Megadungeon Mayhem: Room Design

Welp. 

The last month has been a ride. Carving out some time to post something I’ve been thinking about lately: megadungeon generation. Before I can talk about that, though, I have to talk about resource management in city crawls. 

My dream game is not a city crawl, obviously. It’s a caravan crawl, with wide-open spaces and massive mountains and dying of thirst because you didn’t bring enough supplies. In fact, in my ideal game the City is the enemy, the thing that demands control over the characters and wants to grind them to dust; the Long Rim is merciful because the Long Rim doesn’t care. However, the following was something I originally pitched to WrongRoom, simply because the city crawl is their ideal game, finding treasure in a living, breathing city. 

In a city crawl, there are three abstractions in location: the city block, the city building, and combat. The city block is the neighborhood level. There are buildings and inside these buildings are people and events and treasures. While the blocks are part of and can affect the larger city, events are mostly confined to the districts they occur in. Think a Chinatown or a Little Italy. Likewise, there are three abstractions in time: city travel turns (traveling between city blocks), building travel turns (searching, room by room, a specific building), and combat turns. With each tick of the city travel turn, events occur in the neighborhood you’re exploring, becoming more dangerous the longer you’re there. Think Blades in the Dark circles, or some kind of “heat” system. These time units should be transferable in base six, basically: 

1 city travel turn = 6 building travel turns = 36 combat turns

1 nightshift = 12 city travel turns = 72 building travel turns = 432 combat turns

A city travel turn is about an hour, give or take how easy or hard it is to travel to the next block (think about the rules of movement in Into the Odd/Electric Bastionlands). A building travel turn is about ten minutes, give or take how easy it is to perform actions in the room. A combat turn is however long it takes, sometimes seconds of dodging out of the way, sometimes minutes of a prolonged gunfight (I mean, in old school AD&D, the expectation was that each round of combat was dozens of attacks and blocks, all resolving into a net gain or loss. Combat that seeks to play out every hit begins to get repetitive. Likewise, if you were in a session of 36 combat turns, it would feel like hours). Honestly, the time doesn’t matter. What matters here is that we have the mechanic and the abstraction.

Allow players to game the mechanic, and use the abstraction to smooth the narrative.

The city travel turn is important because it activates the time progression mechanics. The building travel turns are important because that’s the way you find treasure and interact with the city. The combat turns are important because that’s when the player’s got the most to lose. 

I spend this time laying out how it would work so I can overlay it onto the caravan crawl. Instead of city travel turns, they’re simply travel turns. Instead of building travel turns, they’re dungeon turns. Instead of an hour, a travel turn is something longer. I want to say a week to fit it into UVG’s scale, but I’m not sure. Forbidden Lands handles the “turns as resource” thing a little better, being a hex crawl with each day broken up into different quarters with different actions to take per quarter. Perhaps a travel turn is closer to 6 hours? With the need for food every 4 turns? Still working it out. 

Okay, so, this is all well and good, and the explanation of the city turn system can be modified to a caravan crawl situation where the city travel turn is modified to the travel turn and the building travel turn becomes the dungeon turn, but where are you going with this? 

Because when there’s a clear distinction in turn resources, you can use this to write dungeon rooms in the particular style they would be used at the table. 

I had the opportunity to run a one-shot of the excellent Mothership module Gradient Descent for a group of friends a couple of months ago. The book layout is a work of art: all usable at the table, mini-maps of the dungeon on every page, room names that correspond to page numbers… It’s awesome, and I recommend picking up a copy when you get the chance, even if you’ve never played Mothership. This contrasts greatly with the way a lot of modules, even old school modules, are written. The expectation is that the module will be “deboned” by a DM before it is brought to the table, something that shouldn’t be expected if the DM is already paying for a product. On top of the way Gradient Descent does rooms, think about how UVG does creatures: inline, with the kind of creature, level, and attribute: Antelopes (L1, fast), like its calls for skill checks. 

So what does this look like in practice? 

Try to aim for 100 words for a simple room, 200 words for a complex one. Let’s say you write a five-room dungeon: 200 words a room, 1000 words a dungeon. That seems manageable. Here’s an example of the format in progress: 

Because of this, and a potentially fleshed out turn system, now you can imagine what play should look like: 

DM: “You enter a small chapel in utter disrepair. Dust and trash litter the floor. Three rows of small pews point toward a small altar, symbols of the Shining One desecrated by unholy graffiti. Behind the altar, a wicked statue has been erected. There is an arched doorway to the south (the way you came in). What do you do? ” 

Player X: “I examine the pews.” 
The DM describes the pews in more detail, including the small unholy icon. This may lead to time being spent on examining the pews and the icon, costing more turns, costing more resources such as light and food. Adds a Dungeon Turn. 

Player Y: “I begin barring the southern door we came in.”
The DM investigates how they would perform the action. May lead the Player to interact with something not specifically declared (old wood and rusted nails to barricade the door with, perhaps). May require a mechanical roll to affect the narrative (“Roll a Difficult (16) Luck check to find rusty nails.”). Adds a Dungeon Turn. 

Player Z: “I’m staying the hell away from that statue.”
No interaction with the elements in the room. A declared instinct, an action that occurs if something comes to pass. May even include a mechanical advantage if the statue turns out to be alive and attacks. Doesn’t add a Dungeon Turn. 

At 6 dungeon turns, a travel turn ticks, and people need food/water/light/oxygen. 

You could also use this to reformat existing dungeons. Take this 139-word example from Anomalous Subsurface Environment: 

After breaking it down to its base elements, it probably looks like this..

Cut down to 85 words. 

Something else I realized while writing this article is the use of Torchbearer’s character needs. The needs feed into the tick-based turn economy well. 

Something that I think UVG doesn’t do very well is making each point feel more like an area or region, something I struggled with as I ran it. Each region is a point, however, the region actually expands out from the point pretty far. The Porcelain Citadel is a city, but Potsherd Crater is a giant crater that takes weeks to get to the bottom of or around, and really, it’s the grasslands that surround the Porcelain Citadel you should be narrating to your players the most.