Dungeon23: Greystone - Day 15 & 16

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

I thought it was high time that we had some real dungeon passages and rooms. By that, I mean that for the first two weeks I've been focusing on one big building for the whole week. That was by design. I wanted a big house and a big church. These are two prominent buildings in an upper-class part of the city and I wanted to give them the level of detail that they deserved. But this is supposed to be a city, so we need a lot of roads and buildings and such.

However, that poses a problem for how I'm working right now. I really wanted to fit a fairly sizable neighborhood into a single week's worth of development. I also need to bring the Kobolds on stage. I've been talking about them as another faction since week 1 and haven't placed even one of them so far. I think a warren of twisting alleys, and small buildings make for a very good home for a band of Kobolds. Seven rooms, just doesn't seem like enough though. I wanted more rooms in a tight space, so I came up with something. 

I pulled out my 5e DMG, that actually has a pretty nice random dungeon generator. I rolled dice and drew in corridors, doors and rooms. I made a couple of changes to the random results, but kept it pretty much intact. In the end, I had 17 rooms which felt like a nice little neighborhood. Now on to the keying issue. How do I make 17 rooms work on a 7-room key?

Well, first of all, these rooms don't all have to be super detailed. Most of them will just be ancient ruined homes and shops. I noticed that the keys each have six lines.  So, what if I did one room per line? If the rooms were simple, that could really work. So, how about six ruined homes and six ruined shops?  One line for each building. That would take up two key days leaving five for the more detailed and significant locations. Seems pretty cool!

I used the OSE random dungeon stocking tables to figure out what was in each room. I'd already made up a wandering monster table for the week, so I could use that to stock any location that came up "monster". I knew I wanted a lot of kobolds in this part of the dungeon, so they're twice as likely to come up randomly than any other monster. Territory is important though too.  The goblins hold the big house, so if they've got holdings in this region it should be closer to the house. So, I put some goblins in 1-15 A. There may also be some in 1-18, but we won't find that out until Wednesday. In the meantime, I used the tables to stock the rest of the 1-15 and 1-16 lines. When it came time for Empty, Special or Traps, I consulted several other resources:

There wouldn't be much room for a lot of description in each line, so I just did some bullet points in the Notes area. These are general descriptions for a ruined home or shop. Then each line has simple notes about what makes that room unique. Easy peasy!

Oh, and I really hate the idea of monsters just lounging around in a room doing nothing but waiting to be slain. Fortunately, the d4 Caltrops blog has us covered. They literally created a d100 table for every monster in the OSE bestiary. Wow. That's so great!

Tomorrow we get into some more detailed and specific rooms!  Can't wait!


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