(I’m crossposting this post about my Dungeon Delver’s Guide from enworld, because why not have all my D&D theorycrafting writing together on my D&D blog? The original article is here.)
You’ve baited your story hooks. You’ve got your dungeon map. Now what do you put in all those rooms?
Creating an adventure’s worth of interesting features at once can be challenging. You may encounter writer’s block, or find yourself filling each area with repetitive challenges. (A dungeon where every room contains hostile monsters is one of the most common ruts to get stuck in!) In these cases, it can be helpful to have a checklist to make sure you have varied adventure elements: something for the puzzle solver, something for the story lover, something for the combat fan, and so on.
In Dungeon Delver’s Guide, we introduce a new tool for adventure design: the NODES system. Although we apply it to dungeons in this book, it’s applicable for any type of adventure design. Your scenario comes alive when it’s filled with Novelties, Obstacles, Discoveries, Escalations, and Set-pieces.
You can create a short dungeon delve with a classic structure by using the NODES elements in the order they appear in the mnemonic. Start with your mind-blowing Novelty in room one; show the characters an Obstacle; let them look around and find a Discovery that lets them bypass the obstacle; Escalate the action; and finish it up with a Set Piece. This will give you a complete dungeon that takes about one session to play through. This same pattern can be used to structure adventures outside the dungeon as well!
Novelties
Novelty is the driving force of tabletop RPGs. Every dungeon should offer something that the players haven’t seen before in the campaign, or a twist on a familiar idea. (Don’t worry: your dungeon idea doesn’t have to be totally original—just new to your game table.)
One of the best ways to introduce novelty into your game is with a fantastic vista.
We’ve stuffed Dungeon Delver’s Guide with enough novelties and inspirations to keep your players’ minds blown throughout many campaigns.
Obstacles
Obstacles are non-combat challenges that block the way forward. They may require characters to think critically, pay a cost, or even retrace their steps and come back later.
There are several good reasons to include obstacles in your dungeon design:
As a general rule, every obstacle should allow multiple solutions. Consider what happens to the adventure if the players don’t think of a puzzle’s clever solution. They should be able to bypass it or use brute force to solve it, usually at a cost. Perhaps ignoring the puzzle deprives characters of bonus treasure, or forces them to walk through a trap and risk damage. But they shouldn’t run up against a wall that prevents them from proceeding with the adventure.
The most common types of obstacles are locks, puzzles, and traps. In a previous post, we’ve shared our traps with you. We also cover puzzles in great detail in the book, and you’ll find plenty of example puzzles in Dungeon Delver’s Guide, as well as discussion about what makes a good puzzle—and what types of puzzles don’t work as well as you’d expect. But today I want to focus on the use of the most mundane form of obstacle: the locked door.
A locked door is a perfect example of an obstacle with many solutions. While there may be only one key to a lock, there are countless ways to get past a door! Characters can pick the lock if they are willing to risk traps, bash it down if they don’t mind attracting attention, and use spells like knock and dimension door if they’re willing to spend spell slots. That said, it’s good form to include at least one key for nearly every lock in the adventure.
Whenever you place a locked door in the dungeon, add an item to your mental to-do list: “I need to place the key.” The next time you add a patrol or treasure, or the next time you’re adding a Discovery from the NODES checklist, think, “Maybe this is where I should put that key.” For instance, in the Traps section of Dungeon Delver’s Guide, many trap descriptions say that they guard a minor treasure. If you know the players are looking for a key, you can put it on the body of the thief at the bottom of the pit trap.
When possible, a key should visually refer to its lock. Even if players encountered the lock a long time ago, the key should remind them of it—and vice versa. Here are some possibilities:
In the Random Dungeon Delves section of DDG, we include many dozens of unique locks and keys, each specific to the type of dungeon it appears in.
Discoveries
In the NODES dungeon framework, “obstacles” and “discoveries”—-problems and solutions—-often go hand in hand. A discovery is something that makes traversing the dungeon easier or is a reward for its own sake, like treasure. The most common types of discoveries are keys, treasure, social interaction, and secrets. While we cover each of these in more detail in DDG, let’s focus today on one of my favorites: social interaction.
Many dungeons are lonely places without many opportunities to develop relationships or chat with locals. In my opinion, that’s often a missed opportunity. Of all the potential discoveries found within a dungeon, creatures willing to talk are perhaps the most compelling. For many players, navigating a web of social interactions and relationships is the essence of an RPG experience. Even players that prefer fighting and puzzle-solving might find non-combat encounters breathe life into a dungeon. An adventure’s stakes are always heightened if it includes NPCs that the party cares about. Furthermore, social interactions often have material benefits: creatures in the dungeon can provide information about enemies and treasure, places to hide, and new goals and quests.
Social interactions are rewarding in and of themselves, and they turn what can be an empty-feeling dungeon environment into a living place. A potential ally, an enemy willing to talk, or an untrustworthy entity proposing a deal can provide narrative juice, motivation, and meaning that enhances the rest of the dungeon.
Each of our dungeon generators provides specific prompts for social interactions. For instance, in a temple, you might run into a splinter group with beliefs considered heretical by the temple’s other inhabitants. Depending on the nature of those beliefs, the heretics might be potential allies or even more dangerous adversaries.
Escalation
Escalation demonstrates and heightens the danger of the dungeon. In an escalation scene, players discover that defeat is closer than they realized.
Dungeons, even more than most adventures, benefit from a steady increase in tension and perceived danger over the course of the delve. The first room or two of the dungeon whets the party’s appetite and entices them in: as they travel further from the entrance—and possibly descend to deeper dungeon levels—they should face increasing dangers that demonstrate new and shocking ways that the dungeon can kill or endanger them. These threats often culminate in an epic action set piece (which we’ll discuss more later).
Escalation scenes are the advancing clock that drives this tension.
The most common type of escalation is an encounter with hostile creatures. A combat encounter drains hit points, spell slots, and other resources; can signal entry into a more dangerous area; and, if enemies escape or sound the alarm, can lead to a raised alert level throughout the dungeon. Furthermore, each combat has its own self-contained time limit: you must kill or defeat your enemies before they do the same to you!
Using noncombat events to escalate tension enriches an adventure. Noncombat escalations can include failing a Stealth roll and setting off an alarm (for instance, coming within sight of sentries, or accidentally knocking over a pile of pots and pans), becoming aware of a time limit (for instance, overhearing that prisoners are to be executed at nightfall), entering a more dangerous area (such as the well-patrolled inner sanctum of the dungeon’s main adversary), or spending resources (having to use up a high-level spell slot to bypass an obstacle). It might also involve a social encounter (for instance, sweet-talking your way past guards, but arousing their suspicions).
You can manage the pacing of a dungeon adventure by feel, having things generally get harder as the adventure goes on. If you place greater challenges and harder combats further from the dungeon entrance, the characters naturally encounter heightened dangers as they move forward.
Alternatively, you can have the dungeon respond directly to the character’s explorations—growing more dangerous as the characters set off traps and alarms. Dungeon Delver’s Guide uses an escalation clock mechanic (based on the countdown dice pool from Level Up’s Adventurers’ Guide) to measure a bastion’s alert level or the time left until the evil cultists’ ritual is complete. As the countdown advances, each combat encounter includes extra monsters, or a monster is replaced with a tougher one. When the countdown reaches zero, the dungeon’s toughest monsters come looking for the adventurers!
Here’s what an escalation table might look like:
Example Escalation Table
4 All’s Well. Guards make Perception checks with disadvantage (they’re sleeping, playing poker, etc). No checks for random encounters.
3 Suspicions Aroused. Guards make Perception checks normally. Adventurers make disguise and Deception checks with disadvantage. Check for sentry patrols when the players spend more than 10 minutes in an area.
2 This is Not a Drill. Guards peer into the shadows with weapons drawn. Doors are locked. Check for sentry patrols when players enter an empty room or corridor.
1 Red Alert. Caltrops and other booby traps have been deployed. Guards make Perception checks with advantage. Sentry patrols contain double the number of creatures.
0 All-Out War. Large sentry groups, headed by the dungeon leader’s strongest lieutenants, roam the halls. Doors are locked and barricaded. Sentries yell or bang gongs to summon reinforcements.
Set Pieces
While an escalation scene offers a glimpse of danger, a set piece is a battle, chase, or other action scene with a real chance of failure. It’s often the climactic scene in a dungeon or dungeon level, and success often means the characters have reached their goal. For instance, triumphing in a set piece battle might allow characters to descend to the next level of the dungeon (or escape it), defeat the evil creatures menacing the area, or free the prisoners they are searching for.
If you’re rushing to prepare a dungeon for an upcoming game session, the most valuable way you can spend your time is to plan the set pieces. They are likely to be the most interesting and memorable scenes in the dungeon. In fact, a good low-preparation dungeon creation strategy is to plan out one or two set piece battles and improvise or randomly generate the rest using Dungeon Delver’s Guide random dungeon delve system.
Set piece design is a big topic, one that we spend a lot of time on! Besides advice, we have about fifty set piece frameworks, each with varied levels of difficulty based on the dungeon level.
In many dungeons, the most elaborate scenes are big combat set-pieces featuring the dungeon’s boss or miniboss. And in fact, most of our set pieces are combat-based. But Dungeon Delver’s Guide also includes templates and examples for a number of types of non-combat set pieces: chases, tense social scenes, and puzzles or skill-based challenges that offer unique mechanics. The one I’ll highlight here is the elite trap.
An elite trap is an active threat that attacks over several rounds: it functions more like a combat than a puzzle. When players get locked in a room that slowly fills with water, or are forced to flee from a pursuing sphere of annihilation, they discover that the dungeon is more dangerous than they had realized.
An elite trap can be a satisfying climax to an adventure. The garbage disposal scene was the climax of the Death Star dungeon delve in Star Wars: A New Hope, and most of the dungeons in the Indiana Jones movies conclude with an elite trap set piece. In Dungeon Delver’s Guide, the Collapsing Dungeon trap is designed to be a dramatic set piece trap that contains a chase element. We’ll share several of our elite traps in another preview.
Hopefully we’ve given you a taste of what the Dungeon Delver’s Guide’s NODES system has to offer. There’s lots more in the book, including lots of dungeon-building advice; fifty pages or so of story-driven, NODES-based dungeon generation tables; and eight mini-adventures built around the same principles.
Thanks for coming along with us on a look through this book. Let us know what you’d like to see next!
