6. General Room Construction from random rolling

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member
Using L1/room 2 as an example: "Serpentine iron maiden flanked by tarnished & crusted silver manacles (250gp.) Inside a partially formed psychotic dwarf, melted face and dripping goo, dozes till awakened. Behind him, a secret door. 1 Homunculus"

The "dozes till awakened" comes from Shams Monster Business table. 100 entries, the lower section for the unintelligent, it gives a brief description of what a monster could be doing. You should be able to pick them out of each entry in the inspiration file that has a monster in it. The inspiration for room one had something like torture chamber, manacles, homunculus, and dozes till awakened, I'm guessing. From that I created an initial description and slapped some treasure down. Then on the final edit pass I swapped out boring words and inserted Serpentine, tarnished, crusted (its a torture chamber!) flanked, melted, goo, dozing.

I clearly went too far in the "padding words" removal, since Prince did his entire review in tribute to that fact. I was trying to get rid of padding and admit I went overboard on level 1.

I'm trying to describe the monster, in the room, without using their names, Giving a kind of evocative first impression. Then, I'm ripping off 5e for the actual monster. It frequently does this thing where it will have a villager and say something like "for the villager, use the stats for a bandit" or, maybe the room has a king in it and it says "for the king, use the stat block for a commoner." I'm doing something similar here, describing a THING in the room and then at the end listing a creature type, that you can look up on the included monster reference sheet, bolded so they stand out more easily.

Finally, I wanted the entire entry to be short. Short enough that you could read the entire thing and grok it in just a few seconds. If I had gone longer than it would change the entire product concept. I'd need more organization in the room entries, which means more space, which means it's no longer possible to fit 35= rooms on two pages, which means ... you get it. So everything needs to be short, full of punchy impressions for the DM to riff off of.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
I dig it Bryce, though on first glance it's not so obvious that the melty dwarf is actually the homunculus.

Maybe something like "Inside a partially formed psychotic dwarf (1 Homunculus - MM pg. X) - melted face and dripping goo, dozes till awakened. Behind him, a secret door."

I mean, the bolding is easy to spot whether it's at the end of the statement or in the middle, I'd just personally find it easier to associate that the dwarf is the homunculus if it's noted right next to it rather than later on, because the way you've written it means the room looks like it could easily have a melted dwarf and a homunculus, which I know isn't the intent. Also good practice to put a page number for the DM's convenience.

Just my 2 cents.
 

Gus L.

A FreshHell to Contend With
That's a real short room description. No sense of the room generally - laser like focus on the important objects within. What's the room itself like - a salon with pink tile floors, a prominent drain and walls covered in sadistically erotic frescos? Or is this the dank stone chamber decorated in spikey wrought iron kinda torture chamber? Is it dark in there? Does it smell like molten dwarf goo?

I want more detail on the things the players will want to steal - "silver manacles you say"... value is good, but how hard is it to pull them off the wall? Likewise the iron maiden - it sounds special, though I'm not sure what a serpentine iron maiden looks like (snake shaped?, decorated with sinous carvings?) and am curious about material and value, how hard it is to move and how hard it is to chain shut. As it's a secret door I sort of expect it's anchored to the wall - but that could be clear. Likewise with only a dwarf guarded secret door and some fancy chains in the room that door's not especially secret - which is fine, but a few other things to mess with might help.

Also psychotic is not I think the best description - like does that mean this thing tries to murder everyone maniac style or does it mean that it's hallucinating it's a bird after life events cause it to have a psychotic break? Murderous and gibbering might be better for the first and hallucinating and volatile. I like the reskinned monster with GM reference set aside (though really I do enjoy a stat line right their - which could contain the creature's goal/mental state.
 

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member
So noted, and I don't necessarily disagree with either comment.

One of my frequent issues with one-page dungeons is that they something like performance art, seeing how much you can do in one page. This same criticism could be leveled at Black Maw, since I'm trying to do a five/six page dungeon with all keys on 2 pages ... in one hour. (I'm not there yet!) There is value in boiling things down, for focus, but at some point you are making choices that are influenced by the chosen format rather than for the betterment of the product.
 

Gus L.

A FreshHell to Contend With
Ahhh. I didn't realize you were going for 'super constrained' by space and writing time rather then simply built up from random generation. In that case I can't help but wonder if breaking the dungeon into regional nodes with general descriptions. "The Under-Cells - Lightless, musty and cold with wet ashlar walls of russet stone, low dripping ceilings and swollen oak doors reinforced with rusting iron bands." or "Sybarite's Salon - Lit with perfumed bee's wax candles, stuccoed walls frescoed in pastels with prurient images and gilded heraldry, pale pink tile floors, and opulent brass and fluted ebony fixtures" This way each room has a base description the GM can fall back on for feel and detail invention, but you save space. It could help reinforce theming of the individual pages in the 6 page dungeon as well.

I find One Page and ultra-concise dungeons interesting but rarely inspiring and somewhat difficult to write. They also seem to take longer per room then writing up regular ones for me.
 
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