#dungeon23 - bringing loose ends together for February's level

 Looking back to the other posts for February's "Fungal Wasteland" I've tried to tie everything together as the rooms draw to a close:

The fungus-folk's prophecy from week 1 was a loose end, as was the giant ancient mother-shroom so I had to tie those together in 26/2.

This also concretes the purpose of the machinery in 9/2 and should give players something interesting to unravel should they wish to.

Another slime waterfall joins the one from 5/2 as the exit down to level 3, and it made thematic sense to join these with a river.

This level felt like it was missing a "boss" encounter so the "feral harvester" spark added that, plus an extra conflict between it and the fungus-folk (to add to the uneasy peace between them and the goblins that the other rooms imply.

Overall I think the sparks from my meta-spark-table-of-spark-tables have helped a lot in the process, there's definitely a lot I can riff off when I come to draft up the level proper and it feels like the "story" of the dungeon is emerging nicely.

I'm going to refine that spark tabling procedure for March and see how things go ... what will Level 3 be??

#dungeon23 - more mothership metroidvania

My plan for this dungeon23 sidequest is coming together now:

Mothership metroidvania, second area

This is the second area in section A, where restoring the power will open up routes to section B and (back) through section A to section D. 

There's an area here, 15/2, that will change if the external door override is cut in section C so the landscape will be different if the PCs backtrack through to get to section D.

Restoring the power will also add some gribblies to the encounter table ('cos containing them was why it was shut off in the first place) which I'll come to in a separate post.

There's also a draft table of "what these crew have" and "what these crew need" for generating some roleplay scenarios, also to come in the future... Comments welcome!

A double dose of #dungeon23 (with a dash of chatGPT)

As I missed posting my progress last week due to diverting time to work on the meta-spark-table, here are that week's and this week's rooms:

I've tried to use a lot of the sparks I generated last week, and some more that I generated this week, and I'm pleased with the results and how it made me approach this.

I found that I was forcing myself to be more creative, I hope that's a good thing!

One thing I think I will do is make the tables more specifically focused on dungeon things - so keep Antagonists for encounters but make the others more focused towards e.g. treasure and special rooms... but I'm happy with the first draft.

Out of curiosity, while writing this post after the fact, I also fed last week's spark results to chatGPT and it gave me this:

• Rotting survivors' chamber: A dimly lit room with decaying corpses of previous adventurers, their rusted weapons, and tattered armor scattered around.
• Slime refuge: A small, damp room filled with glowing, bio-luminescent slime that provides refuge for various small creatures.
• Infested prophecy: A chamber decorated with rotting vines, with a prophecy inscribed in the walls, warning of the impending doom of the dungeon.
• Corrupted collapse: A partially caved-in chamber, filled with twisted metal and rock fragments, surrounded by clusters of rusted spores.
• Scrap/junk farm: A makeshift farming room where a group of jury-rigged fungus-folk tends to a variety of plants grown on scrap metal and junk.
• Rusted spores' chamber: A large, eerie chamber with rusted spores hanging from the ceiling, filling the air with a metallic scent and slowly corroding any metal objects left within the room.
• Forgotten feast: An abandoned dining hall filled with festering food and rotting remains of long-dead creatures, with a decaying table at the center.

I would be interested to know your thoughts.

If you have your own favourite dungeon generation procedures I would love to hear about them, either in the comments or by leaving a link to one of your blog posts on the February RPG Blog Carnival page here, which this month is all about "procedures".

Join the August 2021 RPG Blog Carnival - Let's Build A Dungeon!

I want to get better at building adventures.

Dungeons are essentially adventures where the shape, flow, and structure is clearer, so August 2021's RPG Blog Carnival topic is "Let's Build A Dungeon", hosted right here.

This is an open invitation to all RPG bloggers, please feel free to join in:

• Write a post taking us through your dungeon building process or
• Write about any good dungeon building advice, methods, resources, or tools you love or
• Write a post taking apart a great published dungeon and explaining what makes it great or
• Grab a cool map and/or some random tables and go where your imagination takes you - just tell us what you did and what you think of the end result - or
• Write a post about any other aspect of RPG dungeon building, map making, or design!

(And of course, "dungeon" can refer to pretty much any point-and-node shaped or location based adventure really)

Drop a comment on this post with a link to your carnival post so we can come and see it. Go see everyone else's too!

Need a map for inspiration? Image (cc) constantly-confused

(Blogger requires you to use HTML in the comment to add a clickable link; don't worry if you can't or don't want to, just post the URL and I'll sort it later)

Early September I'll put up a summary/digest post linking to all your carnival posts, and the Carnival will move on to another blog, so you have the month of August to write and submit an entry. Looking forward to reading them all!

I'm going to have a go too. If I can learn how to build a better dungeon I can extrapolate out to building a better adventure. Or at least that's the plan...

10 more gems from the blogosphere

First off, Sheep and Sorcery featured an unspeakably cool post that is not only a serviceable and colorful light OSR game but also a reference post for some excellent, flavoursome random tables it utilises. That's about as indie as indie games get. I should have told you months ago.

Prismatic Wasteland made a strong case for the application of freeform, player driven truths in mystery RPG scenarios. This is definitely something I'm going to try sometime as I find it hard to plan and run mystery scenarios myself.

Angry GM manages to write about story structure in a way that's usable for me as a GM, and it's been a revelation. Angry is sweary, opinionated, and wordy, and the other thing I like is that his advice is pretty much always good.

Library of Attnam has this random regional trouble table for shaking things up in your neighborhood - although some of it is campaign-starting stuff in its own right.

I'm in an OSR mood at the moment and really liked this short adventure over at Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings. It's for GLOG but I would definitely use it for e.g. Mork Borg...

Rats! Image (cc) TmoeGee

...and d66 Classless Kobolds has this wonderful list of crowdsourced quick settings that is definitely too good to not share!

And Against the Wicked City presents d100 reasons your wizard had to drop out of academia and go adventuring instead.

Spiceomancy reminds us of the importance of players being rat bastards, and how to foster that devious quick-witted behaviour.

And as my own thoughts turn to dungeons and megadungeons I am reading this post at Bat in the Attic about minimalising dungeons, and this one at The Yak Man Cometh about mapless (roomless!) dungeons with interest...

As always please support the blogosphere, and let me know of any more gems in the comments.

6 more brilliant blog posts from around the web

Some older, some newer. All worthy of your time.

First off, one I stumbled on and used in my Stars Without Number campaign: Coins and Scrolls has a comprehensive - and often hilarious - d500 mutations random table.

Image (cc) MassCreed

Bastionland makes an excellent point about some important key questions, and their answers, around how easily we are able to pick up and play RPGs and game settings.

Another great random table - there are never enough tables - this time Graphite Prime asks "what happened in that town?"

The Grave Robber's Guide asks "How can games teach themselves", which has started off an interesting train of thought in my mind...

I stumbled upon an interesting experiment in reusable dungeons over at Lapidary Ossuary which looks at a problem I am mulling but from the other side.

Papers & Pencils has a whopping SIX d100 dungeon-creation tables up - the rest are linked from this one.

Please support the blogosphere and, of course check out this month's RPG Blog Carnival which is hosted right here!