Dungeon Design with Condiments

Or, a Recipe for Awesome! Okay, not really-- a recipe for your bed smelling vaguely of soy sauce. So here's the scoop. It's funny, JB just posted about creativity and map making and I was reminded of some ideas I've had for a while of doing goofy stuff just to generate maps. I think it may have been sparked by Melan on one of the gaming forums talking about drawing dungeons on blank paper rather than graph paper to get more interesting designs. I tried downloading cross grid graph paper, but I still think in 5' and 10' chunks when they're there.

Another idea was to use something like sand or sugar, throw it on the map and outline the results. Well, a little too messy for my tiny living quarters.

Enter Maggi. Maggi is a brand I got to know in Poland. Its a kind of savory sauce you put in soups. And strange foreigner that I was, I grew to love it and put it on everything, soups, sandwiches, peirogi. Unfortunately, here in the states all I can find is some variant made in China, but what do we do with it? Easy, splatter and trace and you've got a two-minute, organic cave system.


After tracing:


Problems: first, yes it is slightly ridiculous for adults to splatter condiments intentionally. Second, unless you have a light box, it's kind of awkward to trace; my trace job lost some of the cool organic shapes that the splatters had, and made them worth messing with in the first place. Third, it might require real Polish Przyprawa w płynie to get it right.

But, wait, I won't leave you with that joke post. Here's another idea, just roll all your dice:


trace:


and combine the results into cave complexes:


At first I was thinking the results on the dice would be diameters or sizes of rooms or something, but that was too cumbersome. You could put an exit up at the location of the die with the highest result, allowing you ways to connect caves vertically.

Another idea I'm interested in is the Distressed Dungeon. Take a relatively symmetrical, rational dungeon design and @#*% it up. Whether it's cave-ins, or lava, or flooding, something has laid waste to the former order. Here is my Monastery of St Eudo after throwing dice on it and tracing:


It doesn't work that impressively here, because it's essentially just a horseshoe, but it's the only handy digital dungeon I had. But, I think this could be a cool way to make a boring rational dungeon with barracks and kitchens, etc. and then throw a bunch of pits, or green slime around on it to make it interesting in an unexpected way. Good Luck.

Rune Magic

Runes are cool for three reasons 1) they are a unique alphabet/system of writing something that has fascinated me since childhood when I memorized the Phonecian alphabet from an old encyclopedia 2) They involve rune poems which give a mysterious sense that "Fehu," for example is much more than just an "f" sound, and 3) these rune poems usually involve kennings making them thrice cool.

Just to give you an example of what I'm mean:


Wealth is a source of discord amongst kin;
and fire of the arms.



Ulcer is fatal to children;
death makes a corpse pale.

So, what I want to do is incorporate rune magic into my campaign. I don't see the class as much different from a cleric, it's the mechanics of the magic that will differ. To me that's what's interesting that there are different kinds of magic in a game world. So, I would focus on the things that make runes cool and different.

First, they are not spells to be cast, runes have to be inscribed. So, they are either ritual like inscriptions that affect an area or thing inscribed, or they must be inscribed on amulets ahead of their time of usefulness.

Second, The magic should be cool in a combinatory way. That's sort of the point. There aren't 24 rune spells (because of the 24 Eldar Futhark runes) that would be very boring. There are spells that are brought about when you combine Fehu + Kaunan, or even Kaunan + Fehu.

It sounds like the first requirement might make a runecaster pretty useless on an adventure, but I'm not so sure. Those spells that later editions of D&D call "utility," like something you pull out of a mop closet, are the things that would be the most useful in real situations. I'm thinking something like Othila (Estate/Property) + Kaunan (Ulcer), for example, would make a door brittle and allow chracters to smash through locked doors or even chests.

Two ways of parcelling out this power to the runcaster that I'm thinking of 1) the dreaded spell components, i.e. to inscribe take some expensive dyes or gold leaf if you aren't actually carving into stone. To draw on human flesh would take expensive, aromatic oils. 2) Knowledge of the runes is incomplete. You could accomplish this by saying you can't achieve this rune combination until level 3, but that seems very video gamey to me. I'd rather say, you don't know what the Kaunan rune looks like. Hmm, I'm sort of unconvincing myself. Maybe the chracter knows all 24 runes to start, but needs to know the rune poems to use them effectively. That would be something they could be searching for in play, the way old school mages hunt scrolls.

One Session Dungeon Template

This is T. Foster's. I think I read about it at Knights and Knaves Alehouse forum.

Don't think of this as a set-in-stone flowchart. Think of this as boundaries to help you when you're floundering around early on in dungeon-making or when you're under the gun to produce something quickly.

The idea is to have at least this much ready for one night's adventure gaming. Twelve rooms holding:

One Session of Play

1 Major Encounter
2 Major Encounter that Overmatches the party
3 minor encounter
4 minor encounter
5 Telegraphed Trap
6 Trick/Puzzle with a Permanent Effect
7 empty room
8 "
9 "
10 "
11 "
12 empty room, with some kind of False Climax

I think it is pretty self explanatory. The false climax and permanent effects are very old school flavor. As is the dangerous encounter that is really too tough for the party unless they out think it (or run like hell). Telegraphed trap means a trap that is obvious about its presence but maybe not its function. The idea is that traps are actually more dramatic and tension building when players know they are there. I picked this idea up over at Ars Ludi.

What I've found myself doing is thinking in chunks of two of these and allowing for player to go in two entirely different directions. Hope this is helpful.

Simple Ammunition Tracking

Using poker chips as a means of tracking isn't a new idea. Lord Kilgore blogged about it here. But I don't know that I've heard anyone talking about using them to track ammo on an encounter basis.

Arrows, sling bullets, and darts are an important part of the resource management aspect of adventure gaming. But you don't want to get bogged down keeping tallies of everything. And you certainly don't want to end up rolling saving throws for every arrow to see if a player can recover it after use.

Here's an easy solution. Like many of them for adventure gaming it involves abstraction. Give the player five poker chips and have them give you one after every encounter. When they're out of chips they're out of ammo.

You can adjust the number of chip up a little, but keep in mind an archer can get 2 arrows off a round and if you have multiple round encounters they may be using quite a few arrows. So, I think it is a fair trade off for the ease of use in play.

You might do something similar with spell components if you want to be a stickler with magic-users.

Problem Meet Solution

First, if you are one of my players . . . scat! Reading my blog will just make your gaming less fun.

Okay, the cool thing about having your megadungeon be a huge cylindrical hole is you have this great accessibility. Players can go as deep as they can manage, especially as they become more powerful.

But . . . what about all that wasted space? The Maw is ~200' across. And at its great depth there is a lot of unused volume there. Seems like a waste.

Empty volume meet invisible tower. Ha ha. Isn't it perfect? I just thought of it today. Of course it is a thin graceful tower, so to watch birds flying or hirelings falling to their deaths you wouldn't notice it. But it is there.

So what features should an invisible tower have? I'm thinking lattice like terraces, so unsuspecting adventurers get a quick trip to the bottom of the Maw. But what else?