Dungeon design: Clusters and corridors
Thinking about dungeon design and mapping today. I've always had a tendency to cram as much into a sheet of graph paper as possible. Sometimes this makes sense due simply to the type of structure, but I'm starting to think that however paper-efficient it may be, it's often suboptimal in terms of a fun, playable dungeon. Thus, I'm exploring another dungeon paradigm, one featuring lots of long corridors connecting clusters of rooms. Don't underestimate the importance of corridors. I've drawn a fair number of dungeon maps in my time, and I've tended to think of corridors as simply connections between one chamber and the next. This, I believe, has been a mistake. Look at any large public building with many rooms -- a courthouse, a hotel or convention center, a school, even a shopping mall. In all of them, corridors aren't connections between rooms, but more like roads through neighborhoods. Roads provide access to each lot, not connection between rooms of a