Wallet Dungeons

 While chipping away on dungeon maps, adventure writing, and messing around with miniatures, I came across this cheerful little document.

Wallet-Dungeons

Essentially, roll some dice and get a tiny dungeon. I think I've seen other similar things (I believe a Mothership adventure has a dice rolling method to create derelict ships) but I've had some good fun with this one.

An array of my creations. I love random generators, and there's something about throwing a handful of dice and moving them around that gives me some tactile joy apparently.

The adventure that I'm working on has some high level notes of adventure locales I need, so I jammed my smaller dungeons together to see if they could be used to make a larger dungeon. I've been messing around with all sorts of flow charts and nodes in dungeon design, so this is right down my alley.

Not a long post, the inspiration and drive are ebbing and flowing of late. I've been slowing working on things, but nothing massively interesting to share at the moment. My figure adventures have been thrown up on instagram (for those that are interested in that sort of thing).

Nefolia Caves: sub-level key

While working on the creature and magic item entries for the Nefolia Caves, it struck me that I had not included the 1st draft key for the sub level. This secret area links areas 21 and 25. So I thought I'd throw a post with it quickly. Now to continue on the monsters and items.

Nefolia Caves: map & key

I showed a very draft version of this map some two posts ago. The map redrawn, I thought I'd share something closer to finish rather than the WIPs until now.

It's come a long way since a bunch of boxes in a flowchart and I'm pretty happy with it, as simple and rough around the edges it might be. I'm sharing the current key and map as is, with the idea to make a neater and edited PDF in the future.

Just struck me there's no extended monster or magic item files. I'll compile them and either add them here or in another post.

The dungeon is intended to be used alongside the Caverns of Thracia. My thought was that the place was a smaller village near the palace complex, perhaps a home of workers and others who supported the luxuries of the palace and underground gardens. As such the "Dark One Cultists" are intended to be part of the cultists in the caverns, and statues (which I feel there are a lot of in the Caverns) come up in several areas, either as enemies or decoration.

The dungeon is, and always will be, free to borrow, use, modify, or otherwise throw around the internet.

Map:

(The key is copied from excel and rather crude. A future PDF version will have more effort put into it, apologies if this one is a bit naff.)

Key:

Expanded key:

Dungeon diagnosis - Branches

I returned to my megadungeon for a bit, determined to clean up the starting area I had been working on to work out why I wasn't liking it. I'd flowcharted it before, but I decided to flirt with madness once again and made a cleaner version.

Dotted lines are secret passages, double lines with no arrows are blocked or collapsed corridors.

On a print out version, I'd circled an area and wrote "boring, basically a straight corridor". This is referring to an area where, while there are plenty of doors and rooms, they are only 1 room deep and all lead back to the same path. As I added areas and connections to the flowchart, I discovered this issue was a lot more widespread than I'd initially thought. For all the rooms and connections, there are a lot of branches, dead ends of exploration. Plus there's a lot of squiggly corridors that I feel can be compressed or turned into rooms.

A rethink and a rework is in order. I might even try making a fresh flowchart, making a well looping area then placing my current key over the top of it, rather than try to endless tweak the current one.

1st Draft of the "Starter Dungeon"

 About a week ago I posted a tangle of a map that needed to be edited down. I also set myself a soft deadline of Sunday to get a 1st draft key done. By and large, I stuck to it, and have 95% of a 1st draft (some stat blocks are missing, and a couple of magic items need more than a keyword of detail).

The mess of a map I was working on was also massively cut down. I wanted a small map, but I was sketching more and more rooms which could be a dungeon, but not this dungeon. I wanted something quick and compact to work on, so a lot was cut until I had below.

As the 1st draft was being written, some areas were being cut up into smaller areas or details added. For example, the north-north west cave walls are dotted with small rooms. I was going to take a photo of the notes, but pencil on grey doesn't show well.

As for the key, there are 30 areas keyed, plus a small 14 room sub level not shown on the above map. It's not exactly revolutionary, but its a key. 

There's enough that I'd be comfortable running it. There are 2 main factions vying for control (and a couple of small groups poking around), enough treasure to get a B/X group to level 2, and some magic items and secrets for the curious. Next step, do some editing and some playtesting.

Progress

Last post was about me messing around with my megadungeon. In an attempt to actually finish something rather than be constantly tweaking a huge project for ever, I started work on a smaller dungeon, aiming to finish it preferably by the end of the month (by the end of the week would be nice).

I needed a base. I needed Donjon.

This was my base. I then made a node map or a flowchart mapping out the basic room layout and straightened out corridors.

The day I was working on this, I got to a point where I was thinking "what's the point of this, why am I worrying about boxes and lines and loops.... so many loops." I'd also done ready on various sites about mapping and nodal dungeons and mapping megadungeons. Definitely had a bit of creative overload. So I printed off these nodes and began drawing, away from the computer. 

The reason I drew it out this way was to make sure the dungeon was jacquayed enough. I was realising a lot of my maps were mostly branches, and even when paying attention I kept falling into boring layouts. I think it was because I was too worried about room sizes, getting everything nice on a grid, etc. So I went freeform, added and removed nodes to get something of interest to explorers.

My moments of madness passed, and I had an initial sketch of the dungeon.

It's a mess, but it's a sketch. I currently have a printed version on my desk and many edits have already been made; too many rooms, many rooms need to be shrunk, but the basic shape is there. Like sculpting, a lot needs moving around still. My plan is to have this place as a sort of introduction to the Caverns of Thracia, or at least another place to visit in a route map surrounding the Caverns.

Megadungeon: flow(chart)ing from room to room

 I feel that with projects, especially large ones, there is an ebb and flow much like waves. Things move along, slow down with blocks and problems, and speed up with break throughs and new ideas. I've been working on a megadungeon for a while now, in various iterations and having put it aside several times too, and the ebbs and flows have been keenly felt.

Recently I've been playing around with a new, drastic idea. The last time I did this, my 3+ levels were all smashed together into a single level, massively changing the dungeon's layout. Now, I've been thinking about the map itself and how I present it.

Up until now I've been working on my maps the classic way; ten foot grid, everything laid out in near exact measurements, all that jazz. However after reading through Gradient Descent, a megadungeon for the horror sci-fi game Mothership, I had a thought; did I need to do it this way?

Gradient Descent uses a flowchart type layout to represent their maps. Rather than worry about scale, rooms are either "human scale" or "industrial scale", drawn as rectangles of various sizes linked by lines for corridors. It's not the first time I'd heard or tried something similar myself, but it renewed the thought in me.

I've also been writing some route maps for designing large city and wilderness locales, which I've enjoyed and also inspired this effort.

To make progress and not get bogged down in the size of the place, I cut off part of my megadungeon to begin working on the key. This is that part. I also reckoned that, once complete, I could run groups through this part of the dungeon while I work on the rest.

This is the part I attempted to "flowchart-ify"; Corridors reduced to lines, some rooms linked together into larger rooms. My main concerns while doing this were;

• Does this map the map and key easier to understand?
• Does this make the dungeon easier to run?

Draft one. Boxes are rooms, double line boxes are large rooms, circles are doors. Rooms take about 10 minutes to explore (1 dungeon turn), large rooms 30 minutes.

It's a hot mess, but it's not a blank page and can thus be edited. Areas with lots of smaller rooms, crypts in the original, were joined into "large rooms", the idea being that in the key I would note "x crypts along walls" and include a random table for generating the contents.

I'm not sure if this will stick, or if it would actually to use at the table, but I'm intrigued and keeps up the momentum.

Editing the (stone)hell out of Arden Vul

As my Caverns of Thracia trundled on and the players explored more and more of the dungeon, I could see a crossroads off in the distance; expand the Caverns, add or make a new dungeon, or do something else.

I had already tried expanding the Caverns, but it was a half hearted attempt. I also thought of starting something completely new, but in the end decided to add a new dungeon to the current game, to not annihilate the progress the long timers have already made.

The next question was what. Stonehell was a strong candidate, but I felt for d&d 5e it wasn't enough. While I'm planning on using a new host of house rules to make things less of a cake walk, Stonehell just wasn't enough I felt. I could expand it though.

The dungeon I eventually decided upon is Arden Vul. Arden Vul is ginormous. 10 levels, that many and more sublevels, some of these levels have over a hundred rooms. It's intruiged me for a while and, given the success of several plotting factions in the Caverns of Thracia, Arden Vul with a host of competing groups is right up my alley (down my dungeon corridor?).

The issue is, Arden Vul is ginormous. And unfortunately, I would argue the key isn't all that great. Full of details and nuggets of history and details on who this skeleton was 200 years ago.

But I don't need that when the party enters, looking for gold, and I only discover after half a page of details that goblins were lying in ambush and should have attacked by now.

I can see the good in there, it's just under a lot of... stuff. I feel like it needs a severe pruning before I could use it at the table.

Before I get into my process, I noted down some oddities I found. Maybe I was missing something after trawling through the key for hours on end, but I'll leave them as I wrote them as an archaeological nugget.

• Carving has piercing eyes & empty eye sockets. Understand the idea, but seems a bit off.
• Way too much info on history of some places. Can see a lot of work went into it, but neigh impossible to use at the table (imo).
• Splitting it up into areas, each with own monsters, magic items, and random encounter tables, rather than front loading a lot.
• A ghost appears in a key, then it mentions "if not found in the room before, they are found here". Would be nice if he appeared in the room before, even a "x chance the ghost from the next room appears here". 
• Maybe nit-picking, but why 3-18 instead of 3d6?

To be able to run it, I needed something smaller. Enter once again Stonehell.

I think most people have an idea what Stonehell is and how the key is laid out; map and random tables on one page, key on the other page. There's also a double spread before with larger room entries, magic items and new monsters found there. It's great, I love it, and I needed something similar for Arden Vul.

A sample of the 1st level key. Using excel, there's not really an exact template to it for the time being. In general, monsters/NPCs are noted first, dressing next, and and puzzles/treasure after that.

At the time of writing, I have keyed up levels 1, half of level 3, and starting on level 2. The plan isn't to key the whole thing right off the bat. Any place that a party can enter from the surface, I want that area keyed. As the games continue, I can add to the key over time. Saying that, Arden Vul has so many connections and ways to access levels. While great for gameplay, it's a lot of work up front.

I somewhat feel that, when this is all done, it would be a shame to keep this key hidden. But at the same time, I have no idea about the legalities of sharing a fan key to a dungeon. I'm in no danger of finishing any sort of key for a while though, so that can can be kicked down the road.

Catacombs of the Scaled Ones

I had originally made this dungeon map as an alternative entry into my Caverns of Thracia for my open table game. This was to be the 1st level of a 3 level segment, with various sub areas and such. However, I probably will be using another map for the alternative entrance. If I don't use it for the open table, I've been considering running a B/X or similar series of sessions for my mostly d&d 5e players, though that won't be immediate.

Either way, the map has been sitting on my desk unused for a while, so I though I'd share it here in case anyone might find it useful.

The maps where made on Dungeon Painter Studio, with free assets from 2 minute tabletop. I also shared an image with a white floor

My initial thoughts were that this place is an ancient lizardfolk catacombs. In the northern end Yuan-ti were "mining" the tunnels for bones to create undead minions and guards. In the south was the crypt of a group of lizardfolk paladins, who even in death defend their ancestral burial site. And in the centre, a raider band of goblins and some hobgoblin/orc mercenaries had made their base.

In keeping with Caverns of Thracia, I attempted to have multiple entrances and ways down; a main staircase in the centre of the map is an evident entry to the catacombs, with a yuan-ti carved entrance in the north. To the north west is an aerie, the nest of a lrge bird (hard to see on the map as it looks just like any other cave wall), and there was a plan to have a disused well/air shaft lead into another part of the dungeon.
Stairs down are in the northern large hall, and the dark areas are chasms and fissures which all drop down.
Also the room to the east of the lake was meant to be a secret are, the resting place or prison of a devil. Inspired by this Dyson's map, at the bottom of this long shaft is a White Ziggurat, the prison of the Moronic Devil, held here by a chorus of other devils who siphon the power of the Moronic Devil.