At some point I skimmed an article about building a 5-room dungeon, but now I can't for the life of me remember where it was or find it again. Can anyone point me towards an issue #?
Great memory for the date, primemover. The article is "Dungeon Design and the Art of Simplicity: Fun Dungeons" by Johnn Four, Dragon 320, June, 2004.
Thanks, sorry I thought it was a Dungeon for some reason. And thank you again, it's been bothering me.
What's the gist of the article? I rarely read dungeoncraft.
It's a general format for a short and concise dungeon. It's a brief description of the purpose of each of the encounters with examples. Ex: 1. is the gatekeeper, and 5. is the resolution. It's a good read, although a little strict; if I were to use it, I'd shakeup the order, or maybe have a 6-7 room dungeon instead.
I haven't run a self-made dungeon for a while, but have been fond of making "three encounter" side quests for my PCs.
The first encounter is a hook, the second is something of another lead to the conclusion, a false conclusion, or something else, and finally, the conclusion. We're using this template in my campaign currently, and it's been pretty successful.
|
I really like the idea of a 5 room dungeon. I was running some PCs through an adventure and things were getting rather boring. Then I realized they had gone through about four or five rooms straight with no encounters. Check for traps, listen, open and it's an empty room. Sure the map looked cool and it made sense for the room to be there, but darn boring for a PC.
I figure if the adventure is not entirely set within the dungeon then about five encounters seems pretty good. Add a few supporting rooms for those encounters and you have a decent sized dungeon without speding twenty minutes describing boring emnpty rooms.
That would put the PCs spending almost half their level in the dungeon with about seven encounters out (maybe leading to and coming back from). That's seems like a good fast paced adventure to me.