Have you written your own dungeon?
Everyone should write a dungeon at least once. You'll be able to write stuff that you like, and stuff that your players like. You can make it as small or as large as you'd like, based on the length of your sessions. If your group likes puzzles, then you can dump three of them in there. And by the time you're done, you'll basically have memorize the damn thing.
And you'll learn all the things that work and don't work. When you run a pre-made dungeon, you come away with a sense that some rooms were more fun than others, but it might not be clear why. When you run your own dungeon, your head will be full of the all of the alternatives, and it'll be easier to come up with improvements the next time you iterate on it.
Reasons Not to Write Your Own Dungeon:
1. Arnold, I don't have enough time.
Fair point. Have a nice day.
2. Arnold, I can't write a dungeon as good as published modules.
Absolute hogwash; get the fuck out of here.
There's some good published modules, but there are many, many more mediocre ones. One of the oddities of this hobby is that you can have a lot of fun with bad dungeons, as long as you're hanging out with your friends and cracking jokes. As a result, there's not a lot of evolutionary pressure for dungeons to improve.
Trust me on this one. The guys writing published dungeons are not lightyears beyond you. It's not like comparing yourself to a brain surgeon. It's more like comparing yourself to someone who is good at making sandwiches.
And even the guys who do write dungeons well and playtest them haven't playtested them with your group. Everyone is different, so make the sandwich that your group likes.
The Missing Chapter
Writing your own dungeon is a pretty big cornerstone of our hobby, especially in the OSR space. There's so much other stuff written that it's honestly surprising how little ink has been spent describing how dungeons are made.
I'm not sure if these is because dungeoncraft is a field that is still in its infancy, or because there is no wrong way to do it. (I'm leaning towards the first one, though. I certainly notice bad level design in video games, but that's because I've played hundreds of video games and its easy to compare them. In contrast, I've probably only run a few dozen TTRPG dungeons over my whole life, and there are so many other things distracting me at the table that I don't think I've spent as much time thinking about the topic.)
A few DM's guides have chapters on creating your own dungeon. A lot of them don't.
A bunch of them have sections on how to stock your own random dungeon, with random rooms and random monsters with random treasure, which I think is absolutely insane. Imagine if you went to video game school to learn to design good levels for an FPS game, and your teacher was told you to roll dice to determine how big each room was, which weapons there were, and how many enemies there were. (I am not a fan of procedurally generated dungeons. You can do better than random.)
I am damn certain that the level designers in Halo didn't roll dice. They had a system.
The System
I suspect that there are lots of ways to do this, but everyone starts with a concept, like "tomb" or "buried spaceship". Certainly better is to have a couple of concepts, like "poisonous tomb" or "musical prison".
It's frequently good to frame things in terms of what they were, and what they are now. (Dungeons are almost universally old places. It's how we justify their ruin, isolation, complexity, and contents.) Examples would be "tomb that is now a hideout for bandits" or "magical library taken over by goblins".
It's also good to have some friction between your themes. Don't just pick things that align neatly. "tomb taken over by a necromancer" is a little thin--it's doesn't inspire anything, although it's a perfectly useable concept by itself. "tomb taken over by necro-artists" is a bit more interesting, since I can already think of a couple rooms. How about "zoo taken over my a necromancer"? Also fun.
"temple to a benevolent god of rot"? Or maybe "underwater prison for a god of fire"? A little bit of contradiction can generate a lot of creativity later on.
Prior Works
Once you have your concept, you can move onto the dungeon itself. I found a few good blog posts on this subject.
Chris wrote a really good one, which includes advice on how to include teaching encounters.
Dyson recapitulates the five room dungeon, which is a perfectly serviceable way to make a small dungeon quickly while ensuring that you have some good variety in it.
Gus has an excellent one where he talks about dungeon naturalism, and gives good advice for writing room descriptions.
Lastly, I have the dungeon checklist, which is just a list of things that I think all dungeons should include (except for maybe the smallest, most specialized dungeons).
Other Considerations
It's also useful to think about a few other questions when you are beginning.
1. How big do you want this dungeon to be?
Or to put another way, how many sessions do you expect your group to spend in this place? Some groups do 2 rooms an hour, others can do 6 rooms an hour. (You should already have an idea of how fast your group moves in your game.)
I also know that when I write dungeons, they usually bloat by about +20% or +50% from my original sketch as I think of new things to add, usually after running it once or twice.
2. Is this a dungeon with a singular goal (usually a boss the party needs to beat) or is it something that can just be explored partially and then happily abandoned?
3. What do you want the split to look like between combat, puzzles, exploration, and role-playing?
4. Do you want it to be naturalistic (i.e. it's a dungeon in a monastery and it has a floorplan that looks like an IRL monastery) or gamified?
Next Steps
Some people start with maps, other people start with key rooms. A few people start with factions and random encounter tables.
Starting with maps is very common, and is probably what I've seen the most.
I do think that dungeon creation is iterative for most people. The first map you draw probably won't be the final one. You'll constantly correct and improve, especially after playing through it the first time. The same can be said for your encounters, NPCs, and magic items.
Beneath the Mouth of Mormo
I'm currently writing the sequel to the Mouth of Mormo dungeon that I posted a couple of days ago.
I want something much bigger, complicated, and challenging. If Mouth of Mormo is a beginner's dungeon, I want something for experienced groups.
Anyway, I'm going to try to develop it on the blog. Maybe it'll be useful for some people. I do think that what I'm doing here is definitely overengineering--you can make a successful dungeon with a lot less work. I just want to try doing something ambitious.
Concepts
1. Temple to the second goddess in the pantheon. Mormo's sister. Mormo is the semi-benevolent goddess of mutation (the sea-change). Sister is something analogous (except perhaps mind instead of body) or prophecy.
2. Continues the theme of the Mouth of Mormo. A fallen holy place destroyed long ago by starfish and merpeople.
Map
2 - Flooded halls. You need a boat to navigate. Some large monster threatens this hub area, but is too large/enchanted to leave. Eel swarms in water. You'll need to find a boat to navigate, or find a rowboat in nearby area.
3 - The Reef Beneath. Navigate around a huge reef. Morays, crabs, fish-things. Sleeping monster (don't wake it up). Giant archerfish spit water to knock you off bridge.
4 - Crypt. Skeletons seated in chairs, beginning their slow transmutation into a living reef. Body horror. History of goddess. This is where the elevator comes down.
5 - Sea Cave with island in it. Hard to Reach. Boss area? Temple of minor god. Wizard is here, an ally of the guys who destroyed the dungeon, wants to hire you to kill/loot the place.
6 - Inner sanctum of the Goddess. Starts out locked. Boss area? The woman of sand sits here writing. She’s writing the whole history of the world on sand. When she finishes a section, she rakes it flat and starts again. Wants you to kill the wizard. Sand = mirror = prophecy = illusion.
Each room has 5-20 rooms, except for Area 2 which is a smaller hub area.
Gimmick
Tides. Room water level rises and falls. Combat is worse when the water is higher
History
Was a temple and a monastery. We need an inner sanctum, monastery bits, some public areas of the monastery, and a crypt.
Factions
Lady of Sand - Cursed remnant of old temple, still loyal.
Wizard in Sea Cave - Wants to finish destruction/looting.
Sentient Undead - Wants you to leave them the fuck alone.
Goblins - Wildcard.
Random Encounters
Drowners. Ghouls. 1 Elder Ghoul. 1 Necrophidius (forces focus). More Cloakers. Giant Fish. Dungeon Moray. Dungeon Clam (contains pearl). Two Giant Starfish. Flying Worms.
Treasure
I'll do treasure last. (I'm not lazy! I just think you can do treasure last, since nothing depends on it.)
Revised Map
Okay, after a little revision I have something like this:
HALLS is area #2. It's the hub area that has a guardian that cannot leave the area. Somewhere in this dungeon, there's probably some weapon or tactic that lets you kill it more easily. I'm thinking a giant water weird that is powered by a skull. Turns into a couple of different animalistic forms. If you manage to pull the skull out (trick it into running through a net) you can smash the skull with a warhammer for an easy KO.
BAD HALL is between a pair of closed portcullises. You can easily open it to get a useful new path, but the bad hall is crammed with a shitload of horrible undead, so maybe you don't want to do this.
Room 2A has a rotating statue puzzle. Whatever door the statue points at will unlock. The rotating statue can rotate to unlock 2B and 2C. However, there's also similar locked doors that lead to 2F and 1D and clever players will realize that the statue's range is unlimited, and that's how you unlock those doors. Can also use it unlock a treasure vault door on the sea cave island.
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