The Maximalist Dungeon

A few posts back a commenter was not too happy with the push toward minimalism in some parts of our hobby.   Since then I've been thinking of what the opposite would look like.  And, while it would be easy to be snarky, I want to do this seriously: what would a maximalist dungeon look like?  And by that I mean a maximalist dungeon that I, the lover of small and streamlined, would really want to see and use?

I think if you're getting a dungeon from someone else it should be giving you something you can't do yourself, either because you are unable to do it or you don't have the time.  This could be several things including ideas you might never have had or DM experience you don't yet have cooked into the design of the place.  But I think the two most obvious are drudge work and art work.  I'm not an artist so that's something I could get from someone else.  And there are plenty of things that might be worth trying at the table but which take so much prep time you never get around to them.  Let's think along those lines a bit.

The Maximalist Dungeon could have:

1. Illustrations of every room.  There's precedent with the image booklets in some of the TSR modules like Tomb of Horrors.  I think a lot of those were produced because a trap needed visualization, but even just an illustration to show you the decay and layout of the rooms would be cool.  As a kid I loved David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries and the detailed images of those rooms, in what was essentially a dungeon, unearthed.
2. Illustrations of cluttered crime scenes.  This is related to the above, because once you have high enough level of detail and once you have illustrations of every room, so that showing an illustration isn't a tip off of importance, you can hide clues in plain sight.  Keys, notes, scraps of cloth.  I have always been interested in solo play and I remember reading about (but never seeing) a solo gamebeook that had some full page illustrations for this kind of close examination/exploration. If you know what it was called let me know.  Of course traps can become more brutal too, if the trip wires or pressure plates are right there in the picture.
3. Illustrations of every monster, or at least every new monster.  We are limited in our ability to imagine based on things we've seen before.  But if you show us a picture your new monster can look like whatever you can draw.  If you've followed my blog you know that I've tried to come up with new monsters through lots of different angles.  This would be one I haven't tried: something hard to explain or describe but that you can easily understand by looking at a drawing.  There could be all kinds of dreamlike, nightmarish, warped possibilities waiting for the right artist to unleash them on us.
4. Portraits of every NPC.  Without a face players don't have much to remember NPCs by, an accent, a cliched personality.  Portraits could help with that.  With portraits you could get a sense of class, wealth, general demeanor, scars, familial resemblance etc.
5. Illustrations of treasure items.  This is pretty simple, one way to make the +1 magic swords unique is to make them look different.
6. So these have been about art so far how about the drudge work?  Well, related to the NPC portraits above would be NPC personalities fleshed out for all the folks in the adventure/dungeon.  I don't think I would personally need a whole backstory, because after a certain length I'm probably not going to read it.  But if the background could inform how they act and make choices that would be cool to know.  If the person was orphaned and has had to struggle alone they might not like the idea of accepting help, for example, and will become irritated if they can't pay for services.
7. Along those lines, if we are dealing with factions, or politics, or romance, illustrated and annotated relationship webs of NPCs would be cool.  What is the chain of command?  Who will rumors spread to first?  Who owes favors to whom?  Who do you need to talk to find out intimate details about a particular NPC?
8. And of course, going right along with the illustrations of treasure items would be unique treasure items with back stories.
9. This is related to having detailed pictures of rooms but takes it one step farther.  I've posted before about the idea of a grab bag store room, where everything in a room is on cards, so imagine if you combine a room's illustration, with small illustrated cards that you could hand players when they ask about particular objects or details.  There comes a point where this would almost be better suited as a video game with items you can pick up and examine, a whole immersive digital world, but even in those, details are sparse or duplicated because of the work it takes to make things.
10. Unique spellbooks is a subset of unique treasure items.  And it doesn't have to be a cheesy facsimile, but having some illustration or physical card with the contents for each spell book found would be cool.  And, of course, each would have unique spell variations.
11. Give me a constructed language and a script or system of runes.  I love this stuff, and I think it adds to the atmosphere in a game, but it takes so much time it falls by the way side in my games.  But having even something that is little more that pig-latin for goblin inscriptions peppered around the dungeon that players can try and decipher would be fun.  Or different aged scripts denoting excursions into a megadungeon at different times, that would be sweet.  You want to talk about something that would be cool but I don't do just because of the amount of work, there it is.
12. Along the lines of musing I did about sandboxes, it would be interesting to have the locations affected by different times of visit.  So, maybe in the wet season this cave is half full of water and there are different creatures here, maybe during festivals this cult encampment has an entirely different population and feel to it.  That is in essence asking for multiple modules.  Yes.  And players are likely to only ever encounter one of these states.  Yes.  But if you want maximal, that's maximal to me.
13. Designer notes is something I don't think I've ever seen.  Presumably, if you are selling a dungeon you have run multiple parties through it, multiple times.  So, what did those folks do?  What choices did they tend to make?  I can see not wanting to read this stuff and experiencing my party's choices with them, but I can also see wanting to go back and read how that compares to the other folks that visited here.  Designer notes would also be cool just to get a sense of what the maker was trying for and how this module/adventure fits in with their experience and other creations.
14. DM notes would be slightly different.  I'm thinking tips and advice gained through experience.  So, this section of the dungeon is invisible, here's some ideas on how to run that at the table.  This monster causes fear, here's a way you might handle what players under the fear power will do.  Etc.  Obviously this stuff isn't necessary to run a night of D&D, but if you are good enough and experienced enough at designing dungeons to sell me one, one of the assets you have is that experience.  So why not share it with me?

What else?  That's all I've got right now.  And I suppose it might seem a little absurd to put so much effort into a single module.  A module you might use with your friends once.  A module that would probably be crazy expensive with all the art and labor involved.  But maybe that's the difference between products and art.  The difference between processed food and a nicely cooked meal.  Anyone can generate random contents for a set of megadungeon rooms, but how are yours notable?

So, yeah, I can envision a module that is a piece of art because of its elegance, how it gives you just what you need to run it and then gets out of your way.  But I can also imagine a module that is a piece of art because of its ridiculous abundance, its richness that spills out at you like coins from a coffer. 

Visual Dungeon Challenge

Okay, friends, for my 999th post I'm throwing down my glove and offering a challenge to each and every one of you:

Make a one page dungeon that uses only images and visual devices.  No words.  No abbreviations.

This is intended to be given to another DM, not a personal bookkeeping system.  Because of that it can allow for some customization by the other DM.  You can use numbers, roman numerals, or your own invented symbols if you can convey what they mean to someone.

Post your attempt to your blog, link in the comments below, or email me, just share your map with us somehow.

This is not a contest.  You win if you make a damn attempt.  There is no time limit.  You can keep making these.  I think this should be an interesting exercise for any DM, because it will force you to look very closely at what exactly you require to run a dungeon, and how that may or not be different from what other DMs require.

Here is my first attempt:

I tried to indicate elevation with shades of gray and curved steps.  Each step is 10' and the darker it gets the deeper you are.  So, for example, the central area has a 90' drop to the right.  I think numbers might work better but didn't want them confused with room numbers.

I used a number to distinguish similar icons, so you can distinguish the potions, for example.  This will only work for very small dungeons or bare ones.  So I might need to come up with symbols for spells to put beside a scroll or for potion affects beside each potion, etc.  Though, that sounds very challenging.  Rather than use the same technique for the coins symbol, I could just put a number for the amount of coins in the hoard right next to it on the map.  Of course that would assume it was a hoard of one coin type or get very cluttered quickly.  A lot of problems.  But this is all okay, it's why I'm doing this: seeing what the limits are, seeing what is possible.

Now, I'm kind of cheating by telling you all that.  But maybe a sentence or two of explanation is okay-- something you might put in an image caption or email to a fellow DM.  Like "Roman numerals are NPC level" or "Greek letters are for traps."  And certainly we want to hear your thoughts behind your design decisions.  You just can't make something that requires a long explanation to be functional.

Good luck.

Why is the Secret Door Secret?

One way we could add details and logic to secret doors is to look at them from the angle of what was meant to be hidden.  I broke that down into four categories.  Here are some ideas on each:

Individuals hiding something from society
Probably more crudely built in easy-to-work materials since one person was doing it.  These might be more covered holes or dirt tunnels than true secret corridors.  Or they could be one of the other types of passages that have been forgotten by everyone, now found by this individual and re-purposed.

The peeper will have holes into the most private areas of the community and maybe a network of these.  The hoarder has a pantry hidden away with alcohol, preserved foods, anything the community is only allowed certain amounts of.  That and the Shirker's quiet hideaway could be nice finds for visiting adventurers.  Mania is where your celebrity stalker pastes up their pictures or the miniatures collector stores their armies.  Blasphemy is where dark idols are kept.  But, really, depending on the community anything considered forbidden could be reason to hide here.

Small groups hiding from society
Trysts allow for forbidden love and will usually span long distances, literally or culturally.  So the Montagues live far from the Capulets, or the king sneaks right next door into the maid's quarters.  These lover's passages should probably have secret doors on each end.  The rest in this category are the cults and secret societies.  These will be better built with warning bells and even traps.  They should lead to, not just more windy little passages, but hidden rooms, big enough for people to meet and scheme.  Could include small barracks, warehouses, or libraries.  Forbidden lore could include magics or heretical religious teachings.

Rulers hiding from society
These are the best quality, built with money, planning, and plenty of labor.  Probably have locks.  The peepholes will be not just into bedrooms, but places people might meet and talk.  Some passages could open into travel routes for easy disappearing of troublesome folks.  Fraud includes the hidden panels that allow priests to make an idol "eat" its offerings.

Society hiding from invaders
These are of similar quality to those built by the rulers, unless they are built after occupation and then they'll be more like the individual's crude attempts but full of traps.  Peepholes may function as murder holes.  The escape route may be one-way and much larger than the ruler's bolthole.  The flanking and guerrilla type should be located in tactically advantageous positions.  Most people in the community should know about these.

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I have been messing about with this for several days trying to figure out the best way to present it.  I had an idea that you might use little icons in the table-- eyes, bells, and such-- to represent the features each category has..  But I figure I'll just post it now to share the ideas and revise it later. 

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games VII

For those of you just joining this series, I realized that the default for travel in the wilderness is usually-- nothing happens-- and that there was little to differentiate traveling through one type of terrain from another.  So I set out to try and create strategic games to both, give players something to do while travelling, and to make travelling through the desert feel different than travelling through the jungle.

Because I don't have any typical images in my head for travel through the luminous aether, I made this one a little more abstract.  Also, I don't have any experience DMing folks through planar journeys, but I imagine this could be modifiable to lots of different applications-- travelling through dreams or psionically, for example.  For that reason, though, I have no idea what unit to use here, whether it be time, space, or number of planes jumped.  I leave you to figure out the particulars.  Here we go:

The character that initiated the travel begins in the center.  The rest of the travellers are arranged around the initiator concentrically.

Every unit of travel each traveller must move one position as they are jostled about in the aether.  Before moving each player rolls a d6.  The position they can move to can only be their die roll or lower.  Only one player can occupy a spot at a time. 

If a player rolls lower than all adjacent spaces they must move to the lowest space next to them.  If a player on a 2 spot rolls a one or has adjacent spots blocked, they slip into the void.

Once a journey, players with exceptional intelligence can add their bonus to any persons die roll.

If the party is attacked while travelling, characters receive penalties to combat depending on which ring they have been jostled to: the three spots are -1, and the two spots are -2.  A player lucky enough to be on the six spot receives +1 to combat that round.
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So, it isn't too likely for someone to get jostled off unless the party travelling is large and starts blocking each other.  But with the penalties to combat, players will still want to stay as close to the center as possible.

What does slipping into the void mean?  Seems like a pretty good adventure hook to me, probably they end up in a plane they least expected.  What happens if the initiator of travel slips off?  Ooh, seems like they'd take everyone with them, don't you think?

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games VI

The desert is a grueling waste and the best way to deal with it is spend as little time there as you can.  For every three days the party travels in the desert their food and water needs will multiply.  Each day the party will see features that they can choose to explore or ignore.  Exploring them will require an extra day.  The features that might be seen during each three-day-span are linked with dotted paths.  Landmarks are tombs and ruins or ancient stelae which might hold riches in gold or ancient knowledge.  An oasis will provide food, water, and shade to a party for as long as they like; will allow them to re-stock their supplies; and will reset their place on the chart to the start.  Caravans can offer food, water, and unerring transport, but may also be hostile bandits or slavers.  Unfortunately, 50% of the time any of these will be mirages.  And 25% of the time they will be one of the other two features.

Once a party member cannot meet the food and water requirements they must make a save each day to continue.  Failing this save means they are unconscious.  Each day they are unconscious they must save or die.

Every landmark visited will offer a bonus against getting lost on subsequent journeys through the same area.
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Note: I probably should have put a couple check boxes for local guides or rangers that give you one free non-mirage.

The idea here is that the desert becomes more and more deadly the more time players fiddle around in it.  They may decide to strategically search for an oasis or caravan if supplies start running low.  A DM would need to prepare several landmarks ahead of time.  These could be anything from full blown dungeons to just obelisks.  I envision using my trackless wastes chart to help players know where they think they are going.  I also envision using this with the normal getting lost chances, which could make excursions into the desert very dangerous.

I can imagine situations where a few tougher party members desperately seek out an oasis or caravan with all the rest of the party left behind, unconscious.

Update 10/12:

I simplified the chart to three sections and lowered the multipliers to the still easy to remember but more believable 2,3, and 4x.  I like this better, it looks cleaner. 

I would have the multipliers just apply to water now.  I think it fits the tropes better.  I also added the reminder boxes for rangers and locals getting one free I'm-certain-that-is-no-mirage per journey.  (funny how I put rangers and druids and such on all these charts when I don't even use them in my campaign.  I guess that is just me trying to be helpful to you all-- rangers, druids and equivalent situations-- players with magic items or special backgrounds-- should all work equally well on these simple rules).

I was in the process of changing the three day increments to four but reverted them back, I think, while I had it too brutal before, it needs to feel like a dangerous and slippery slope-- four days of travel equivalent to just being on a normal road was a little too easy to do that in my opinion.

Also, I don't think I ever mentioned that the whole dotted line mess isn't just for aesthetics, I was trying to limit when players might find certain things.  I didn't want a party, fresh and confident, checking to see if every oasis is a mirage.  But as things get desperate there are chances available to get out of the situation, like being picked up by a caravan.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games V

Here's another attempt at a simple way to engage players while they travel the wilderness while making different types of terrains feel different.  (Maybe a better name for these things would be Terrain Challenges, or Travel Challenges Simon?)

This might be the simplest one yet (I'm sure the seed of the idea came from Zak's critical range choice he gives his players):

Each day the party has to move one box.  The idea is that in the dark woods you can either be safe or know where you are, but it's hard to do both.  Running from encounters leads to getting turned around and all the stands of trees look alike.  You can try to mark your way, but your bread crumbs might lead something to you.  Treat each box as a corresponding bonus or minus to the wandering monster and getting lost rolls.

If you have any of the folks at the bottom in your party they can shift one box per day as well.

Depending on how you check for monsters and getting lost you might want to cut each side down to 3 boxes.  I'm assuming a d6 with results on a one, so you would never completely avoid the chance to have encounters or get lost.

No players will want to get lost, but I'm thinking low level characters may push towards safety just to survive.  Hopefully they will stumble upon a road or an interesting ruin before they are finally eaten alive.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games IV

First, I never mentioned that I would consider any kind of road or known track to be civilization and by using them players can avoid these mini-games.  I intend these for going off-road or trailblazing.  I suppose that could lead to boring trips along roads in the wilderness, but I'm thinking we should probably all have charts for terrain-specific road encounters and travel on a road should feel quicker anyway. I imagine hand-waving road trips would be less of an issue than whole expeditions through difficult terrain.

Second, obviously these don't have to be used for the terrain they are named for.  If you have a different terrain that you want to keep interesting as players travel across it, choose the mini-game that fits it best.  So far we have terrains that:

• wear parties down with a single, relentless element (swamp)
• drive hirelings mad through isolation and discomfort (ocean)
• are technically difficult and require gear and planning (mountain)

and today I'll give you:

• consume hirelings with hidden dangers (jungle)

Now, the jungle.  I had a hard time with this one.  While I knew that I wanted something like I remember from watching old Sinbad and Tarzan movies-- porters and bearers dying every step of an expedition into the dark jungle-- I didn't want to interfere with the game's system of playing out dangerous encounters and combat.  I'm hoping this might balance both well enough:

The idea is the jungle devours men and women-- quicksand, silent constrictors, piranha filled streams.  Every other day one hireling will disappear.  Having any of the special folks at the bottom of the chart in the party can save one hireling per journey.

Once per journey, a character with an exceptional strength, dexterity, or constitution can prevent a disappearance.

Otherwise the party must leave the hirelings to the jungle or challenge this cruel fate by rolling a d6.  A result of 5-6 means crisis averted-- you grabbed the hireling's hand just as they were about to slip off the cliff trail. A result of 3-4 means the scene becomes a full-blown encounter-- determine what the hazard is, whether environmental or wandering monster, and play it out.  A result of 1-2 means the scene becomes a traditional encounter as well, but you've escalated the danger of the situation-- 1d4 additional hirelings are knocked into the quicksand, are encoiled by the giant anaconda, etc.

I'm hoping that players that really don't want to lose hirelings can avoid it, but that in tense situations, chases or parties lost in the jungle, they may just let hirelings go to avoid losing even more hands to the wilderness.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games II

Some more thoughts on spicing up travel through the abstract wilderness.  Keep in mind I intend these in addition to encounters and in addition to terrain-based encounters.  I'm just trying to shift the default from nothing happens to- there is some slow-burning tension.

One thing I've done in the past is add npcs to converse with on a ship.  But that takes some prep and players don't seem to want to interact with anything that isn't explicitly a boon or a hook.

After my last post I was worrying that all terrain might be seen as an element wearing you down: thirst in the desert, cold in the tundra, etc.  So I pushed my brain trying to think of a different approach for a mini-game.  Here's an idea for steep and rocky terrain:

Once a day (or hex, whatever works best for your scale) the treacherous mountain terrain will consume a random piece of equipment.  Ropes and spikes used to cross ravines will need be left behind.  Poles will be lost into deep drifts.  grapnels irretrievably wedged on ascending rock faces.  If the party has a dwarf, ranger or local in it they can absorb one of these losses per journey.  Characters with wisdom or intelligence bonuses can substitute one item for another once per journey-- think of it as cleverly rigging something up: the torches melt through the ice wall they can't scale, a pole is used to clamber up a steep spot.

As long as the party has one of the item type that the roll says is consumed, then things are okay.  If not, movement decreases (halved?) and things start getting harder (food and water consumption double?).

Well, it's similar to the swamp travel in that it's still wearing away at the party which I guess is what all resource management amounts too.  But I was hoping with this, the party could be shown the chart before travelling, see what is consumed more commonly, and try to prepare for the trip accordingly, to give the feel of a big expedition.  It could even make finding the remains of a previous expedition, with spikes and rope, treasure-like.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games

Hill Cantons just posted about the tedium of wilderness travel and I was recently struggling with the same thing (you think a hex crawl is boring, try the ocean!).  The first default answer to this is to include terrain-based encounters on the wandering monster table.  That's fine, but if you don't roll an encounter  . . . the default is still nothing happening. 

Weather charts try to balance interest with plausibility, so usually you have the kind of weather you'd expect for the season and it doesn't change much.

You could just make something happen each day of travel and prepare a big chart.  That's how I handle my abstract city Nidus.  Every trip into the city rolls on the table, often these are more exciting things than what the players intended to do in town.  But two things, 1) players entering Nidus are playing a mini-game (they have to roll dice to find what they want), so it's more interesting than just something happens guaranteed and 2) a teeming fantasy city should feel different than the trackless wastes.  Do we really want something happening every day of travel or every hex travelled in the wilderness?

So how do we avoid the boredom of nothing happening while giving the feeling of travelling through vast, treacherous territories?  I think a mini-game is the solution.  Almost exactly a year ago today JDJarvis suggested a roll-to-get-out-of-hex-mechanic to spice up wilderness travel.  I think he was on the right track.  I think it should be a little more involved than that though-- complicated enough that players can make decisions and devise strategies.  I also think each kind of terrain should have a different mini-game.  The challenges of travelling through the Arctic are different than the challenges of the swamp.

What the games would be I haven't quite figured out yet.  Maybe you could help.  But here is a proof of concept I whipped up for swamps:

I think the biggest ongoing threat from wetlands is . . . well, the wet.  The damp gets into food, ruins boots, and wears down pack animals trudging through soft, sticky earth.  So you might make every day in the swamp (travelling or not) give 1+ 1d4 squares of dampness damage.

Players can choose where to put this dampness damage: on boots and armor or on pack animals.  The idea is you can privilege your gear, keeping it dry by overloading your animals or save the animals by trudging through the wet muck yourself.  When the dampness bar is full, the animals are through.  They are lame.  They've been left in sinkholes.  For the boots/armor I'm not sure.  You could say all armor becomes worthless, but that's pretty harsh.  Maybe start taking dampness damage off of AC, once the bar is full, one a day.  Loss of boots should mean slower movement rate too.

You can reset the bar by finding a dry enough spot to camp-- one square cleared per day of fire and rest in camp (props to Wilderness Survival for that idea).

The squares on bottom are if you have a one of any of the labelled folks in the party.  You can sink one square of dampness damage per day into them. The idea is that through know-how and experience they help the party avoid some of the most difficult terrain.

So what choices would this give a party?  Well, in an emergency they could work the animals so hard they sacrifice them, but then you would need to be strict about encumbrance to make that matter.  Or if they are going to need their animals on the other side of the swamp they could store all their armor, sacrifice their boots and travel very slowly.  But if nothing else I'm hoping there would be tension as they split dampness between both bars and looked for a decent camping spot.  You could even set a minimum elevation ahead of time and use this technique as a sub-mini-game.

What do you think?  Can you invent entirely different games for desert/tundra/ocean that would be interesting and "feel" like those places?

Artifact Powers

Just some brief thoughts. If you're unfamiliar with the artifact and relics power/effects tables from first edition AD&D, Mr. Jeff Reints explains them here.

If you're like me, those tables have fascinated you for decades. To look at Baba Yaga's hut and know it was an artifact of mythic power but not know what powers it had, was tantalizing. It makes me long to either find the Hut as a player, or run a campaign as a DM that the has the Hut.

In a way, that evocative uncertainty is what makes D&D work. We know of dragons, and wizards, and the City of Brass. But we don't really know about those things. Nothing definite; I don't know the street plan of the City of Brass, though I feel it's more real for me than a city like Baltimore, or Ottawa, places I've also never been but that evoke nothing for me personally. Likewise, we've all read about powerful mages, but the stories all differ. And so each DM can have their own vision of such wondrous things as wizards, and dragons, and Baba Yaga's Hut.

This is especially fascinating in that it's counter to the whole Gygaxian tendency to codify everything in 1e. It really is a quirk of a wargamey desire to not have players knowing all the game secrets that ended up giving DMs some creative breathing room.

I'll go farther and say those tables are the best thing in the 1e DM's guide and their real benefit was unintended.*

And it's interesting how we can have this cross-blog conversation about artifacts using this simple system of roman numerals and understand each other. I think that other loose but simple standards might help us DIYers communicate back and forth, maybe poison types, or treasure types, anything that would benefit from a kind of communal short hand.

tl;dr:

1. Artifact power tables are a perfect example of just the amount of detail in a game product; enough backstory to get me interested but not so much I can't make it my own.
2. The system used for categorizing their magical effects is a simple and useful tool for facilitating communication between all of us.

Now that I think of it, I guess that's what I was going for with my unfinished Mix-n-Match charts; a sort of community effects table. Just imagine if a module even used such a system for traps, rather than spelling them out. Saying something like "Triggering will result in two Type I effects." And the DM could customize to their liking.


(*I don't mean to be provocative, but this is why I don't get all starry-eyed thinking about Gygax. Yes he helped create something really new under the sun. But I don't think he really understood it, because he almost immediately started down a path to make D&D more centralized, codified, and focused on tournament play. All features in no way new under the sun. If he had only focused on empowering DMs the way he had in B1, B2 and these tables, rather than constraining them, imagine what we might have had by now.)

Shopping in Nidus

This is still a work in progress. I've tweaked the numbers a little added local guides and now that I have my campaign's first rogue, figured I'd give him a bonus too.


I'm still thinking about making regions-- The Grand Bazaar, The Docks-- or landmarks-- The Bronze Statue of the Laughing God, The Plaza of Forgotten Gods-- that might affect the likelihood of finding certain things. But I'm hesitant to pin Nidus down too much. I want it to be bigger than life, and mapping seems to work against that.

Detail & Dungeon Design

Amityville Mike at the The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope posted on the One Page Dungeon Contest today. In commenting on the submissions he had this to say:

One of the purposes of the One Page Dungeon, something that several contestants failed to grasp, is that it’s supposed to give the referee just the information they need to run the dungeon. If you can fit in more, fine, but brevity is the One Page Dungeon’s strong suit.

Yikes! I don't know whether he had my Coastal Caves in mind or not, but it sure applies to my entry. I approached the OPDC not trying to see how to do more with less, but to see how much I could fit into that one page. I packed that thing like a $20 burrito! It's a little embarrassing seeing as the aim of my blog is to simplify and come up with elegant solutions that do more with less. So, I decided to make it a learning experience and write about detail. After two long drafts and tumbling this around in my head all day, here is what I've come up with:

Telecanter's Three Laws of Detail & Dungeon Design

First, to define detail as I mean it here: specificity, development, fine grain rather than broad strokes.

#1. Detail is Expensive
This seems most straightforward so I'll start here. It takes time to name places and people. It takes thought and creativity to place hazards and dungeon exits. Modules wouldn't be for sale if we were all satisfied with randomly generated or stock dungeons.

#2. Detail is Dominant
Once detail is there it tends to stay there. Sure you can rename Acerak, but it takes a little time and effort (see #1.), and if you're changing every name, every monster, every treasure, there's a point where you may as well make your own dungeon from scratch. It's easier to work with what's given than change it. This is also because detail tends to be related to other detail, if you want to take Roghan out of B1, you'll have a lot to do, including changing or ignoring the initial carved in the headboard of his bed (if I recall correctly). But detail is also dominant in the sense that once the dungeon is defined as the evil temple of a frog god, it can't be the good temple of a frog god, or a laboratory, etc. Detail by definition cuts off other possibilities.

#3. Detail Demands Mastery
If the lich is named Acerak, you need to remember that when you play your friends through the module. Sure, sometimes it won't matter, but what if the name shows up in inscriptions, in riddles. The more detailed a trap or trick is, the more you have to study it to run it. Some details may be far more important than others-- maybe you forgot to mention the treasure in room 32A and that treasure had the key that allows access to the dungeon's second level. You can wing it, of course and always change it, but there comes a point where if you disregard enough of the detail, you may as well have made your own.

And here are some additional thoughts that don't seem to merit a law:

• The more improbable something is, the more detail it takes to establish a sense of verisimilitude. For example, that fountain of gender exchange may require a lot of backstory to make it seem reasonable. (This would only matter if verisimilitude is a concern, and it doesn't have to be)
• I wonder if there is a paradox here: the people of the OSR are making dungeons for other people in the OSR who like making their own dungeons. I'm not sure about this, I would be interested to know how often you use modules and when you do, how much you customize them. And this surely deserves a post of its own, but what level of detail would a module perfect for you have?