Things The Dungeon Can Take From The Players

In anticipation of #dungon23 I’m going to be trying to build up just a bunch of generic semi-abstract tables to help guide writing the dungeon. Some of these will be thematic, but others are more intentionally tied to the actual form of the dungeon-crawl. Today’s table is the latter type--a list of all the things that the dungeon can take from players foolish enough to venture into it.

The core loop of a megadungeon is a series of delves, each of which are based around a process of attrition; you go in at full strength and slowly the dungeon grinds you down. You try to get as much profit out of the dungeon as you can in the time you have before you are forced to turn around and flee. Here’s a list of some of the forms that attrition can take, with some more specific examples.

I've written this list for use with traps and special rooms, but it can easily be used for monster special abilities in a pinch as well.

Examples are listed loosely in order of how painful they are to lose, with later elements needing more and more care to remain fun. I’ve included a roll-table at the bottom for #dungeon23 use.

Hit-Points

This is the default resource that dungeon crawls are ultimately built around. You start with full health, and if you ever run out of it you die. Hit-Points are easy come and easy go; players probably have some healing, and you don’t get any less able to affect the world if you aren’t at full health. HP are meaningful without being too stressful or discouraging to lose.

Examples: An arrow trap that triggers when you step on a plate, a spray of acid from a pipe, falling down a non-bottomless pit, staying in a room so hot you take damage for each minute you spend in it

Competence

Status effects that temporarily weaken a player. Often they stick around for the length of a session but are cured up by the next, so they can throw a wrench into one session without being too much of a bummer.

Examples: A poisoned needle in a chest that leaves you weak, caltrops that reduce your move speed if stepped on, a blinding flash of light, thick mud that clogs up inventory space, a curse that forces you to only walk backwards.

Safety

Hazards that create new hazards are a lot of fun in a dungeon. They might be hazards that alert the monsters of the dungeon to the PCs presence, or that activate a previously sleeping or deactivated danger. Such hazards can be great for ratcheting up tension without reducing the strength of the player characters.

Examples: Mushroom that screams really loud when you approach it, a hidden scout that calls for reinforcements if not discovered, perfume that attracts monsters until washed off, a lever that activates a disabled trap, a sleeping monster that will hunt the players if awakened, a sign saying ‘No Trespassing", a ghost who haunts anyone in possession of their cursed ring.

Resources

Hazards that can use up a character’s resources, such as held items or limited use abilities. These can vary quite a bit in how painful they are--some items such as torches or rations are bought to be expended, while rare and expensive magic weapons are devastating to lose. Resource use can be explicit or implicit--a field that rusts all metal that passes through it directly destroys gear, but a cliff that needs a rope to climb also forces the players to use up their items.

Examples: Sheer cliff needs a rope to climb, strong wind blows out torches, fungal spores render rations inedible, magic door needs Knock spell to open, toll booth requires treasure to open, siren charms and kidnaps hireling.

Morality

Treasure hunting is inherently a morally fraught act, but you can still have situations that test the morals of your players. A situation where the players have to put themselves in danger to help a NPC, or where they have the opportunity to treat a NPC badly for a profit are probably the main two types of this. How these land will really depend on the expectations of your players, and on how much you’re asking them to give up in order to be moral. Moral gotchas, where the actions of the players unwittingly cause harm, tend to feel bad but can be used sparingly if there’s then a chance for the players to make things right.

Examples: A NPC in a dangerous situation that the players would need to risk to rescue them, a helpless NPC holding a valuable treasure, two factions in the middle of an ideological conflict asking for player assistance, a noxious NPC trying to hire the players to do their dirty work, a magic portal that requires human sacrifice to open, a doppelganger that will wreak havoc on whatever settlement the players bring them to.

Orientation

Being able to run away is vital in a megadungeon, so any hazard that disorients or forcibly moves the players is incredibly frightening. Of all the hazards in this list, this is the one most likely to cause a TPK, as it removes the ability of the players to end the session once the attrition piles up too high. Being lost in a dungeon is very dangerous, but also very thrilling.

Examples: One-way doors, teleporters, spinning rooms, subtly sloping hallways, magical confusion, pit traps that dump you on a lower level, rearranging hallways.

Time

Time is safety in a dungeon, where the longer you take on any task the more wandering monster checks you have to make, the more torches you burn through, and (potentially) the more rations you consume. Time-wasting hazards can leave a player group vulnerable, but they’re more fun as a novelty than as an everyday occurrence. I suppose hazards that waste IRL time would also fall under this category, but those seem likely to outstay their welcome very quickly.

Examples: A dart that paralyzes a party member for an hour, a hallway blocked by rubble that would take 20 man-hours to clear, a door that only opens at midnight, a cage trap that automatically opens after six hours, a very slow-walking NPC that you have to escort, a NPC who wastes everyone’s time with a long shaggy dog story.

Selves

Hazards that permanently change player characters exist on an entirely different level of stakes than all the other types of hazards. This is a good and a bad thing. It’s good because it makes for high stakes situation, but incurable negative effects can be seen by some players as a fate worse than death for their character, as they now will simply always be weaker and less competent than other characters of their level. Permanent changes should only be on the table with a lot of foreshadowing. The degree to which these changes are reversible will have a big impact on how brutal they will be seen; in many ways instant death is the lightest of these conditions, as most fantasy games have some spell for bringing back the dead.

Examples: A trap that cuts off a player’s hand, a throne that grants a player a mutation for sitting on it, a needle coated with instant death poison, a helm that mind controls anyone who wears it, level drain.

d20 Hazards

1-6: Hit-Point Loss

7-10: Competence Loss

11-12: Safety Loss

13-14: Resource Loss

15-16: Morality Loss

17-18: Orientation Loss

19: Time Loss

20: Self Loss

Well, what do you all think? Have I missed anything?

#Dungeon23: What's in a room?

 In my last post I talked about my plans to populate my #dungeon23 megadungeon almost entirely through random tables, and how most of those tables would be suggested by the results of other tables. Today I want to think through some of the more high level concepts I want to be playing around with--it’s time to break a dungeon down into its component parts, so we can start figuring out what fun stuff we can do with them.

So, because this is a megadungeon, there are a number of concepts inherently baked into it. . .

1. Rooms: This is what we’re keying one of per day

2. Treasure: Why do players even come here

3. Monsters/NPCs: Who do they interact with?

4. Traps/Tricks/Specials: How does stuff get weird and dangerous?

This list probably looks familiar to anyone with experience designing for B/X--these four things are almost the atomic elements of a dungeon crawl. Some of these imply larger sets that they’re a member of:

1. Levels: This is what we’re making one of per month. These sort rooms by difficulty and, to some extent, theme.

2. Zones: Thematic subsections of levels. I think the original #dungeon23 post said they were planning on making each week into a zone. These should make the rooms make more sense next to each other.

3. Factions: Some (most) NPCs should be members of larger factions. Factions are great for magnifying the effects of player actions--if they can befriend one NPC, that gives them a foot in the door with all their buddies. Treasure and Traps can also flow out of Factions.

There are also some more conceptual questions that apply to just about everything in the dungeon:

1. Why is this here? On a, like, narrative level.

2. What are its relationships to other elements of the dungeon?

3. Why is this fun for the players to run across?

4. What themes of the dungeon does it reflect and elaborate on?

5. What unanswered questions about the dungeon could this provide the answer to?

When I start building out procedures for populating rooms, I want those procedures to be more about giving me inspiration than being mindless rules I need to follow. It’s easy to fall into a rut when you have to key 365 rooms in a row, so prompts that shove me into unexpected directions are going to be vital. This means I’m, unlike many table-based dungeon creation procedures I’ve seen, planning on having my tables be more about these conceptual questions like “what themes does this room embody” than concrete things like “how many doors are in this room”--although there will be plenty of that, as well.

I also want there to be some continuity between rooms using these questions. Whenever I key a room I’ll think of what themes it embodies that I want to see more of and then add them to a list. Whenever I roll a room in the future that starts from a thematic seed, I’ll then roll on that list of themes for their zone/level and use that as an initial departure point for brainstorming. Same with when I roll up a NPC--each faction will have its own list of themes/traits that I use when coming up with fun NPCs. That way I should be able to keep zones/levels/encounters feeling thematically distinct despite being randomly generated.

So, what might this look like in practice? Let’s take a shot at an imaginary room on level, say, 5.

Step One: Basic Pacing Shit

Dungeons are full of monsters, traps, treasure, etc, but all those things need to be proportioned and paced out. The balance between hazards and rewards is close enough to a dungeon’s core activity loop that figuring out a room’s general contents comes first. I’m using this handy BD&D table to figure out what’s in a room for now, but might switch to other methods on other levels or zones.

Step Two: Procedure Picking Procedure

Different procedures have different strengths and weaknesses. If I always start from the same place I’m going to develop blind spots. I want to build different rooms from different start points. For each room, roll once on the Themes table you’ve built for the current Zone, and then once on the following table.

1: Roll one additional time on the Themes table for the room’s Zone.

2: The room has something to do with the dominant faction of this Zone.

3: Roll a random faction from this Level--this room has some relation to them.

4: Roll on the table of Ideas had for cool stuff.

5: Roll on the table of Unanswered Questions about the dungeon and try to answer it with this room

6: Roll on the table of Player Problems & Opportunities.

More on what these tables all actually look like next time.

Step Three: Key the Room

With this you have three points of inspiration to get you started: room contents type, a theme, and one other concept. I find that this is the perfect amount of prompting to get me to make some really weird and unexpected things. If you’re ever left staring at the results without a plan, just roll up another Theme--they’re great because they cut down the possibility space a ton while still being super open-ended.

At this point you just write out a first draft for the room. Try to find the overlap between all the concepts you rolled that still feels like one coherent idea and makes sense in the dungeon’s larger context.

Step Four: Unanswered Questions & Theme Updates

Odds are good that whatever idea you came up with raises a bunch of new questions, possibilities, and ideas up in your mind. Where does this Owlbear find food? Who is this Cultist a worshiper of? If this is a mad sculptor, where are their sculptures? Who killed this corpse? Take as many of these questions as you can think of and throw them all onto the Unanswered Questions table to serve as inspiration for future rooms. Likewise, if this room answered any standing Unanswered Questions you can remove them from the list (if you want--some are fun to let trigger multiple times).

Similarly, think of all the Themes about this room you think are interesting that aren’t already on your Themes table, then just add them to the table. You just keyed an Ossuary where the bones are staged into morality lesson tableaus? Toss “Bones”, “Morbid Tableaus”, “Morality Tales”, and “Tone-Deaf Patronization” onto your Themes list for the Zone/Level/etc. Get some thematic through-lines pumping through your dungeon!

And that’s my planned process! I’m sure it’ll evolve a lot as it hits actual practice, but that’ll be part of the fun of this all. I’m pretty excited to get started.

#Dungeon23: A Procedure for Procedures

 I’ve decided to make a #Dungeon23 dungeon. More specifically, I’ve decided I want to make a megadungeon construction procedure--a set of actions I can take each day to randomly generate a sprawling dungeon while still giving it the cohesion and narrative coherence to make it be something I might actually want to run. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently on the topic of ‘default’ procedures to help teach people RPG design/GMing skills, and this should be a fun process to test out my thoughts.

So, without further ado, here is my primary procedure for #Dungeon23:

Whenever I have a question I need to answer about my dungeon, I will draw up a table and jot down as many ideas as I can think of over the next 24 hours. Once those 24 hours are up, I’ll roll on it. If the same question comes up again, I’ll use the same table to answer it. I may add or remove options from the table over time as appropriate.

Aside that, there are a few other things I plan on doing/tracking:

I want the dungeon to maintain narrative coherence, so I’m actually starting from the bottom up; the first room I key will be the ‘final’ room of the dungeon featuring the super-powerful entity the entire dungeon is built around. Normally this would be a bad idea, since you typically want to be able to start running a megadungeon without needing to finalize the areas players won't be exploring for years into the campaign, but the limited format of #Dungeon23 dampens that problem

I want the rooms closer to the surface to foreshadow what's beneath, for the entire dungeon to feel like it's flowing out of the natural repercussions of a single great secret hidden deep beneath the earth. For that to work, the first thing I need to decide on is the nature of that secret itself. This brings me to my first table:

Who Is At The Bottom Of This Dungeon?

1. Devil

2. God

3. Cosmic Horror

4. Lich

5. Artifact

6. Primordial Beast

7. Dimensional Rift

8. Immortal King

9. Archimedean Lever

10. Billionaire Fleeing the Apocalypse

11. Big Dragon

12. Tarrasque

13. Sleeping Civilization

14. The Messiah

15. Fountain of Youth

16. Magical Mutagen

17. Underground Civilization

18. Roll Twice

If I can think of any more ideas before the 1st I’ll add them to the list. Once I do roll on the table, it’ll obviously open up a whole bunch more questions (if it’s a god, a god of what? did they build the dungeon? is it a prison?), but those tables will have to wait until after the initial roll.

There are a few more tables and procedural elements I’ll be using that are inherent to any room--how big is it/how many doors does it have/what’s in it--but I’ll talk about how I’m handling those in a future post.

The Grand d666

 By far the most useful RPG tool I’ve ever made for myself is the d666 table.

I think it’s important, when creating a setting, to think about the core concepts that are important to it. There should be certain recurring themes/aesthetics/archetypes that run throughout the setting, and that you can play with while designing content for the game.

Maybe you want betrayal to be a big part of your campaign. Then, as you’re making all the various locations/factions/etc in the setting, you can think about how each of them relate to the concept of betrayal and how it shapes them. One NPC is hated by one faction and loved by another because they betrayed the first to save the second. Another NPC is on thin ice with their faction because they lapsed in the past, but are in the process of gaining forgiveness. A major monster NPC in the dungeon will try to get the PCs to betray their patrons in exchange for power. Hirelings employed by the PCs get seduced into betraying them by their enemies. Each time the players deal with any of these, what they do also changes their relationship just a touch towards all those other instances. It makes the setting feel more coherent, and makes the choices players make feel just a bit more weighty and interesting.

The issue that I run into when designing content for my games is that, when writing up ideas relating to a theme, it’s really easy to go for the low hanging fruit or end up in a rut. Especially if I’m being put on the spot, if I’m being asked to imagine betrayal stories it’s really easy for me to fall into one of a few cliches that come naturally to me. If you ask me to do this multiple times, it’s probably going to start looking repetitive.

The solution I’ve found is to offload a big part of the creative process into a giant table of concepts and then roll on it three times.

Whenever I start a new RPG project, once I’m done sketching out the big picture stuff I make myself a d666 table to use for inspiration for when I get down to writing up actual content.

What’s a d666 table?

d66 tables are fairly common in the RPG world, but if you haven’t seen one before here’s a quick summary:

A d66 table would be a table set on a 6x6 grid. To use it you roll two six sided dice--the first determines what column you read from, while the second determines the row.

11	Human	21	Fighter	31	Fire	41	Monster	51	Devour	61	Plains
12	Goblin	22	Wizard	32	Water	42	Trap	52	Betray	62	Hills
13	Elf	23	Cleric	33	Wind	43	Gold	53	Corrupt	63	Desert
14	Gnome	24	Thief	34	Earth	44	Gear	54	Ambush	64	Forest
15	Beast	25	Peasant	35	Light	45	Mystery	55	Mislead	65	Jungle
16	Pixie	26	Noble	36	Dark	46	Friend	56	Extort	66	Mountain

A d666 table is basically just six of these tables back to back. So, the first die might determine the table, the second the column, and the third the row. Exactly how you lay it out is up to you.

How to structure it

A d66 table gives you 36 possible results, while a d666 one gives you 216. I generally prefer d666 for larger projects, but the idea of just whipping up 216 concepts back to back is impractical. That’s fine, though, because one great thing about d666 tables is how easy they are to structure.

Instead of just throwing 216 unstructured concepts into a table, I suggest grouping them by type. I’ll typically make all the entries in a column or mega-row have something in common with each other. Specifically, I’ll divide the setting up into six different factions and thematically link everything in a column to one faction. Then I chop up the six mega-rows into categories.

On my current project, I use the following categories: 

Sub-Factions: the various types of members a faction might have (merchants, soldiers, nobility)

Personality Traits: some of the types of personalities you’re more likely to run into when dealing with the faction

Desires: what types of things the faction wants and what their motivations are

Ways They Can Hurt You: a list of common ways they can make life hard for the players

Themes: just various imagery and concepts that you want to crop up repeatedly in the setting, especially associated with this faction

This suddenly means that, instead of needing to think up 216 ideas from scratch, you just need to think of six ways that, say, goblins can fuck you over, or six things that the ice witches want. It basically fills itself out. 

How I use it in practice

Cool, so now we have a gigantic table of concepts for our setting. How do we actually use it?

It’s really simple--whenever I need to think up something cool (what’s in a hex, what type of treasure is in this room, what’s this NPC’s deal) I just roll on the table two or three times and use that as a starting point. Typically, if I already know the role a thing is going to need to fill I’ll roll twice (I know this room of the dungeon needs a monster or a trap in it), or three times if I’m coming in without an agenda (filling in a block of a hex map).

The amazing thing is, this really works. I initially started doing it as a way to come up with ideas when I was running dry, but I’ve found that the stuff I come up with when I use it is just wildly more imaginative than what I write from scratch.

Let’s look at some examples of results I’ve gotten recently, stocking rooms for a demon-haunted gatehouse guarding the valley of a long-extinct civilization:

Clothes, Demand Vow: This was for the lobby of the gatehouse, an area that anybody entering the valley would need to pass through. I decided that outsiders visiting the valley would be required to wear a sash that marked them as visitors, but that allowed them to understand and speak the local language. The sashes emerge from a great metal cylinder, within which sleeps the gigantic spider engineered to spin these sashes. As long as the spider is left inside, taken sashes will be replaced after a few days, but if the top of the cylinder is opened the spider will rampage.

Abominations, Song: Used to fill a room in the upper floors of the gatehouse. The initial idea was to have some sort of horrible but immobile creature stuck in this room, guarding some treasure, with an enchanting song that could put any who enter the room to sleep. This eventually evolved into the idea of The Shrike, a small and innocuous-looking songbird with a hypnotizing siren song and the ability to use wood magic to imprison a complacent victim in the side of a tree to be devoured at its leisure.

Friendly, Revolution: I decided that this meant an imp who would try to corrupt the players by offering them an enchanted item--a magical dagger that forces its victims to save-or-die, but only when used against a direct superior.

Hedonists, Bullying, Animal Companion: A group of goblins have captured a magical boar and are using it to put on a little colosseum-style arena battle. The goblins have made a little arena out of furniture and are jumping into the ring one by one to battle the boar while others throw insults and rocks. This results in a lot of dead goblins, which the surviving goblins find hilarious.

Some tips on using this effectively

These work best when used as loose inspiration rather than as hard requirements, but at the same time I encourage anybody using them to give an earnest attempt to use any result you get--a lot of my favorite results have come from combos that I initially had no idea how to reconcile. That said, I will frequently reroll if a result seems like a bad fit for the specific prompt I’m currently working on--I’ll just keep it in my back pocket for a few prompts.

It’s also a good idea to have a skeleton framework of your setting already set up. If you already have a bunch of facts laid out about your setting that you want to find ways to show off to the players, you’ll find tons of opportunities to do so as you’re interpreting these.

For example, I already had established that the ancients used spiders for manufacturing, so when I got a ‘clothes’ result it seemed like a great chance to bring a spider into the mix. I already knew that goblins, being low-grade demons, have negative survival instincts, so they seemed like ideal candidates to bully an animal in as inefficient a way as possible. Demons are all about turning civilization against itself, so a dagger that encourages violent revolution seems like a natural gift one could give.

An Example

Here’s the whole chart from the example above. The setting is slightly on the backburner as I try to think through how to safeguard a fantasy adventure game all about ‘discovering’ a treasure-filled valley full of vying factions from just turning into colonialism-apologia (more on that later, I’m sure).