Happy Megadungeon Monday!

Two quick things and that’s all for the preroll. I just have too much f$&%ing ground to cover. I want Day 1 to be DONE today. This project is taking too damned long. I’ve got to start getting much bigger chunks covered if we’re going to finish this map.

Thing one: I’m sorry about last week. I was lax in sending out the notification that I was taking the holiday weekend off – some moving stuff came up – and that there wouldn’t be a Mega Memorial Monday. I dropped the ball on warning people. Mea culpa.

Thing two: I’ve found a new way of quickly grabbing screenshots while I work and also a way of resizing my screenshots in bulk to fit into the article nicely. You might notice a watermark from a site called BatchImageRezize.com in the lower right corner. I COULD register and remove it – the service is free even with registration – but I’m going to leave it there to give them a little plug. It’s a helpful service and they deserve the little watermark. If you need to resize a bunch of images in one go quickly – say, to export s$&% for your online Fantasy Grounds game – check them out. The other side of that is that the screenshot is a full screen grab. So you will be able to see the whole Campaign Cartographer window. And if I take the time to crop every one of the thirty or so images I’m grabbing at a pop, I’ll be at this for the rest of my f$&%ing life. So, suck it up buttercup.

Okay. Done and done. Let’s get Day 1 finished.

The Story So Far

The story so far is this:

If you recall, Day 1 introduces the dungeon and acclimates the players to what will hopefully fill many weeks of dungeon adventure. It ends when the players confront the main group of kobold raiders who stole the Time Sensitive MacGuffin™. And that means Day 1 has to do a couple of things. First, it has to introduce the dungeon and suggest who might have built it and why it might have been built. Now, that’s just an introduction. The entire f$&%ing story of the dungeon doesn’t have to get told in the first twelve rooms. Basically, what we’re trying to establish is that the space was built by as a peaceful retreat or sanctuary. A monastery of sorts. The beings who built the space were artistic and had an appreciation for the natural world. It doesn’t have to say, outright, they were elves. The party might reach that conclusion and some of the art might even depict elves. But we’ll let the players figure it out over time. Though, as you’ll see, there is one optional room that might reveal to the players that this space was constructed by elves. Or confirm it, at any rate.

Second, Day 1 has to foreshadow a few things. It has to imply that the space is much bigger than the party’s initial explorations might reveal. That invites the players to return and adventure further. Second, it has to imply that water once flowed throughout the space, but something has stopped the water and left the place dried and petrified. Third, it has to suggest that the space is seismically active. And each of those three foreshadowed elements play an important role in the adventure. Obviously, inviting the players back to explore more keeps the adventure moving beyond the initial inciting incident. The water thing sets up the fact that the players will eventually transform the space. Now, that setup alone doesn’t do much. But later, the party will kill the plant brain and the dungeon will be transformed as a result. When they see that and then start to encounter flooded spaces, they will be primed to accept transforming the dungeon again by restoring the flow of water as a goal. Even if they can’t actively pursue the goal, they will recognize the opportunity once they stumble on it. In a sense, it primes the party to see the floodgate event as an advancement of the story – as a victory. That’s important because players have a hard time recognizing any accomplishment that isn’t an explicit adventure goal or a major boss fight. And a campaign needs regular accomplishments for the players to feel like they are periodically winning. So, if you don’t want to make everything culminate in a boss fight and you don’t want to explicitly state everything as a goal – say, because your game is about exploration and discovery – you have to find ways to mentally prime the players to recognize plot points as actual victories instead of just things they do.

Super Metroid did this exceedingly well in two instances – though one was tied very closely to a boss fight – as did Metroid Prime. Each of those games included two moments wherein suddenly, a huge new space was open to you, moments that were far bigger than merely discover the Hi-Jump Boots or Boost Ball and being able to open some new rooms. That was, the opening of the entirety of Norfair, Maridia, the Magmoor Caverns, and being able to access the Phazon Mines through the Crashed Frigate. Those were significant story elements and each one involved Samus finding a new suit of armor and therefore undergoing a flashy visual transformation. “This is not just another key,” the game said, “this is a significant turning point in the story. Something important is coming.”

Point is, in a discovery-based game, you have to signpost your non-combat, non-explicit victories so that they feel like victories. Or else, they just feel like opening another room up and they aren’t any big deal.

Third, Day 1 has to end with a climatic encounter with the brunt of the kobold force who stole the Time Sensitive MacGuffin™. That will end the inciting incident and clear the initial quest. Now, that might seem like a strange thing to do. After all, why not give the players a goal to pursue throughout the entire adventure. Well, because, the point of exploration and discovery as core game elements is that they are self-directed. When the players clear the first quest – the one they are assigned by the GM and the world – they are off the leash. The space is now theirs to explore. Even though there will be plot points and foreshadowing and goals that will come and go, the fact that the party is choosing to pursue them rather than being assigned them, and the fact that they are open and non-explicit, that increases the sense of agency.

Why am I saying all of this now? Well, because I kind of forgot to when we started building the map of Day 1. But I was designing with all of those things in mind. And, as we finish up Day 1, we want to make sure we’re accomplishing those goals. This is especially important because we’re going to building the space for the first “boss fight” in the adventure. But first, we’ve got to design a bunch of side spaces. We should be able to bang them out pretty quickly.

The Orb Grottoes

When I named this space, I envisioned a series of little caves connected to a larger space. Each is a little, private alcove meant for meditation. And I imagined that each one might have one of those meditation balls in it. You know, those highly polished, reflective spheres you see in gardens sometimes? I also envisioned that the space might have been overgrown and also include water. That’s why I used the word grotto. Of course, the water is gone and the space is dry. That’s the theming side of it.

In terms of the game side of things, this is an optional dead-end room. I will probably put an optional encounter with cave vermin in it, but it might just be empty space. And that creates a problem. If the heroes can peek in the door and see it’s an empty space with no exits, they aren’t inclined to engage with it. It might as well be a matte painting for all the use it will serve. So the space needs to pull the players into it. At least briefly.

Beyond that, one of the things to be cognizant of is that this dungeon is a very standard sort of room-and-hall dungeon. That means every encounter begins in a chokepoint. And there’s always a scrum in the door. Melee combatants tend to stack up in the doorway and everyone else is left running around behind, unable to get a clear shot. So, the encounter spaces go unused.

Now, there are a few counters to that. One – which I’ve already done – is to plan the spaces out so that it isn’t easy for the enemies to move from their starting position to the doorway in one go. The Strangled Garden is broken into zones and the petrified plants provide cover from missile combat precisely so the kobolds can’t just charge the door and block the heroes. I mean, they can, but they will give up their actions by likely having to use the Dash to get all the way there. Meanwhile, the heroes can’t stand in the doorway and pepper the enemies with ranged attacks easily because the enemies have ways to take cover and break line of sight. All of that helps draw the heroes into the space. At the very least, it ensures that eventually all the mid- and back-line players will start yelling at the front-line PC to get out of the doorway and let them join the combat. When the party has their first argument about how they are engaging the enemy in the dungeon, that’s when you know the heroes are growing up and the game is getting good.

But even with those tricks in the previous rooms, we still have an issue where the heroes and the enemies begin on opposite sides of the battlefield and have to come together somewhere. And the key to interesting combats is variety. Sometimes, we want the heroes to start out surrounded, for example. Sometimes, we want them to have the enemy surrounded.

Long story short, we want to design a space that forces the heroes to enter it just to know what’s in there and one that potentially pulls the heroes into being surrounded.

First, we start by preventing the party from even seeing the room. The room is u-shaped and the heroes can’t see around the corner. They have to enter to even know it’s a dead end.

Next, the room has a bunch of little rooms sticking off of it. Anything could be hiding in each of those rooms.

So, if the party walks into the main space first and then fans out to explore each room, monsters could jump out of those rooms and have the party surrounded. Alternatively, if the party peers into each little room in turn as they proceed through the larger space, they will spot a monster in one alcove and engage. Then, monsters can spill out of the further alcoves and outflank the heroes while they deal with the first. Either way, it puts the party in a bad tactical position.

And then I finish the room. I decide the room’s main floor was once a small pond that the elves waded through to get to their meditation rooms, ankle deep at most, but now it’s filled with dried sand and silt. And it is level enough and packed enough to not impair movement. It’s just a terrain feature.

The Reflected Twins

This room is on the critical path. The party has to pass through it. And, it follows the tight and contorted space of the Strangled Garden. So, I mostly just want this room to be an empty space. The name, I’ve decided, refers to a pair of statues standing over reflecting pools. Well, former reflecting pools. However, the statues themselves are ruined. At least, mostly ruined and badly weathered. I don’t want the party to be able to identify the figures. We don’t want to scream “it was elves” just yet. Just hint that it might be.

There’s not much to say about this room. The sand-filled pools don’t impair movement. This is just a nice, open space to contrast the Strangled Garden. There probably won’t even be a fight here.

The Windswept Overlook

This is another dead-end room. As such, it needs to draw the party in. And we’re going to use the same trick we used in the Orb Grottoes. We’re going to mess with their line of sight. In this case, however, the room is elevated above the level of the entry tunnel. A sloping path winds up to the overlook. The overlook itself opens out of the mountain into which the dungeon is built, allowing a beautiful – and windy – vista.

Unlike the Orb Grotto though, because creatures on the upper level can see down the sloping path, but creatures on the path can’t see all the way into the overlook, and because there are a few steep drop-offs or cliffs defining the path, an enemy in the room can use missile combat with impunity against the heroes. If the heroes encounter a fight here – and that fight includes ranged combatants like kobolds with slings or bows – they will have to charge up the slope under fire. Or, if they are athletic, climb up the steep cliffs. That’s an exciting fight.

As a further way to draw the heroes into the room – and also to further show off the artistic sensibilities of the inhabitants – we’re going to add a bit of music. Yeah. You heard me. We’re going to use a siren song to call the players forward. There are small monoliths in this room with holes carved into them that sing in the wind. The party will be able to hear the singing from down the tunnel. It will entice them to investigate, but it might also frighten them into making preparations against magical charms. They might assume they are being called forward by harpies or something. And then there aren’t harpies. Ha!

At this point, you should be able to figure out how I got from this winding path of room-spaces…

… to this finished room:

I also changed the name of the room from the Windswept Overlook to the Singing Overlook. For obvious reasons.

The Sandblasted Path

Let’s talk about the seismic activity. The players have already seen the results of one major cave-in blocking off the main Causeway. But that’s not the same as suggesting the dungeon is CURRENLY seismically active. If we want the players to believe that the dungeon is active, we have to be active at them.

Now, I started with the idea that the Desiccated Sanctuary had water flowing through it, both through artificially constructed pools and canals, and in natural ponds and lakes. We saw one such lake in the Orb Grottoes. But, the place is dried out and earthed over. We want to give the sense that the place is basically fossilized. Dehydrated. Starved of water. And that’s why I replaced the water with dry, coarse sand. As the water dwindled and evaporated, it left behind mud and silt. That gradually dried out. Now, there’s sand.

Okay. Fine.

Imagine, though, a hot spring or mud bath – after all, this was a sanctuary and I’m sure the elves enjoy a good spa treatment as much as anyone – imagine some volcanic fumaroles that heated a pool or mud pit. Maybe there was a natural, elevated path with such a heated, bubbling pool on each side. Then, replace the water with dry sand. The volcanic vents are still active though under the sand. So, every so often, they built up enough pressure to blast a cloud of dry sand into the space. And THAT is what I imagined as the Sandblasted Path.

Now, the sand geysers will blast certain areas of the map periodically. And they will have some effect. Possible something like save or be blinded for one round. Or maybe blindness and choking. If there’s no combat in this room, that is merely an annoyance. If there is a combat in this room, though, it’s exciting. Either way, the room does what we want to do. It says, “this place is active and rumbling and so you shouldn’t be surprised if an earthquake happens in the near future.”

Remember, we’re just building the map here. We’re not planning encounters or mechanics. But we are making sure every space COULD be an interesting space for an encounter. Even if we don’t put an encounter in here initially, after all, a random encounter could happen later.

Anyway…

I started by planning the winding path through the space.

As I added the walls, I decided a little alcove that the party could check out – if they braved running across the sand pit – might be a fun place to hide some treasure or an artifact or something.

And then I added some rock columns and archways to keep it from simply being a big, open space that occasionally exploded.

The Rubble-Choked Warren

Okay, this space was hard. But then, it’s the most important space in Day 1 after the three main causeway spaces. I’m not sure why it was hard. But, I deleted three full attempts. And, I’ll be honest, I’m not happy with what I came out with. I might revisit this space in the future. But, for now, it’s standing the way it is.

Honestly, I will probably redesign it after I design the encounter that’s going in it. When planning a space for a climactic encounter, the space has to serve the encounter. It’s not enough that the space is “exciting enough to host any combat.” The space has to be tailored to the climax. A climax has to the best encounter. It can’t be good enough. And that was probably part of the problem I had.

The other issue was that I wasn’t working with the sort of space I wanted to work with. See, from the perspective of the dungeon design, this space represented a major intersection. A doorway would lead the party into the collapsing hallway that would drop them into Day 2. Another – locked – door would lead them out of the Desiccated Sanctuary and onto the path that would lead out to the overgrown Great Tree. To keep with the theme of the space I had established, that meant it had to be an open, natural area with building-like constructions projecting from the rockface. A courtyard. A plaza.

But, to me, kobolds are scurrying, mobile things. They like to ambush. They like to gang up and runaway. Kobolds live in twisty, narrow warrens, right? They use ambushes, traps, and hit and run tactics, right?

And so, I found myself trying to take an open, plaza-like space and turn it into a twisty, narrow warren by caving it in and filling it with rubble. But I kept going so far that the space was unrecognizable as an intersection. As a major confluence of paths. So, what? That’s realistic.

Well, so what is that I was counting on the players to come back to this room TWICE. First, after they defeat the kobolds and return the Time Sensitive MacGuffin to town, they have to come back to this room to continue their adventure. So, the doorway deeper into the dungeon has to be inviting and memorable. Second, they have to come back here after they find the key in Day 3. That means the other doorway has to be inviting and memorable. Like the Seal of Oran Ionath, this place has to stand out as a sort of nexus.

And then I realized something. I had kobolds wrong.

Sort of.

There’s nothing mechanical in kobolds these days that suggests they like hit-and-run, ambush tactics. It’s goblins that got that. Goblins and kobolds used to fill pretty much the same mechanical niche. That’s because, as late as 3.5E and Pathfinder, humanoid creatures didn’t really have unique traits that suggested particular tactics. Goblins and kobolds, prior to 4E D&D, are mechanically pretty interchangeable. In 4E, though, kobolds became Shifty. They got to dart around a little, to disengage freely. They also became Mob Attackers. They got bonuses whenever they had allies adjacent to the target they were attacking. Hence my conception of kobolds as hit-and-run ambush fighters. Goblins, meanwhile, were dodgy. They had Goblin Tactics. They could take a free move whenever an attack missed. They weren’t ambushy, they were slippery. And that worked, because they were often teamed up with more militaristic hobgoblins and bugbears. They were cannon fodder. Basic infantry. Meat for the grinder.

But, in 5E, goblins are now shifty and dodgy. They can freely Dash, Disengage, or Hide once per round. That makes them the sneaky, stealthy, ambush fighters. Kobolds are just mobby. They overwhelm foes with numbers. And that means, I was trying to make an encounter space for the wrong enemy.

Now, kobolds are still hit-and-runny. They are individually weak and cowardly and I want to keep that flavor. But being mobby means that tight warrens and narrow spaces don’t do them a whole lot of good. On top of that, my kobolds tend to mix missile, melee, and magical combat. They are very versatile. To mob a foe, the kobolds need open spaces. And to use missile and magical combat, they need good lines of sight but also terrain that makes it difficult for foes to engage them in melee.

In other words, they are at their best in encounter spaces like the Strangled Garden. A bunch of interconnected open zones they can draw melee combatants into, difficult terrain to slow enemy melee fighters, and some cover so that the melee kobolds can hide from enemy missile combat. The need terrain they can take advantage of.

And so, I ended up designing a space very similar to the Strangled Garden space. I started by identifying a series of combat zones and their connections.

Then, I placed the artificial and natural walls and the exits from the space.

I even added a hallway to nowhere in the western wall to further drive home the idea of a confluence of paths.

Then I placed some solid columns and mountains of impassable rubble. I still wanted the space to be a ruin. I wanted the players to remember – again – that earthquakes and cave-ins were to be expected. The impassable rubble is a high mound of rubble that is, effectively a climbable wall. It doesn’t quite reach the ceiling in this case. Conceivably, a clever hero – or a flying PC – could get on top of it and use it as a vantage point, but it’s effectively a wall otherwise.

You can see how the rubble and the columns establish the “walls” between the zones.

Finally, because this is a boss fight, I decided I could f$&% with the player mobility a bit to put them at a serious disadvantage by scattering some difficult terrain around. The rubble slows movement. Yes, it’ll hinder the kobolds too, but the mixed kobold foes will be able to match the PCs in terms of taking advantage of the terrain. I hope.

And then I changed the name to the Rubble-Choked Plaza.

The End of the Day

And, that’s it. That’s the end of the design of Day 1. I’m still not sure where I want to go next. I might stay in this region and do Day 8 next. I might stay on this floor and do Day 3 or Day 4 next. Or I might go consecutively and go downstairs to work out Day 2. We’ll see. I might even attempt a test map wherein I convert this map to an art map, just to see how it comes out. At this point, I’m just going where my whims take me.

Whatever I do, I will be working faster with each article and leaving more crap unsaid. Planning these last five rooms took me roughly 45 minutes. So, we can safely say I’m averaging about ten minutes a room. At that rate, the whole dungeon map could be planned in one full-time week. If it was all I spent my time doing. Writing up the explanation and getting it posted, though, takes three to four times as long.

The problem is, this isn’t the only project I’m working on and it’s about a third of the content I put out every week. So, a full-time week isn’t something I have. Especially when I tack on three more weeks to talk about the map. Now, after I’ve moved and published the book and things have calmed down, I do plan to focus a lot of time into this particular time sink. But until then, I have to find a way to speed this up.

Expect, as time goes on, for me to leave a lot more unsaid and to just focus on the highlights of the design. The next article, for example, should involve me planning an entire Day in one go.

But meanwhile, here’s the map of the dungeon so far:

I just love looking at that.