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.
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.