Designing Dungeons: Or, How to Kill a Party in 30 Rooms or Less is now Complete

At my day job, I’m a technical writer. In the evenings, I blog about RPG stuff. I am combining these professional interests into this series: I am using my career of instructional design to tell you how I play games. This makes me the most boring person alive.

At the beginning of the year, I began a project with my colleague Warren from ICastLight called the:

Designing Dungeons Course

or

How to Kill a Party in 30 Rooms or Less

Click the pic!

After six months of writing, the course is now complete!

In this free series, I provide practical, step-by-step instructions on how to make a 30-room dungeon that is fun to play. You’ll learn the nitty gritty of writing a dungeon from inception to completion: drawing the map, numbering the rooms, populating them with monsters, hiding treasure, and putting together notes that you can use at the table.

Together, we’ll create a dungeon. Like Bob Ross, you can follow along at home using the provided workbook. At each step, I’ll talk through the design choices and philosophy of why I do things a certain way. And, like Bob Ross says, there’s no wrong way to do things—you can make different choices as you follow along. At the end, we’ll have a working dungeon you can actually run at the table.

To give you a sense of the content, here's the chapter list:

Chapter 1: Course Overview

Chapter 2: Brainstorming

Chapter 3: Refining the Theme

Chapter 4: Creating the Map

Chapter 5: Dungeon Checklist

Chapter 6: Experiments and Surprises

Chapter 7: Talking and Fighting

Chapter 8: Running and Resting

Chapter 9: Exploring and Returning

Chapter 10: Formatting Room Descriptions

Chapter 11: Keying Room Descriptions (Part 1)

Chapter 12: Keying Room Descriptions (Part 2)

Chapter 13: Writing Random Encounters

If you find this helpful, let me know what you create with it!