube of 2 rooms by 2 rooms.  Still too complex.  I think tumbling dungeons of this size might work in a video game, but I want something simpler.  I think it should be just complex enough for a player to hold in their mind while providing interesting things to investigate on each rotation.  The perfect size would also allow for at least one rotation to happen during a session of play-- otherwise memory and player churn will become a problem. Remember, a cube rotating will have 4 states, so you'll multiply the number of dungeon chambers by four (and then need to design those rooms).  I'm thinking a dungeon with four rooms and four passages might be just about right for me.

Building Blocks
As far as I can tell there are four classes of elements that will come into play in a tumbling dungeon:

• Rolling Elements-- balls and cylinders
• Fluids-- water and sand
• Hinged Elements- these are connected at two points, doors and shutters
• Swinging Elements-- these are connected at one point.  Unless you're rotating in more than one direction they'll function very much like hinged elements.  Although there may be some differences, the ability to push them aside and such.  Think chains and pendulums.

All of these can function to, not just change the look of a room but hide and reveal features and channel travel by making areas traversable or not.

Gravity
If this place is a feature that has existed for a while, then it will most likely be sparsely decorated and with the building blocks above.  Anything loose would have been tumbled to bits.  So any treasure items will have to be ingeniously secured.

I like the idea of magic producing anti-gravity effects which the tumbling dungeon can't, and thus I would reserve magic for that effect and keep my tumbling dungeon a physical apparatus turning with huge gears or pivots somewhere in a cavernous void.  But using magic to shift gravitational direction would yield essentially identical results as having the dungeon actually physically turning.  So, it's really up to your preference as a DM.

Misc. Thoughts
The first rotation after entering should probably block the entrance the party came in by, forcing some exploration of this strange place.

I think it would be a bonus if it isn't obvious at first that this dungeon rotates, i.e. no chairs on the ceiling.  hat way you get a little extra surprise from players on that first rotation.

For those of you that have a simulationist streak that's wondering why the hell someone would build a place like this, two ideas: an alchemical formula that needs blending for a 1000 years, eldritch eggs that need a source of heat evenly applied to keep them viable.

I can't do a post about rotating dungeons without directing you to Grim's idea of using a Rubik's Cube to generate dungeons with geomorphs, and Norman Harman's further exploration of the idea along with a proof of concept.  Awesome, but it seemed more about generating the dungeon on the surface of the cube than experiencing the effects of those rooms moving through three dimensional space.  Of course, all the ideas above could be applied to a Rubik's Cube dungeon, although I think Norman, like me, found it to be quite difficult to map and represent to players.