Chapter 12: Keying room descriptions (Part 2)

Completing the dungeon

In chapter 11, you wrote 15 rooms—half of your dungeon. This chapter will talk through potential avenues to explore to key the rest of your rooms. By the end of this chapter, you will have finalized all 30 rooms.

Table of contents

  1. Write to fill gapsActivity
  2. Write for your players
    1. Player-specific challenges
    2. Player-specific treasures
    3. Connections to player backstories
  3. Write for the world beyond your players
    1. Open-ended challenges
    2. Weird stuff and undiscovered lore
  4. Write what makes sense
    1. Supporting rooms
    2. Necessary elements
  5. Write what doesn’t make sense
  6. Tidying upActivity
    1. Josh’s dungeon: The Lower Ossuary Resource
    2. Warren’s dungeon: Barrow House of the Headless Mage Resource
  7. Congratulations!

Write to fill gapsActivity

This entire chapter is an activity, but it’s less prescriptive than chapter 11.

To build out your additional rooms, look at the gaps that were formed in your initial work. What makes sense to have in this space that isn’t here yet? What rooms would compliment what you initially wrote? Write to fill those gaps.

Open two copies of your workbook. By having two copies open, you can reference your past work while keying your rooms. As you read this chapter, find ways you can fill out additional content for your dungeon. Key rooms until you have all 30 rooms complete! 1

Write for your players

Consider the players you have in your game. What can your dungeon have in it that specifically appeals to them?

Or, if you’re writing this dungeon without a specific play group in mind, think about the archetypes for the game system you’re writing for. Make sure there’s content that appeals broadly.

Player-specific challenges

Give your players opportunities to use their powers and abilities. Provide challenges that can be bypassed by a player’s specific skill set.

  • It’s fun for a thief to have locked chests to pick.
  • It’s fun for a sorcerer to have a chance to use their spells.

Contrastingly, a reason to return might be to solve a challenge that would be easily solved by a specific character ability that you know your current players don’t have. The undead door can only be (obviously) opened by Turn Undead, and the party doesn’t have a cleric. Can they convince one to come with them to the dungeon?

Player-specific treasures

Put treasures that you know your players want in your dungeon.

  • Fighters deserve to have access to magic swords.
  • Magic-users need access to rival wizard’s spellbooks and hordes of spell scrolls.

Gate these treasures behind appropriate challenges. Give your players the satisfaction of earning these treasures by solving puzzles, discovering hidden doors, and tempting fate against difficult monsters.

Connections to player backstories

Create connections to the outside world by seeding content specific to your players’ quests, goals, and backstories.

  • Did a cutpurse steal a player’s pouch a few sessions back? Wrap the cutpurse’s body around a trap as a way to broadcast that danger and give the player a chance to recover their stolen goods (and give the party a sense of karma!).
  • Is one of your players a member of a knightly order? Put the tomb of a member of their order in your dungeon and let them learn some ancient lore.

I’m not writing my dungeon for a specific set of players right now, so I want to provide a good mix of challenges for different core archetypes.

  • I added the petrified mummy as a puzzle monster that a sorcerer with second sight could solve.
  • I added some locked doors and tricky terrain for a thief to navigate around.
  • I added a few stuck doors and additional monsters for the fighter types.
  • I made sure there were lots of bizarre flora and fauna for scholars to investigate.

Write for the world beyond your players

Of course, your players aren’t the center of the universe. Create a sense of depth and realism by having content that specifically feels disconnected from the players’ specific steeze.

Open-ended challenges

Design a challenge that isn’t easily solved by any specific class feature or skill. Remember, as discussed in chapter 6, a hallmark of OSR challenges is that they have many possible solutions but no single solution. Create strange situations and let players work out a solution (or not!) that makes sense in the fiction. You don’t have to have the solution written down beforehand!

  • An anti-magic field in a room with a chasm can remove obvious spell-based solutions to navigating the crevasse. How will the party cross the room?
  • A locked, electrified door doesn’t invite the use of lockpicks. How will the party get through?

Open-ended solutions doesn’t mean “anything goes”

Allowing players to come up with solutions you hadn’t thought of but make sense based on the rules and physics of the fantasy world is a different kettle of fish than “waiting for the players to come up with ideas until they seem frustrated, then letting one idea work.” Honor your players’ problem-solving skills by keeping your world grounded and realistic. It’s okay to have challenges your players don’t solve.

Weird stuff and undiscovered lore

As a GM, you probably have lots of setting details and lore that you haven’t gotten a chance to show off yet. See if there’s an opportunity to place connections to these elements in this dungeon. When your players don’t have the context for a piece of lore, it makes your game world feel expansive, lived in, and realistic.

  • The dragon’s horde contains the dowry given by the Necromancer King to the Queen Unconquered, NPCs from your unpublished fantasy novel.
  • A skeleton grasps a letter to a man named Ultan. In his pouch, he has several printing press blocks. Who is this Ultan? Discovering this mystery can be a future quest hook.

Don’t hide the cool stuff in your setting. Show it to your players at every opportunity.

Write what makes sense

Review the content from your first 15 rooms. Ask yourself: what else fits in the negative spaces created by those rooms?

Supporting rooms

Create rooms that flow logically from the rooms you’ve already keyed. If you introduce a concept, make sure the space can reasonably support the concept. These can be rooms that provide infrastructure or additional dungeon denizens that build this concept out.

  • If you have a kitchen to prepare meals, it makes sense that you would have a dining room or feast hall to eat the meals.
  • If you have a manticore, it makes sense that you have things for the manticore to eat. Add a population of bats to support the manticore’s diet. Add a goblin hiding from the manticore.

Sequencing rooms together in this way ensures the space feels grounded in the fantastic and not just a sequence of 30 disconnected challenges.

Writing Rooms in Pairs by Sean McCoy of Failure Tolerated

When you’re working on a key for a dungeon or other location, it can be difficult to come up with all the concepts you need to round the place out. One trick I’ve learned to cut this in half is to write rooms in pairs. … You can think of these rooms as sequels and prequels to the rooms you’ve already come up with. Setups and punchlines.

I had set up a structure with this dungeon where there would be four shrines surrounded by reclaimed tunnels transformed into sewers and cisterns. I saved three of these shrines for my second writing session as a little gift to myself.

Necessary elements

Think about things that are essential for life. Make sure your dungeon has these basics, as much as it makes sense for the details you have already established.

  • Food
  • Water
  • Air
  • Light
  • Toilet
  • Seriously where are your goblins taking a poop, put a toilet in your dungeon

Write what doesn’t make sense

Don’t worry too much about what makes sense. This is a fantasy adventure game after all. When you start mapping out prevailing winds and supply chains and dungeon ecologies, everyone’s going to stop having fun. It’s more important for your dungeon to be fun than it is to be super realistic.

Let the fantastic be fantastic. Once you’ve hit the high points of food and water, move on with your keying. Don’t get too hung up on hyperrealism.

The real world is weird. It’s weirder than you can possibly imagine. Let your world be weird, too. Don’t feel the need to justify every single thing you want to include.

Sometimes, you can just say “A wizard did it.”

THE SPARK COLLAGE FOR DUNGEON STOCKING: If you’re feeling stuck on finalizing your dungeon, here’s a technique that works for me.

First, I look for a small collection of pictures that match the setting. Then, I turn the pictures into a collage with a grid overlay so I can create rollable segmentation: part oracle, part die-drop table, part spark table, but all dungeon stocking goodness. The result is something that looks like this:

I can use this to ask a room’s contents, roll d66, and interpret what’s in the square. I could also do the same for the color of a room or object—roll d66, interpret either by general color or pick among objects in that square. Since the pictures that make up the collage ARE things that remind me of the dungeon, the overall composition should approach some cohesion that players won’t notice unless they look super close.

And again, the goal is to get it good enough to the table for play, not to win painting or dungeon design contests. Just trying to have fun!

Taking my earlier advice, I decided to put a dragon in my dungeon—a little one, called a bloëmdrakk, from an issue of Knock!.

Tidying upActivity

When you have something in every one of the 30 slots in your workbook, begin to finalize the text. Read through what you’ve written so far. Make sure all the connections you intended are wired up.

Use Ctrl-F to look for placeholders. If you typed “p.XX” at any point, clean those up now.

Trim out loose ends of ideas that were started but not finished.

Make a note of the things that you cut. You might be able to use them for your random encounter table in the next chapter.

Taking a look at my workbook, there are parts that are more fleshed out than others. Some ideas were ambitious. Some were interesting. Some are mostly done. Some are just sketched out. What do I need to cut to get this down to a finishable state? If I cut content, I make sure to save it somewhere. You never know when you can create something new and interesting by Frankensteining two old drafts together.

Josh’s dungeon: The Lower Ossuary Resource

Here’s my finalized dungeon!. At least, it’s as finalized as it’s going to get for this course. It’s a little rough, but that’s okay. It’ll be fun for me and my friends. If you can parse my notes, you can adapt it for your own purposes, too.

Warren’s dungeon: Barrow House of the Headless Mage Resource

The dungeon I completed as part of this project can be found here.

Congratulations!

Huzzah! You have now written a 30-room dungeon!

We have one final chapter to get through: writing the random encounter table.

Once you have that, you’re ready for the real challenge: scheduling a game! (Truly, scheduling conflicts are the real dragon we must slay.)

If you’re running His Majesty the Worm, you already have two small dungeons for your Underworld: mine and yours. And now that you’ve made one dungeon, you know how easy it is! Using these techniques, you’ll have a megadungeon in no time. And if you want to add more content, head over to the Library Heretical at the Wormsite and borrow some other dungeons!

  1. All spot art in this chapter (and this course!) by BertDrawsStuff. ↩