#Dungeon 23, Days 9/10/11/12

Day 9 - Revisiting Goblin Kitchen

• pantry: goblin waiting in there for other goblins for a card game
• root celler, goblin "sommellier"
• old casks of wine (reference to the Cask of Amontillado)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cask_of_Amontillado
• Lots of strange things in jars and exotic foods
• Pickled creatures
• Pickled vegetables
• Pickled people
• Pickle-people
• expensive foods that strange effects on the PCs (d20 table)
• I KNEW there would be some good D4 caltrops tables for this, haha:
• https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2022/04/d100-marvelous-mushrooms-tantalizing.html
• https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2022/03/d100-fantastical-fishes-spectacular.html
• https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2021/05/d100-terrible-toxins-vile-venoms.html
• https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2019/05/d100-table-one-hundred-unconventional.html
• https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2022/04/d100-why-is-garlic-so-stinking-expensive.html
• https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2021/05/d100-equipment-with-coin-weight-slot.html
• https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2018/11/more-migration-herb-plant-generator.html
• speakeasy - potion-seller?

Day 10 - Temple

• Deeeeeeeeeeep underground.
• Feels very important, but also very empty and sad. Staying here too long results in a loss of willpower to leave or do anything.
• other adventurers seem to have come here and just got too depressed to leave. their gear is still here, much of it too old to use but some salvageable
• Actually a hollowed-out fossil of some being from a forgotten age.
• Built by an unknown culture for an inscrutable purpose.

Day 11 - A Dark Place

• A race of docile goblins who have been living and dying in a pitch black trash-heap at the bottom of a nearly-bottomless pit.
• Looking down from above, the pit looks almost like a giant eye (funnels into a circular opening, with ledges spiraling around it, towards the center.
• Peaceful, but creepy. Large bat-like ears, long fingers, pale clammy flesh, bulging white sightless eyes or eyes that have been atrophied and almost non-existent
• They perform strange rituals repeatedly for no discernible reason
• creating statues out of junk (which they believe comes from heaven)
• whispering and looking towards the sky with arms outstretched
• harvest glowing mushrooms from piles of dung made from poop and compost from food scraps (and dead prisoners)
• they've developed an immunity to the mushrooms, but if the PCs eat them they will trip balls
• receiving a vision about another part of the castle (d12)

Day 12 - Central Lift

• Lift from bottom level to the servant's quarters. Giant cylinder with a spiral staircase around the edges. Lift goes up and down using chains and massive counterweights.
• Side-note: I had a hard time doing this particular day, at first. I came back to it later on and it was way better. I had gotten myself all stressed out feeling like I had to do the challenge, instead of wanting to do it. 

#Dungeon23 - Catching up (older rooms I didn't post)

When I first started this I wasn't sure if I wanted to share every room I made. I don't know why; probably some kind of bullshit paranoia about people stealing my stuff, using it, and then making money with it (funny how insecurity and ego go together, isn't it?). Then I realized that this was the opposite approach to get what I really want: meeting and getting to know other people who like the stuff I like. Also, why make a blog if you don't want to share your thoughts? Lunacy.

Anyway, let that be a life lesson to you about how fear and self-centeredness will destroy you and open-heartedness and goodwill will save your soul. Or something. 

Here's some of the rooms I came up with so far but didn't get around to posting:

Day 1 - Secret Underwater Entrance 

This is from the first day, and I was working off of a procedure that I had created to make things less overwhelming. It was based off doing different rolls that would tell me what to put in the room, to spark my imagination and randomize the whole process. It had stuff like "Roll 1d4 for: Trap, Monster, Puzzle, Roll2." It was a fun idea, but it got too fiddly and actually wound up making things less fun. If I followed all the rolls I came up with, I'd wind up with a completely nonsensical random assortment of rooms and it wouldn't even be that fun to make.

It turned out that it was way more fun for me to sit down fresh every time, and pretend I was actually going to this dungeon in real life, and imagine what I could find there. Letting my mind do that also wound up giving me lots of visual information that my brain would then fill in with other details and little flashes of what the overall "vibe" of a room would be. I felt this procedure in my guts, whereas I felt the previous procedure in my head. Guts wins.

Monster: 4 suckered tentacles; aquatic.

Treasure: as a drowned adventurer in its lair.

Pond has underwater caves leading to another entrance (next to a rocky outcropping). Left cave leads to 1st level [of the dungeon], right cave leads to lair (flooded laboratory). Only hunts at night. Light hurts it. Is the head of the dead adventurer? Has helmet? Pack w/useful items. 

Day 4 - Sewers

For this room I'm imagining a sewer where all of the refuse of the castle eventually finds its way, and then congeals. It's fed by a natural spring that flows down out of the mountain and the washes the detritus and waste out to sea. Not out the same area as where the octopus lives. That wouldn't really make much sense.

So I'm imagining these openings high up on the wall and maybe in the ceiling where gross stuff drops down and into this water, and there are metal grates that cross over where the water flows. So the PCs would have to cross these metal grates to get through the room, but the room is slippery and there are things in the water. At first the PCs just see shapes in the water, but if they look closer it looks like body parts combined with waste and junk. So they really need to not slip into the water. There's diseases in there for sure.

The room itself is all flagstones and bricks, with the channels in the floor being of natural stone. There's a tunnel somewhere that the natural spring is rushing in from. Maybe further up into the mountain there's a cave with a pool that this empties from. I think the rainwater also swells this place when it rains, the castle being designed to collect it and channel it here to flush it all away.

What are some ideas for other rooms? (Note to self: Don't have to use them, just having fun with this.)

• An actual dungeon (for prisoners, and torture).
• Factions: prisoners, and guards (golems).
• A secret laboratory for a mad sage/wizard.
• Factions: maybe the lich and his experiments (some townsfolk, some prisoners, people who pissed off the lich). Basically beastmen, and goblin hybrids that hate him.
• Catacombs
• Factions: undead high-born ghosts, protected by undead zombie servants, deep gnomes trying to get their jewels.
• Some kind of even older place, built by someone else, accidentally discovered, possibly unleashing the dark powers that now rule this entire place.
• Demons, undead of a forgotten time, a good holy man in some kind of stasis who is guarded by some angels.
• A pantry / root cellar / kitchen filled with goblin slaves.
• Factions: goblin slaves, hobgoblin guards and overseers
• A garden
• Factions: animated gardening implements at war with faeries?
• A library
• A demon librarian (gateway to the stygian library), and a group of adventurers from another plane who are hiding out from it. Travel through the library somehow. portals in books? pocket dimensions? Tunnels through stacks of books?
• An aviary
• An enslaved Dragon, and its captors.
• An art gallery with macabre art and collections
• a group of vampires constantly critiquing art and drinking blood and having bloody orgies.
• Servant's quarters
• 
  
• Guard barracks
• 
  
• Stables
• Courtyard
• A great hall
• A tower with some special prisoners perhaps
• 
  
• A tower with some magical research stuff, maybe astronomical in nature
• A martial training area with cool rare weapons and armor
• Some kind of temple, or priory, or chapel of some kind

I'm starting to imagine a vampire king, and his lich vizier. I know that this entire thing is filled to the brim with cliches but I refuse to allow myself to care about that this early on. I think that cliches are broad stokes, and broad stroke are where you're supposed to start. I hate it when people are just trying to be original for the sake of being original. Coming up with something someone never came up with before doesn't make something good.

If the castle is full of cool fun stuff and scary monsters, and the whole thing has a really solid mood and makes sense, then it's good. I think it's more about giving the players something to sink their teeth into than it is about "It's got a vampire, but instead of being bad he's good!" I mean putting twists on things is always a good way to get people's attention, but it's not everything.

Day 5 - Literal, Actual Dungeon

On this day, I was starting to find the groove of just letting stuff flow and seeing where it took me. I started to feel like I was discovering the dungeon as well, rather than creating it. That felt really nice. I'm not going to clean up the notes and make them make sense, but rather put them in exactly as I wrote them.

Dungeon

- stone blocks, armored skeleton guards, torturer is a ghost? Wight? Demon? Prisoners kept in cells? Barrels? Sarcophagi? Bottles? Shelves?

- Special secret room for the most hated prisoners.

- key ring for cells*. Cells mostly empty but some ghosts that forgot they're dead. Sleeping minotaur.

- secret room to dwarven realm.

- *one extra key for tower.

Day 6 - Catacombs

- Vast, cavernous cemetery with glowing fungus that eats corpses.

- Fungus people (neutral, but scary looking).

- Takes over dead people's bodies. Retain some memories. Showing them objects or asking them questions brings memories back.

- Catch is: they want to infect people. Charm spores.

- Lots of mausoleums and graves and statues.

- Some tomb-golems.

Day 7 - The Librarium

- Books are all traps. Can only be escaped by telling a story (i.e. telling the story of the PC trapped in that particular book's pocket-dimension).

- Lots of spellbooks to learn from

- Librarians are: angel and demon? Sphinx!

- Top tier is a hidden room, guarded by the Sphinx.

 

Day 8 - My "3 Orcs, 25gp" day

Remember when Sean McCoy said not every room has to be a big deal? I took that to heart, and when I really wasn't feeling very creative I just looked at the list of possible rooms I came up with a week ago and just picked a couple to think about. It was still pretty fun, even though I'm pretty "meh" about both of these ideas.

Art Gallery

- Contains "The Maze of the Blue Medusa" (another megadungeon, beautifully written by Zak S and Patrick Stuart, I believe. DUNG-CEPTION!)

- Vampires discussing art. Won't eat anyone they find interesting (a reference to the cannibals in Maze of the Blue Medusa).

- priceless art abounds

Goblin Kitchen

- Goblin chef with human apprentice

- Rat's nest of food and junk

- Lots of supplies.

- Lots of goblins.

#Dungeon23 - Day 5

Dungeon

• extremely long hallway with doors on either side. takes 20 turns to walk down.
• some locked, some open, some missing, some broken
• table of random room contents (d100):
• 1-30 are empty
• 30-40 contains a skeleton in rags manacled to the wall
• 40-55 contains skeleton in rags lying on the ground
• 45-50 contains a skeleton sitting in a chair facing the corner
• 50-100 tbd
• one is a door to a minor dwarven kingdom, deep below the earth. There is a vertical passage that opens into a huge cavern. A massive stone tower rises up in the center, atop a rocky island, surrounded by still black waters. There are chain bridges festooning this cavern that attach to the tower at all different heights. The bridges lead to different tunnels that intersect a dwarven tunnel system.
• in the water is a cave, which is the lair of an ancient aboleth. the dwarves don't stray down below a certain level of the tower for this reason.
• Random Encounters (in a room):
• armored skeleton guards playing games in one room.
• playing one of these games, whose pieces are worth 500gp (roll 1d4):
• cards, poker chips (actual gp)
• a miniature wargame (skeletons vs. goblins, miniatures worth a lot to a collector)
• chess, but on a globe (exotic game worth money to the right person)
• dice (made of ivory and gem insets)
• sleeping minotaur, cradling a terrified prisoner.
• green slime dissolving a pile of bodies. kill it to reveal level 2 treasure hoard.
• goblins busted through the wall from their secret tunnel (1d6). tunnel can be followed to the goblin's secret network of passages and dwellings.
• ghost of former prisoner that forgot it's dead. wants pardon for its crimes. promises to offer information (roll 2x on rumor table).
• disturbed a rat's nest made of discarded prisoner's belongings (level 2 treasure hoard)
• torture room - a ghost torturing a dwarf (can lead PCs back to the Dwarven castle, which is a good place to rest and regroup).

Comparing Room Description Styles - Part 1

In my quest to overthink everything about the #Dungeon23 challenge, I decided to do a deep-dive on how some of my favorite module writers do their thing. These are people who've gotten a lot of credit and props from very critical folks like Bryce Lynch (Ten Foot Pole) and the folks at Bones of Contention.

First up is Vasili Kaliman (Singing Flame). I'm going to take one room from two different things he did, that I like. There's no special reason for either of these rooms, I just picked one at random from each zine.

1. This is the description of room "1A" from DNGN Weird Fantasy Megadungeon #1. Note that the opposite page contains a map, and on that map it has notes about the "Floor" and "Light" for each room. For this one, it says: "Floor: fresh earth overlaid on stone. Light: Candles on floor." I think this way of giving room details that doesn't clutter the room description is original and neat, but now I'm looking in two different places for the information and my brain hates that. It could work really well for other people, I have no idea. Would love to hear their ideas and thoughts.
• Here's the actual text for the room, though (exactly as it is laid out in the book):
• 1A > CYBERNETIC CORPSE
• Human corpse (on the floor), its arm and face merged with cybernetic parts.
• 2 candles (next to body) emitting black smoke [see ILLUSTRATION, P.24)
• Corpse: cybernetic parts can be cut from the body (worth 100gp to a cult). Leather pouch containing a journal (penned in an unknown script), 12gp (next to the corpse)
• Door to 1C: Bronze (locked), inscribed with strange symbol. Opens from the other side.
• I think this is pretty good. Certainly miles above a lot of other things I've seen. Really pleasing to look at visually, and it feels good in my ADHD brain to look at the information so clearly disseminated (if you know, you know). I'm not sure if it's inspiring enough, but it's certainly got the information organized in a really easy to digest way, even down to his use of bold text. I understand that seeing the corpse of a cyborg with an indecipherable journal is pretty inspiring, but something about it just doesn't land for me. There's a lack of atmosphere, somehow. A lack of a vibe, maybe? It's just a very simple room with some weird stuff in it; which is definitely cool, but maybe not awesome?
• Side note: It's hard to do this when you don't know what you're actually looking for.
2. Moving onto Xanadu (such a fucking good module, Jesus Christ). This is the description of the room labelled "5. Statue":
• 5. STATUE
• Stone stairs, leading up to small vaulted chamber. Statue, 12' high, standing in the middle.
• STATUE
• Female, she is grand, smiling, joyous, body is chipped in placed [SIC]. One arm extended holding a bowl. Gems embedded in eyes, red garnets (worth 700 gp each). Small wings growing from her shoulders.
• If the bowl is examined: it is empty
• If something is placed in the bowl: nothing happens. Only one item can be placed in here that will have some kind of effect (see below on how to disarm the trap).
• If search for traps is made: gems in eyes are trapped.
• If attempts are made to remove gems from the eyes without disarming the trap: a disintegration ray will shoot out at the PC touching the gem, save vs. death or be obliterated.
• How to disarm the trap: a human tooth must be placed in the owl. It will melt into a sugary syrup, the syrup will disappear from the bowl and secrete from her mouth, parts of the chipped statue will begin to heal, the eyes will glow red for 1d6 rounds, at which time the germs can safely be removed.
• I like this a lot as well. In some ways I like it more than the first, but in other ways I see the appeal of the first. Xanadu gets 2 rooms on a page, sometimes 1 if there's a lot of cool stuff going on. DNGN gets between 6 and 9, depending on the floor of the dungeon. I mean, it's a megadungeon in a Zine form. Pretty impressive, in that sense.

The thing that the first one has is a cool description of the door leading to the next room, and a little bit more descriptive language about the stuff in the room. The thing that the second one has is this great information about how to interact with the stuff in that space. Xanadu is full of stuff like that, which I love. Again, it makes my brain happy. I really don't want to think when I run a pre-made thing. I think enough.

I would be fine with a much longer version of DNGN if it had that kind of stuff in it. But I get it: zines aren't books. I think DNGN is supposed to be a little more sparse, so that you can add stuff to it or mess with each. That's something people do, right? Personally, I think that's for people who don't freeze when you put them on the spot about what a place looks like.

One thing that I think is really cool in DNGN is a little 1d6 table of dungeon dressing for each floor. You can roll on it every time the PCs enter a room and get stuff to put in the room, like:

1. human-sized cage
2. throne carved from wood
3. gurgling water from the floor
4. severed finger in a glass vial
5. half-burnt candles in a pool of wax
6. stone statue toppled on its side

I think that's a cool take on dungeon dressing. You have the main points of interest of each room placed within the room description, and then a cool little "flavor table" on the map. It's like the room description is the cupcake and the table is the sprinkles. Or pizza, with toppings. 

Okay let's look at another writer. Let's look at some rooms from good ol' Gavin Norman (Necrotic Gnome), in The Hole in The Oak:

1. 12 | Tiny People
• Stone blocks (walls, ceiling 10', and floor). Ornamental table (wooden, 2' high). Dozens of glass jars (on the table). Green bottle (on the table; corked). 
• In the jars: inside each jar is a tiny dead person (1" tall).
• In the bottle: half full of old wine (now potent vinegar). Two scrolls hidden, rolled up inside the neck:
• 1. A scroll of diminution (shrinks the reader to 6" tall for 6 turns).
• 2. A page from a tale about a journey to a world of micro-people.

Really fun things to interact with and look at. I just... again, the "stone blocks (walls, ceiling 10', and floor" just bothers me somehow. Also "Ornamental table (wooden, 2' high)" is definitely cooler than "Wooden Table" but "ornamental" is so vague. What about "Wooden table (2' high, ornate floral carvings" or "ornate carvings of stars." Ornate just makes me need to think more. You could add a ton of picture snacks for my brain to gorge on, with a few more words.

Let's check out another one:

2. 19 | Ghoul Bay
• Natural cavern (8' high, slick with mist). Rushing river (cold and fast-running). Sandy bay (streaked with gore).
• Half-Devoured Corpse
• Fairly fresh (flesh still intact). Partially dismembered (legless). Destroyed armour (remnants of rended [SIC] plate mail)
• Reaction: the legless corpse will crawl to attack PCs. (It is a recently killed adventurer half-way to ghoulhood.)
• Demi-Ghoul [stat-block]
• AC 8 [11], HD 1 (hp5), Att x1 bite (1d3), 1x claw 1d3, THAC0 19{0], MV 30' (10'), SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16(1), ML 10, AL Chaotic, XP 10
• Bones and Driftwood
• Piled up (at the eastern end of the bay).
• Searching the pile: a sack containing 324gp, a ruby (worth 800gp), 5 black opals (200gp each0, and a crystal dagger as hard as steel (+1 magic).
• Moored Rowing Boat
• Drifting out in the current (10' into the water). Undamaged (battered but sound).
• Using the boat: up to three PCs can fit in the boat. Characters in heavy armour (or carrying other heavy loads) must make a DEX check to get into the boat. If they check fails, the character falls into the water and is swept away. See The Underground River, page 5.
• This is where Gavin really makes my brain mentally conjure the image of the Hannibal Lecter "Perfection" GIF. It takes up about half a page (there's two rooms on that page, and there could be more but the map on the opposite page only goes to room 20. And actually, this is where Gavin does something even more awesome: he puts the same map on two different pages, because the map has rooms from both pages on it. He could have condensed the writing to fit more rooms on one page, but he just repeated the map (or at least, the relevant part of it). And why not? He's adding value, and making my brain work less. ::chef's kiss::
• No mention of lighting, though. I went back to the beginning of the book just in case there was a note about it there, but there wasn't. I guess we're meant to infer that it's pitch-black unless otherwise noted, which makes sense. I just need things spelled out for me, because I have a goldfish brain. Ask my girlfriend, it's fun to watch me struggle to be a normal human.

By the by, I have The Incandescent Grottoes as well, and that one is written basically the same way so I didn't think it necessary to pull one from there.

So, what have we learned so far? Less is more, but only up to a point. At least, for me. I am willing to bet there are people out there who get really frazzled with someone else's details about a room, but I'm willing to make a second bet that those people are just running their own dungeons and don't feel the need to buy premade stuff.

//begin rant

That last paragraph got me thinking about some stuff: pre-made modules are like cover-songs. See, there's two kinds of people:

• People like me: I love music, but I never had any desire to write my own songs. I only wanted to learn how to play the songs that I loved. There were plenty of them to learn, and all I needed to do was copy them to enjoy playing them and sharing that with other people.
• People not like me: I had friends in high-school who were amazing musicians that never bothered to learn covers of other people's songs. They only wrote their own music.

The second kind of person is unfathomable to me. Yes, of course I was amazed by their musical skills (and definitely a little jealous, as well), but I thought the fact that all they did was sit around playing their own music with each other was kind of weird, mildly pretentious, but most of all: unrelatable to the vast majority of people in the world.

If all you ever play is your own stuff (and you're not a famous musician), you're just a person singing to a crowd of people staring at you. It probably rules being a famous musician. You've got amazing music living inside of your head, and other people love your music so much they walk around singing it in their head as well.

That being said, there's obviously more schmucks like me in the world than the second type of person. We might not be the most creative, talented, or unique, but we're the majority. We want to buy your RPG books, because we don't write RPG books for a living (but we do love us some RPG books). We want to sing cover songs, because we don't have songs living in our heads, and practice an instrument for four hours a day (but we do love music).

//end rant

You know what comes next, of course. We have to give at least one of my Dungeon23 rooms "Da Treatment." Let's give it a shot:

1 | The Bloodwell - Ancient Burial Mound

• Deathly silent, misty field of overgrown burial mounds (40' high, 40' in diameter). One of them is covered in red flowers, like dandelions the color of fresh blood (smell is coppery). Rough-hewn stone archway has collapsed, blocking entry.
• Clearing the stones: requires some kind of draft animal, or several people pulling with ropes, crowbars, etc. When cleared, the wind picks up slightly with a whisper. The low opening is wide enough for one person to enter at a time (with head bowed). 
• The surrounding area:
• There are other barrows. Feel free to add more, but here's 1d6 table of stuff in other barrows:
1. Unsealed. A dead adventurer, mauled by an owl bear. Claw marks and owl-bear feathers (recent), a severed arm (fingers digging into the dirt), and two cases of expensive wine (one smashed, the other worth 100gp)
2. Unsealed. Rusty shovels and pickaxes next to empty 4' deep holes in the earth with three ancient brown skeletons in an embrace (two adults, one child).
3. Sealed, by a large stone with a weathered inscription. Magic-user can read: "Herein lies a foul spirit of darkness and death. Don't be a damn fool." Breaking it open releases a howling black wind that ages anyone within 20' by 2d10 years.
4. Partially sealed, with tools abandoned at entrance. Roughly carved statues of everyone in the party (minus one), smiling.
5. An adventurer's camp, hurriedly abandoned. A hastily handwritten note pinned to a log with a silver throwing knife reads: "We heard it again, last night. We're not staying here after what happened to M&P. Keep your money. -F&S" (pouch containing 100gp)
6. Entrance completely caved in. Climbing on top of it, there is a crack with a withered leathery arm reaching out of it. If anyone approaches or touches it: it will spring to life, detach itself, and attempt to choke the life out of them until it is destroyed.
• AC [10], HD 1 (hp 2), Att x1 choke (1 hp), MV 30' (10')
• Inner Mound (10' high, 20' diameter dome made of very old smooth, stacked stones with a hard dirt floor):
• The air is still, and clammy.  Eight stone menhirs are spaced equally around the room, part of the walls (words in ancient dialect, depictions of snarling guardian spirits).
• A magic-user or sage can translate: "With blood flowers, blood moon, and blood wine, the blood way opens." Close inspection shows carvings of the flowers that grow on top of the mound, and a hooded figure performing the ritual below ("opening the well as intended").
• In the center of the room is The Bloodwell (a cylindrical stone 4' high and 4' diameter, with a 1' stone lid of the same diameter). The lid is carved in a stylized script where all the letters connect via a smoothly carved channel. It is impossible to move, though it can be destroyed like any other stone.
• Destroying it curses the breaker of the seal to die in 2d6 days (dreaming every night of killing vampires). If they kill a vampire, the curse is broken. If not, their final dream is of being exsanguinated, and the other PCs will wake to find their desiccated body.
• Opening the well as intended: combine the red flowers and a few drops of blood with wine on a blood moon. Pour that on the lid, and the letters will glow red. The stone lid will slide aside easily. 
• Upon moving the stone lid aside, there is a strong smell of musty air and death. The whispering of the wind intensifies inside the barrow to a chorus of sighing and crying, then dies out. Light sources (even magical) are snuffed out.

After reading it over, I realized this is more like 7 rooms. That's because it's one of several entrances to a much larger dungeon, and I wanted each entrance to be more than just a room (more like an area to itself). Mine's obviously a lot longer than theirs and needs work, but that was still a fun exercise. I'm excited to see what things look like in a year...

#Dungeon23 - 4 Days in. Thinking about the process.

I've decided to join in on the fun, and do the #Dungeon23 challenge.

I've never made dungeons before. I've always relied on published materials, as the idea of creating my own thing felt very overwhelming. But when I read the original blog post about it I realized that I was way overthinking it:

Sean McCoy's post on Dungeon23

It was really nice of him to say that "3 Orcs. 25 gold pieces" is acceptable, because my brain definitely needs the out to do that once in a while if I'm actually going to do this every day. That being said, I'm not going to make a lot of rooms "3 Orcs. 25 gold pieces" because:

1) my brain would absolutely not let me get away with that even if I wanted to

2) if my imagination gets sparked at all, I'm almost certainly going to be Googling "what you'd find in a medieval person's trash" at 2am.

In short: I'm either lazy, or I go overboard. But that's okay. We're going to work with that.

All we really need here is some good advice about design, and flavor. Ben Milton from Questing Beast has a ton of good links in his video about it (and his newsletter had a ton more). Highly recommend:

Questing Beast on Dungeon23

I've been using my collection of OSR .pdfs as an endless source of inspiration, and this neat article over at "Into the Dark" is keeping my mind thinking about good design:

Into the Dark - Bryce Lynch's Adventure Design Tips

I really don't want to disappoint the paternal caricatured version of Bryce Lynch that lives in my head.

To that end, I made a system of sorts for designing dungeon rooms. My goal was to come up with some guidelines that I could use to create dungeon rooms with minimal effort, by focusing on the most important and impactful information I could give to a player, and making sure the process is fun for me. This is what I've got so far:

• Not something rigid. If it's too rigid it won't be fun to explore and will get boring after a while. It won't be surprising, mysterious, interesting, etc.
• Nothing too random, either. It needs to make sense, and not just be a weird hole in the ground full of disconnected rooms that all look totally different, with a bunch of random shit in them, and monsters that all live next to each other but never interact.
• The design of each room needs to be something that I could sum up in a few highly impactful, flavorful sentences upon entry. Then, there are further sentences that can be used to describe things in more detail should the PCs choose to explore the space and its contents more thoroughly.
• The description should probably occur in the order that a normal person would notice the things. In other words, start with the most obvious things about the room, and work my way down.

I think the process of describing the room and designing the room should be fairly similar, because that's how our brains decode a space and organize the information. Maybe something like this:

• What do the PC's:
• see?
• Is there light? Either way, this is probably the first thing people notice.
• smell?
• Most primal sense. Smells always take priority, if there is one. Especially if it smells like something died, or is on fire.
• hear?
• In the absence of sight, we tend to rely on this.
• feel?
• Not always important, but changes in temperature, moisture, or air movement tend to raise our level of attention.
• taste?
• Probably almost never going to happen, but certainly memorable if it does.
• Is there anyone or anything else here?
• Our brains always look for friends and foes.
• Are there other entrances/exits? If so, are there doors? If so, what are those like? Are they locked?
• We always want to know how to get out, if something goes wrong.
• Then we start taking in details about the room itself.
• What are the walls like?
• What is the floor like?
• What is the ceiling like?
• Is there furniture?
• Are there other noticeable items?
• What does it seem like this room is used for?

That last one is actually more important than it seems, however. It's the key to the rest of the process, even though it's last in the description. If a room has a purpose, then it's easy to decide what it should look like and contain. I really wanted to add cool details to the room descriptions, but I was getting super tripped up by the amount of things that I COULD describe. Doors, walls, floors, altars, ceilings, boxes, furniture, rugs, art, etc. etc. And that's to say nothing about monsters, what the monsters are doing, whether there's anything ON the monster.

I was getting very overwhelmed, which is exactly how I wound up creating this process, and exactly why that last item on the list is so important. If the dungeon itself makes sense, then the things in it will fall into place. At least, in theory.

Here's the one I did for today (yes I know I started early, I got excited):

• What do the PC's:
• see?
• You descend a narrow set of stone stairs cut roughly into the cliff-face in switchbacks. At the bottom, you come to a three foot wide, ten foot long stone platform. To your right, the ocean crashes only feet below. Ahead of you and to the left the platform comes to the edge of a cavernous natural entrance carved into the side of the cliff by time and the elements.
• Inside:
• the cave is high enough and wide enough to contain a large sailing vessel, though you see only the broken remnants of a mast jutting crookedly out of the water inside. The platform comes to a ladder made of planks nailed to the side of what looks like a wooden pier where a boat could dock.
• In the water: moonlight glints off of various objects at the bottom of the pool, the details obscured by the rippling waters. You also notice what appear to be cylindrical cages with chains attached to the top, that appear to have been attached to large iron hooks on the ceiling long ago.
• smell?
• You smell salt air, rotten fish, seaweed, and a faint whiff of burnt wood.
• hear?
• Outside the cavern: you can hear the crashing of waves.
• Inside:  you hear the water lap against the stone sides of the cavern, and drip from the stalactites into the dark depths below.
• feel?
• A cool breeze seems to pull you ever so slightly into the cave, and through the rusted iron portcullis to what lies beyond.
• Is there anyone or anything else here?
• Under the water lies a giant octopus, unfed for years. If the PCs feed it: its old training will kick in, and it will pull a hidden lever that raises the portcullis with a grinding and screeching of rusted metal. After one hour spent in this area, if the PCs don't figure it out on their own, they will start to notice signs of it: tentacles feeling around places they have stood, giant eyes looking at them from beneath the water.
• In the ceiling, nesting amongst the stalactites, is a swam of bats. Their guano is visible on the floor, and the stalagmites that stick out of the water. They will erupt from their places of hiding if the PCs make any loud sounds. This will also get the octopus' attention.
• Are there other entrances/exits? If so, are there doors? If so, what are those like? Are they locked?
• Portcullis. Rusted, and shut. On either side are two very old wooden barrels filled with sand, with rusted metal torches on long iron poles driven into the sand.
• On the far wall opposite the pier there is a natural stone archway 10' wide, with natural stone steps leading upwards,  Leads up to the lighthouse, where a giant ruses brazier with tentacled legs holds ashes and charred wood. 15' x 15' natural stone floor and walls, opens out to the ocean
• We always want to know how to get out, if something goes wrong.
• Then we start taking in details about the room itself.
• I've already answered all of these questions:
• What are the walls like?
• What is the floor like?
• What is the ceiling like?
• Is there furniture?
• Are there other noticeable items?
• What does it seem like this room is used for?

That's enough for now. Fun to think about, but starting to feel tired in my brain. I started writing this, but I'm going to come back to it in the future:

Now here's the tricky part: how would this look on a page, and how do I make it take up as little space as possible? Seems kind of big. Hard to imagine an entire module with all that detail (even though I really like it already).

Here are the individual elements:

• You descend a narrow set of stone stairs cut roughly into the cliff-face in switchbacks. At the bottom, you come to a three foot wide, ten foot long stone platform. To your right, the ocean crashes only feet below. Ahead of you and to the left the platform comes to the edge of a cavernous natural entrance carved into the side of the cliff by time and the elements.
• Inside, the cave looks spacious enough to contain a large sailing vessel, though you see only the broken remnants of a mast jutting crookedly out of the water. The natural stone platform you stand on end at the side of a wooden pier, with a ladder made of planks nailed its' side.
• The wooden pier covers the three cave walls, and is about 15' wide. Facing the cavern entrance is a closed portcullis. It is rusted and salt-encrusted. On either side are two very old wooden barrels filled with sand, with rusted metal sconces on long iron poles driven into the sand. The sconces are styled to look like tentacles wrapping around a torch.
• On the far wall opposite the pier there is a natural stone archway 10' wide, with natural stone steps leading upwards.
• Leads up to the lighthouse, where a giant ruses brazier with tentacled legs holds ashes and charred wood. 15' x 15' natural stone floor and walls, opens out to the ocean.