Adventure Design 101: Dungeons That Live

It’s a little delayed thanks to the self-destruction of my network card a few days ago, but now that I’m back online, it’s time to wrap up my thoughts on dungeon design.  My previous article covered some important questions that I like to ask when stocking my dungeons.  There are other questions you can ask yourself, most of which spring from those.  The main question that remains, though, is:  What are the inhabitants doing?

I don’t mean in the long run.  That, we’ve already covered.  I mean, what are they doing right now?

I think that answering this question is one of the easiest ways of making your game world seem more real to your player.  It’s one of the main differences between monsters who are just there as opponents and monsters that inhabit your world.

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Adventure Design 101: Dungeons That Make Sense

Dungeon of the Chateau de Chillon, Switzerland. Photograph by Ioan Sameli via Wikimedia Commons.

I recently wrote about making your setting work for you.  Today’s topic is related:  How do you make all of these dungeons feel like a realistic part of your game world?

Say you’ve got a dungeon with goblins in one complex of rooms, a dwarf necromancer and his ghouls down the hall, and a colony of giant ants around the corner.  What the heck are they all doing there?

You could just present all of that and answer, “They’re there for the players to outwit, outfight, and make off with their loot.”  I think most gamemasters probably started with games that ran like that, and I know many who still do, at least once in a while.  It can be a lot of fun to just kick in the door and face whatever’s behind it without worrying about a greater backstory.  But let’s say you and your group want that backstory.

That’s where you get into the history and ecology of the dungeon.  A lot has been written on these topics, but I’m going to try to break it down to make it as easy to use as possible.  Important questions you should ask regarding your dungeon include:

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100 Medieval Careers

Taking a brief break from adventure design, I present a related topic:  100 jobs NPCs in your game-world might have.  Helps with creating those random NPCs — pick a job, then add a name, race, gender, and a quirk or two.

I’ve broken them down into some broad categories, in case you want to go old school and turn it into multiple subtables to randomly roll on.  If you’re taking that approach, note that the “Working Class” and “Scoundrels and the Underclass” categories should be most common in the typical medieval-European-style game worlds, followed by Professionals, Entertainers, and Martial, with Learned and Lesser Nobility being least common.

100 jobs, after the jump.

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Adventure Design 101: The Setting

With a plot and a villain in mind, it’s time to consider the other elements that make the adventure.  Setting can be a vital element, yet in my experience it’s often given short shrift — and not just by novice gamemasters.  I used to fall into the same trap.  I would spend a great deal of my preparation time working out the plot, detailing the villain, NPCs, even minor encounters — but I wouldn’t pay much mind to the setting.  My adventures would occur in a cave, or an abandoned mine, or a lost city, or the palace, or the ancient wizard’s dungeon.  Appropriate locations, but generic.

If your plot and characters are good, you can run a memorable game this way nevertheless.  My players certainly seemed to have fun, on the whole, and so did I.  But once I started putting my settings to work for me, my group and I saw a difference.  So will you.

Now I make it a point to build at least one memorable location into every adventure.  I prefer to have at least one every session, although I’ll admit there are still times when that doesn’t happen, for one reason or another.

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Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Story

My last post discussed a method of setting up a plot by creating a web of characters’ actions, motives, and goals.  That design begins with simple building blocks and interconnects them to create a more complex structure.  I’ve had great success with it, and I design many of my adventures in that way.  It is, however, a little bit counterintuitive.  If it’s not to your tastes, don’t worry — there are other methods of plotting that can serve equally well.

Instead of a character-driven method, for instance, you might try an event-driven method.  When I was starting out as a gamemaster, I used what I call storyboarding, after the film organization method.

A storyboard is a static graphical and text representation of a film, first developed in its modern form by Disney for their animated features of the late 1920s and early 1930s.  It was widely adopted for live-action films in the 40s.  It’s essentially a comic-book of the film — concept-sketch images of each scene, often several per scene, along with a brief text description.  It provides a visual layout for the film to follow and allows, among other things, for scenes to be “designed” for the camera before shooting begins.

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