The sheer size of the dungeon is definitely a success. Writing a 14 room one page dungeon was the height of folly and making it actually fit within a single page was painful indeed but at the end of the day I think it was as much of a success as I could’ve hoped for. The dungeon is reasonably made non-linear in the style of Jennell Jaquays1 and provides multiple avenues of exploration as well as different secret areas or connections. Neither of the parties explored the dungeon in its entirety, mostly due to time issues, but both expressed interest and joy in the scale of the dungeon as well as the freedom they had to explore it.
One thing I’ve realized doing my first ever playtesting of written RPG material is that a playtest is closer to a one-shot than campaign play, and that means that writing material intended to be dropped in to an existing campaign or used for a single night of play requires a different approach. Even from an OSR perspective, littering a dungeon with gold and other treasure works for PCs intending to level up and accrue power but is much less important for PCs that are rolled up and discarded at the end of the night.
I don’t want to have plots in my dungeons so much as lore and background story that can be discovered and meaningfully interacted with, but some measure of a driving force, time limit or default goal might be best in order to give parties an immediate method of engaging with the material2.
In a similar vein, the inclusion of the wandering spirits was a very accidental spark of cleverness. Even though the second party didn’t interact with them due to their interrogation of the first “friendly” NPC (more on that later), it provided the first party with a very direct item to investigate and helped avoid the issue of the choice of going north or south being meaningless3.
Having a clear reason to want to explore the southern section of the dungeon for the 1st party, and the information provided by the seneschal giving the 2nd party the impetus to explore the northern wing, helped differentiate both playtests as well as build confidence in me that the dungeon possesses enough interesting phenomena to keep players and GMs at other tables engaged.
I am a little torn on the inclusion of friendly NPCs that know the details of the dungeon and its situation. The cowering treasure hunter in the banquet hall was met by the 1st party and I think his inclusion was strong because he provided a hook to explore the rest of the dungeon (his missing or dead party) as well as interesting misinformation (he was fearful of the harmless masked scion, who in his fear he decided was a vicious monster).
The seneschal and the demon on the other hand were interesting to come up with and do provide what are essentially the only two factions in the dungeon, but they also know too much. Its easy for a party to get bogged down in questioning either of them and it both slows down play and also prevents the more natural slow discovery of the dungeon’s lore when a character can just infodump to the party. I do like the seneschal as both a potential ally and enemy with his warning of hurting thieves, although he may be a little toothless as even 1st level Knave characters can fight their way out with some luck.
Regarding negatives, my decision to have the demon resemble the protein structure of hemoglobin in the second playtest may be a moment where I tried to be too clever for my own good. Describing the quaternary structure feels nearly impossible and if no one clues in on it then it ends up being a clever nod to nobody. Dungeon design is technical writing and technical writing is still writing, so I suppose the advice of “kill your darlings” still applies.
I also received some feedback that the smoke sword was too easily found and didn’t pose enough of a danger to make players doubt picking it up, which is fair. That and the ritual to unseal the demon seeming to be a little too simple when combined with how the seneschal hypes up its powers of persuasion which is a solid point I don’t think I picked up on in my draft.
I regret the lack of a random encounter table, something I made the choice to not include due to space concerns. I’m also quite proud of the terse, sense oriented read-aloud and want to continue using this style since it gives players an immediate “in” to the room and what might be going on within it. I don’t recall exactly where I read the advice about keeping read aloud sense oriented, but when it came to keying the dungeon I was motivated and inspired by Arnold Kemp’s dungeon checklist4.
The Lady and Tiger 
Leave a comment