Gelatinous Icosahedron

 Being able to assess the risk of adventure locations is a vitally important aspect of old school play, especially the sandbox style. In dungeons, this is a relatively simple matter: the danger increases as you descend deeper into the dungeon. Dungeon levels are typically numbered, starting with 1 for the first level, typically the most easily accessible, and progression to higher numbers with each level farther from the main entrance. Monsters found on a given level will tend to have the same number of Hit Dice as th e dungeon level (e.g. on the third level of the dungeon, 3 HD monsters are most common) and more loosely, traps and other hazards become more deadly. The amount and value of treasure also tends to increase with dungeon level. There are some twists on this formula; some dungeons may have additional entrances that lead directly to deeper levels, and some dungeons may be "layered" horizontally rather than vertically, but the overall principle is that players will b...

It's come to my attention that legendary game designer Jennell Jaquays has recently passed away. I am sorry to say I am not, in general, terribly familiar with Ms. Jaquays's contributions to the hobby, but I am aware of one: a particular dungeon design ethos which has come to be known as jaquaying, or more properly, jaquaysing, in recognition of her role in pioneering and popularizing it. As I understand it, this in a nutshell is the art of creating non-linear dungeons with multiple and often unexpected points of connection between different locations. I had always tended to apply this philosophy to my dungeon maps, albeit in a dilute form, sporadically, and without conscious intent, (and I may well have been influenced in that subconscious attitude by either the actual, unrecognized-at-the-time work of Jaquays, or indirectly by that of others inspired by it), so of course I was delighted to learn of Jaquays's technique as an intentional design philosophy, and thus enabled ...

 While D&D combat has a pretty clear order of operations and economy of actions, outside of combat I've tended to play things fast-and-loose regarding sequence, timing, and number of actions. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many other DMs handle things similarly. There's nothing inherently wrong flying by the seat of your pants, if that works for you, but if timekeeping becomes a tangled mess and/or you have some very assertive players who tend to monopolize the game between combats while passive ones barely get a chance to participate, a more structured exploration sequence may help. The editions I've played (B/X and BECMI, mostly) do give some guidelines, but for most of my DMing career I've struggled with how to apply them. Below is a more detailed, but still hopefully simple, step-by-step procedure for dungeon crawling. 1. Party moves, either until its exploration movement rate is exhausted or a keyed location or other point of interest is reached.  2. Des...

 Traps have always been a staple of dungeon-delving adventures. There's more than one way to classify traps, but here I'll be looking at them according to their purpose in the dungeon, both in-fiction (i.e. the purpose they serve to their creators in the game world) and in-game (i.e. what they add to the experience for DMs and players.) Of course, there is a fair bit of overlap, and any given trap might fit into more than one general category.  HAZARD: Not truly a trap, per se, but some feature of a dungeon that presents a danger to explorers. Unlike a true trap, a hazard is not intentionally constructed, but functions in the game in a similar way. Hazards may be natural features, such as a sinkhole, an unstable pile of rubble, a pocket of toxic volcanic gas, or the result of deteriorating structures, such as a crumbling bridge or loose ceiling block.     Purpose:  In the fiction, being products of impersonal forces, they have no purpose per se. In a game sense...

 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...