Negative thought patterns, expectations, comparisons, self-doubt & self-criticism…
You will overcome them eventually,
so any time or energy spent on them is wasted.Stay vigilant for their return, recognize their signs,
let them glide off your mind.If they persist - record, interrogate, break them down,
& their power will dissolve.
Deciding and figuring out how to format the above took me twice as long as writing the post. This is still a huge reason I don't blog more -_-
One of a set of guiding principles I've created for myself, to fall back on when things aren't going great on this new quest of mine. I may share more in the future.
I've finally started getting good at catching negative thought patterns and simply saying "Not Today", and they immediately dissipate. I've heard people call that voice their something along the lines of Asshole Brain or their shitty little mind goblin. Which made me wonder if there was a demon associated with this kind of thing. The closest I found is Astaroth, associated with self-doubt.
Also he looks so dumb. Look at this dweeb. His dragon looks like a doggo with a permablep and balls for a nose. I think he's not even on board with this guy's bullshit.
So when you catch yourself having unhelpful thoughts, think
"Nice try, Astaroth, but Not Today"
and move on with making progress and enjoying life to the best of your ability.
...that's... not the point of this post.
When a PC gains the attention of demons in some manner, they may attract The Voice of Astaroth. This is a curse that prevents them from attempting significant, voluntary challenges unless they pass a Save vs Paralysis. After a successful save, the Voice is quelled... until they fail at another significant, voluntary challenge. Or sunrise. Whichever comes first.
I've been feeling bad about not making (well, releasing) stuff, so today I made a game about (not) making stuff. It's unbalanced and untested, but I'm releasing it to remind myself that it's something I can do.
I next started to add detail to the map in a number of ways that just felt right, partly guided by the Themes, and partly just playing around with the tools Mipui has to create some more interesting layout. As mentioned in my last post, I identified the 8 "memorial statue chambers", as well as the central locked stairway to whatever lies below, and cut the existing downward stairway.
This also included removing some bits, fusing some rooms, together and tweaking the sizes of some rooms; I tended to standardize on 3x3 and 3x5, as well as the octagon-ish statue chambers, seeing this as a sort of Dwarven architectural grammar. It'll also help describing the spaces while running the game, as well as emphasizing the rooms that break this standard.
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| Where we left off from the post before last, slightly tweaked from the original Donjon output. |
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| After the first round of refinement. Keep the 8th statue room a secret, eh? |
I also placed icons for where treasures might be placed, both minor and major, just as a rough draft for thinking about how the map flow might work; how a party might progress through this space. I also played around with three thematic areas - a throne room, mines, and a cistern, which I turned into a little maze of barred passages.
I can't remember if this was true of the Donjon output or if they were lost in the import to Mipui, but the map didn't have any secret doors, so I also started adding these in where they felt might be interesting, to make connections for loops, or to break up areas where the flow felt too open.
At a later point, but it bears mentioning here, while thinking about what types of rooms might exist in this dungeon, Industriousness was an obvious Dwarfy trope to lean into, so I imagined that each of the Siblings was associated with a type of Craft, and hence needed a Workshop. So that's 8 more rooms identified. You'll see them noted on later maps.
I had the thought to visually block out areas of the dungeon in terms of accessibility to identify both chokepoints and the regions they separate.
Dotted lines represent areas that were only accessible by secret doors. This started to show some basic areas and got me thinking about the Zones in the dungeon - more on that in the next post.
But I realized if I really wanted to analyze the flow of the map, I may as well make a literal flowchart, so I fired up Lucidchart (well, my work account for it - don't tell anyone). I simplified "room complexes" which were groups of closely associated rooms which acted like one space, in terms of flow, relative to other complexes.
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| I made this a bit more complicated than it has to be by matching the lines with the actual shape of hallways and locations of entrances, though this helped visualize loops. |
This helped me visualize the dungeon in a similar way to a "Melan diagram", and see how Jaquaysed it was, at least in terms of branching and looping. I think I made a few minor tweaks to the map as a result of this, but nothing extensive; my prior tweaking (and Donjon) did a pretty good job in this respect.
Below, I color-coded distance from the entrance (factoring in secret doors, especially those that only open from one side), to begin thinking about the high-level pacing of exploration; I could see how a party might progress through the dungeon over multiple sessions and/or expeditions. This can help in placement of monsters and traps, increasing the challenge as they explore deeper into the dungeon, to the extent that I wish; we still want a fairly flat (or spiky) difficulty curve in a good old school style dungeon.
For the purposes of this exercise, I wanted to put my trust in the BX stocking procedure. However, instead of using the process verbatim, I used a simplified procedure described in this B/X Blackrazor post which seems like a classic.
Here's a peak at my notes from this process (in Workflowy, which is a completely indispensable online notetaking tool. All of my thoughts from the last decade that haven't turned into Google Docs yet live in there.)
I used Gavin Norman's Hole in the Oak as a touchstone, since I had it in hand and knew it was both faithful to BX and just darn well made.
I made a spreadsheet to easily break out the number of rooms of each type, as well as grouping treasure values:
I expect I'll be adding to this treasure total, however. I have some (optional) puzzley ideas I want to use that would feel bad for not rewarding the players, and there really isn't enough in this budget to cover them.
There's also the question of supporting a scaling reward for the scaling difficulty feature of the dungeon, but there's an easy answer to that - the invading factions will bring valuable treasure with them; in most cases, literally carrying them. They might even start hoarding the dungeon's treasures the party hasn't found yet.
I manually assigned the treasure values to certain room types in a way that felt right - since I wanted some interesting traps, I put the highest value treasures behind them.
Next I started to look at placing the room types on the map by using tokens for Monsters, Traps, and Treasures on the flowchart, so I could easily move around and combine them.
I started noticing where the traditional BX room types overlapped in definition and intention, and were fighting some of my existing ideas for certain rooms. Are the Memorial Statue rooms "Special" rooms? Are they Trapped Treasures? There's 7 of them, and that doesn't leave any room for other rooms of that type.
This sent me on a design philosophy tangent to identify a room typology that aligned more closely to how types of rooms are used in practice, but eventually realized it was silly to hold a practical procedure up to the epistemic standards I had in my head unless I devoted more energy to it.
I do remember gaining some clarity on the real intent behind the traditional room types from the preface to Hack & Slash's Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design; though re-reading it now, doesn't really conjure the exact insight I seem to remember. It's still a great resource.
So I might return to this idea in the future, but for this project - whatever, I'll not hold myself too closely to the procedure, and it'll all come out in the wash.
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| After distributing most of the tokens, and a peak at the next post topic - Zones! |
Anyhow, physical pain from the posture I've put myself into while polishing this post is signaling that I'm putting more energy into it than I have in the actual dungeon over the past few months, so it's time to move on!
Long live the Shards Of The Shattered Blogosphere Spinning Silently Yet Sparkling In The Exponentially Expanding Void!
Going into this project, I had a couple inspirational themes/central features:
I want this to be a versatile module, which led to a couple more features:
Two further central features were inspired by the generated map itself:
Importing the map to Mipui, some of the Donjon-generated detail is lost, including which doors were locked and trapped, but interestingly it did transfer portcullises. I think dungeons could use more "windows" - ways to see ahead which could give hints at the dungeon's layout and "objectives" without allowing easy passage. So I decided to make most of these unopenable, at least from the side you're likely to reach first.
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| Preview of the next map-focused installment |
So the fact that the dungeon hasn't seen ruination also likely means it
hasn't been inhabited by intelligent individuals since... what? What
happened to the dwarves? I guess they're dead. Undead? Perhaps protect what they sealed below with their un-life? Ok, so some light ruination.
What
if the items the statues hold in these monument rooms need to be
collected in order to unseal it? That's 8 items. Kind of a lot. So maybe
they aren't super challenging to acquire, but have a good variety of
types of challenge. And the dwarves aren't a constant danger.
But
what else is in there to give the party a challenge? They must be the
first ones to open up this dungeon since it was sealed off. So let's
style the majority of the wandering and inhabiting monsters after
unintelligent dungeon dwellers; things that would fit through a tight,
undiscovered entrance and have gone about their merry lives in darkness
for decades. Normal rats and bats, spiders, oozes. And I really want to
throw in some monsters from BX I think are underutilized: Cave Locusts,
and Giant Geckos. And... Cats!
But we really need some kind of
intelligent faction to interact with. And that was a perfect match for
scalable difficulty. I'll include a number of factions that could begin
inhabiting the dungeon after the party arrives. Challengers to
the party's quest, and a first wave of more general dungeon inhabitants
moving in. The GM can pick and choose between these to add spice and
challenge.
So a rough history and outline comes together:
So in a way, this module might examine the birth of a more typical Dungeon. I'm not sure how hard I'll lean into that concept, but it's there in some respect.
In reality, a lot of this took place in the back of my mind while working on various other bits of the adventure. I was going to start looking at further map changes in this post, but I really want to give that a lot of attention, so I think I'll cut this one off here.
Well, there was a time when I wanted to keep this style of writing off my blog, but it seemed to help me actually write instead of endlessly edit, so...
Be Warned: This only superficially and sarcastically resembles a step by step procedure that I would recommend following. I may or may not revise it into one later. I've been working on this pretty much constantly since my earlier post, and so this is an artificially re-organized and dramatized version rather than a real-time log.
Return from an RPG info-sphere hiatus and come across a couple of genuinely inspiring posts on making dungeons at the equally indispensable Swamp of Monsters and Papers & Pencils. Remember Bryce's Black Maw experiment. Remember I saw a few neat dungeon-building "games" recently - Ex Umbra and Delve / Rise.
Think "Hey - maybe I'll just make a dungeon. I've never really done it before despite how much I've read about and thought about dungeon design. It might even be a nice, chill past-time exercise, like a crossword puzzle; just following procedures and progressively fill in some gaps. Some nice soothing distraction from our IRL hellscape."
Decide to keep it vanilla, trope-y, not get my head too high in the clouds with heady artpunk/OSR-envelope-pushing concepts. Focus on making something Bryce wouldn't pan. Use the lingua franca of BX and put my handy OSE books to good use. Keep it to one level (though we'll definitely want to have multiple floors/sub-levels for some good verticality. Every time I see a dungeon restricted to one lateral, level I nope out.)
Spend sometime revisiting some old links and compiled dungeon design notes from around the blogosphere of the last decade (Philotomy's advice, Melan diagrams, Jaquaying the Dungeon, Goblin Punch's Checklist, Blackrazor's Stocking Method, a bunch of others), and honestly come up short on good fully "worked" examples of a well-rounded old school dungeon. (Fittingly, I saw only yesterday that Necropraxis agrees after reading the exact same posts that inspired this project. Though the recent Gygax 75 Challenge comes close. Note that I'm not sure I actually intend to fill this gap with this series - the dungeon itself takes precedence!)
So less a simple, relaxing exercise, but between all the resources and my own design thoughts, I think we can work this out.
All of my backburner dungeon projects have started with ideas for central features and themes, or a rough shape of a map. Moon College started with the idea of a bunch of thematically related magic items. Its map was literally shaped around them.
And I've always assumed if I ever made a "whole package" dungeon that I'd be meticulously designing the map layout myself, (and I will almost certainly be doing that after this exercise). Starting from an "externally sourced" dungeon feels... pedestrian.
But partly inspired by the Papers & Pencils guide, and given the self-constraining nature of this project, I decided to turn things upside down and just start with a pre-made map. And not just any pre-made map. A random Donjon map.
I've always kind of written off Donjon as being too random and vanilla, and it really is, particularly the room contents. And you're also locked into its rigid generation rules.
However, after playing around with the advice from Papers & Pencils, I did find some sweet spots in the generator settings that spat out some layouts I didn't hate.
And! I discovered that Mipui, an online map editing tool we've been using in the Castle Xyntillan game I've been playing in, can import maps from Donjon.
Mipui doesn't have the most intuitive or... nuanced toolset, and it can be visually buggy and slow even with modestly sized maps, but it's definitely the most comfortable tool for editing old school dungeon maps I've found - at least online. And its image exporting is pretty good, if you don't need any fine detail beyond what the tools it supports. I definitely intend to reproduce the map in another tool, maybe Tiled, or actually hand-draw it, since that's another thing I haven't really done since childhood despite my latent, 1.6 decade-old (insert gasp and sigh of despair) Art & Design college major.
I also intend to produce two maps - one for the GM (with optimal
iconography and notes for running) and one suitable for displaying to
players in a VTT or cut up and assembled at the table while playing (no
secrets). That's another pet peeve of mine - a lot of effort and
artistry goes into creating some beautiful maps that only the GM gets to
see! It doesn't take much to get those to a condition that they can be
very simply used in Roll20, as long as you aren't using "S"s that stick
out of walls, or crossing passages over each other.
So I generated a few Donjon maps and settled on one that spoke to me. It's far from great, but all we're really looking for here is a starting point for a dungeon that already has good looping, flow and multiple routes, and some good variety in layout.
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| The Donjon map imported to Mipui |
Get rid of the most glaring absurdities. The passages that lead back into the same room, the ridiculously long linear corridors, the dead ends (should have used the "no dead ends" setting) - this isn't a funhouse dungeon.
Starting adding some flare and non-standard shapes. But don't get obsessive about the layout yet. I'll revisit how and why I refine certain aspects later.
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| Snip snip... ah, much better. |
This step, at least, was nice and relaxing - in the same way as fixing up a wonky generated Minecraft village.
Many more steps to come - if I'm up for it. I've got an outline of everything I've done so far, but don't want to Icarus up this post before I Icarus up the dungeon itself.
