Comments on: Dungeon Design 101

By: hypno ape

hypno ape — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:01:06 +0000

i have just started my first campaign with a group of my friends, and i have been trying to create my dungeon from bottom up. Of course i manage to finish it just the day before i find this site :P
i want to encorperate a few set of dungeons as this is the first real campaign for many of my players, so i want to give them the feel for the real classic dungeon crawl. now with this guide i won’t spend four days makeing just one dungeon.
So i bow down and praise you O dungeon god lol
seriously though thx you saved me for future events

By: Elderon Analas

Elderon Analas — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:55:07 +0000

I found a new use for your plans. I have used your plans to also make a entire town. i just used squares and rectangles for buildings and put 4 octagons at the far corners for watchtowers. each of the 9 sectors became a block and then i made the houses. i kept them low. as it was a small town ad the building is “spuratic” to put it faintly. (really just poor planing.) I made streets 20 ft wide on each of the folds and kept buildings at least 5 ft (one sq.) apart and just went from there. it also helps if you need a floor plan for one of the said houses. it makes building rooms alot easier. though keep in mind the scales don’t make a bit of sense. like if the house is 20ft X 30ft on the outside it may be like 60 X 50 on the inside. I made up for this by making the magority of the town magic users so that this can be explained by the insides of the houses being built into an extradememnional space or that the outside of the house was compresed while the inside stayed the same. it works and is as far as I know a fine explination. it fits my purposes and well I can always use the “my word is law” line on my players. Well that’s my system, hope you enjoyed my little speal and well I’ll be off now. [large footsteps fade into the distance]

Your Friendly Brass Dragon,
Elderon Analas

By: Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Friday Five: 2010-03-05

Ravenous Role Playing » Blog Archive » Friday Five: 2010-03-05 — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:07:54 +0000

[...] Dungeon Design 101 Daniel LeBlanc’s guest post over at Dungeon Mastering has a great system for coming up with dungeons and their designs. Yes, there are some random elements in there, but I’m OK with that. Usually, I have a point to each dungeon, and I design around that point, but I leave out the “extras” that could make things just that much more fun. This method will help introduce those extra elements and make things more fun for my players. [...]

By: Roger L. Mills

Roger L. Mills — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:43:08 +0000

I know it may sound like some sort of blasphemy, but I have been making maps using simple spreadsheets:

1) I get the grid lines I want,
2) I can size the squares as I want,
3) I can colorize dungeon floor squares versus dungeon walls for example, as well as roads/trees/grass/rocks/water for outdoor areas.
4) I can label in other items such as tables, coffins, etc. as needed,
5) I can include labels, notes or comments (i.e., N/S/E/W) as well, and
6) I can save/update the map in a more-or-less permanent file format.

The best part is that I can then print out each page of the map with the grid labels so that when I tape the pieces of the map together the grid labels are present throughout the map, not just on the outside edges (Laugh now … wait until you get older and your eyes start to go … )

In future versions I am considering cutting and pasting in jpeg pictures of items like tables, coffins, etc. Obviously I don’t get any squiggly or unusual (non-grid) lines, but this has worked very well for us.

By: TheWhite

TheWhite — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:22:47 +0000

@ BlueWolf. That’s great, I know a few people in your shoes. A couple of the other guys in my group who I share the DMing with never run dungeons that they haven’t found on the net for that exact reason. I’ll probably end up sharing this with them if I keep getting positive comments like that.

The fun thing with doing up dungeons using methods like this is the funky designs that come up that you might never have thought of yourself. One sector I rolled up a few dungeons back had 6 small square rooms each 2 by 2, ended up being a tunnel with the rooms being wider bits, usually with traps or monsters in them. Got the players very paranoid. You also get funky things happening if you randomize your treasure tables and encounter tables, my last dungeon (players were all level 2) had one room spawn a set of half-plate and the next room spawn a rust monster… the fighter hated me :D

If I get a chance and if you guys think it would be a good idea I might throw together something on populating your dungeon since that can take almost as long as drawing it up if you make yourself think about every little detail.