I write constantly but I never publish anything because its not done, and its not done because its not good enough. I'm trying to get out of that habit. So here is one of the the big things I'm working on and some of my meandering thoughts on why made those decisions.
It's called the Priory of the Sunstruck. It's a 22 room dungeon. For me the number of rooms is super important. I nerd hard on all that osr/cag/nsr design theory stuff. I don't actually know if it makes me a better DM, my 14 and 9 year old seem happy enough to play, but it is interesting to me. What do I play? It's mostly OD&D.
Anyway, the number of rooms is a combination B/X stocking conventions and my belief that there is something to the 5-Room Dungeon (a popular dungeon design concept in 5e). A 5 room dungeon has the following rooms: Guardian, Puzzle, Red Herring, Big Battle, Plot Twist. Now hear me out in BX you have the following rooms: Empty, Empty w/ Treasure, Monster, Monster w/ Treasure, Trap, Trap w/ Treasure,Special. They kind of map to each other.
- Empty -> Nothing, this is where you dungeon breaths. Random encounters happen, room for chaos.
- Guardian: Monster
- Puzzle: Trap
- Red Herring: Monster
- Plot Twist: Special
- Boss Battle: Monster
To get all of these elements into dungeon you need at least 8 rooms using B/X distribution.
- 3 Empty rooms
- 3 Monsters - Guardian, Red Herring, Boss Battle
- 1 Trap - Puzzle
- 1 Special - Plot Twist
In my mind if you are hitting those beats you have a solid lair or 1 good loop in a dungeon. A proper dungeon should have at least 2 loops though. The tightest dungeon then has a minimum of 16 rooms. At 22 rooms I feel pretty confident that the adventure should be able to consistently hit a minimum of 3-4 of those 5 room dungeon beats for at least 2-3 sessions.
Then I made a map - it's still in progress, based on actual historical blueprints I found online of a Priory.
Then I start the fun part. Using my dungeon stocking I start placing the important rooms. Everything left over will be empty. I generally have a few good ideas that I'm excited to write about so I'll start there because that is the fun part.
My favorite room is number 7. I spend way too long on my flavor text but I'm doing this for fun, not for your money so it's worth it.
And there you have it. The first in hopefully a series that gets me posting more and maybe - just maybe - making more progress. If I don't lose confidence I have a good chance of keeping a good clip on this because it already has some play testing (yes, I do subject my children to level drain). Next week we'll talk about another fun encounter area: Room 3!
