Spiceomancy: [Gygax 75] Divide and Conquer

gungeon map

I'm doing a worldbuilding challenge. The story so far:

Gygax 75
Week 1 - The Setting
Week 2 - Carving out the Valley
Week 3 - Into the Mines
Week 4 - Hitting a Wall
Week 5 - The dungeon, continued... (for real this time)

Let me regale you with a tale of dungeon design gone wrong. You see, I'm a real freak for vertically engaging maps (Dark Souls 1, etc.). So, the first thing I did while designing the 3 dungeon levels was figure out how they all stacked on top of each other.

This was a very bad idea.

Breaking a dungeon down into segments is a really useful tool (whether you're a DM running it or a player navigating it or a designer building it) because it makes it semantically accessible. If the dungeon just flows into itself, suddenly you're building 30 rooms all together instead of 10 at a time, and that sucks major balls.

In my case, I was doing a lot of Jaquaying on the level of the whole dungeon before properly dealing with the individual levels. To center myself, I laid out each level as a closed space first.

Level 1 - Haunted Mine
Themes: Trapped, buried, mine, stone, grudge
Objectives: Retrieve the Scar; secure site A; break the iron circle; drive off the forestfolk; recover the faerie trinket; rescue the starving dogs; appease the ghosts; catch a big cave fish.
Characters: Forestfolk/dogs/faeries, rats, ghosts, carbuncle, fish, surface monster.

This level is the most accessible from the surface, and by surface factions. The hooks come from them: you can help the forestfolk restore the natural environment or the Irontown residents take back the mine. Within the dungeon are a lot of ghosts (dead miners and such) who act as the social obstacles within the crawl.

Level 2 - Infested Caverns
Themes: Toxic, infestation, gas, fire, sick, metal
Objectives: Exterminate kobolds/centipedes; steal the centipede eggs; recover the body of the kobold king; making the dungeon safe for miners.
Characters: Kobolds, centipedes, oozes, kobold king (ghoul), fungi, roots

The vibe here is that of pulling up a floorboard and finding out the underside is infested with termites. Kobolds are great to talk to (goblins always are), and they have treasure in the form of their king, who they keep in a deep hole. This level is mostly full of obstacles to "cleaning out" the dungeon: it has the biggest impact on the wandering monster table, and is the most dangerous.

This was the moment I realized I needed to double back to Arnold's Dungeon Checklist FOR EACH LEVEL.

In retrospect, I could flesh out this level a bit more by giving blood sorcerers some more presence here. A magic puzzle that the kobolds have tunneled around; a victimized adventurer, and their partner nearby; something valuable in the tainted water.

Level 3 - Ruins
Themes: Archaeology, ruins, crucible, artifacts, communication
Objectives: Defeat the golem; assemble Chernobog; steal the big artifacts; rescue/defeat the blood sorcerers.
Characters: Blood sorcerers, golem, demon, ghost dinosaurs, traps, husks

This level is back to basics: a dungeon with traps that's already been traversed by another adventuring party. Some have been reset. Some new ones have been set. Messages have been left. Corpses remain. I imagine there were somewhere between 9 and 4 blood sorcerers in total, and they've all been scattered or routed. There's one last gate they failed to breach, and they released something terrible before they could overcome it.

Radical.

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There's a secondary consideration I'm making as I lay out the maps--a rule I'm leaning on because I'm not very good at drawing maps. It's this: All crossroads should be well-informed. When the road forks, it only forks twice, and the options are distinct: one tunnel radiates heat and skittering, another is quiet and subtly stinky.

Fork-in-the-Road Qualifiers: Up/down, sloping/steep, noisy/quiet, warm/cold, dry/wet, stinky, lit up, wide tunnels/tight corridors, worked stone/natural rock.

Oh, and the most important differentiator: messages left by other adventurers. The whole dungeon has been traversed by others multiple times, first the miners, then the blood sorcerers on level 3, and they left notes. (this should be a major theme of level 3)

So, priority #1 in my key is to put a bunch of obvious colored chalk in the first room, and a note on the wall.

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Oh, I've also been mapping. Level 1 is the closest to fully realized, level 3 is the furthest. You can probably figure out which is which.