Making a Dungeon Patch - Sausage Making

Per this post last week, I have issued a challenge to start writing chunks of a dungeon as a creative exercise. The Worm community is calling this elemental, nodal building block a dungeon patch. 

This post is a stream of consciousness description of how I'm going to start putting together my first patch. I'll clean it up for publication (on the blog) in a future post.

To recap, I've argued that a dungeon patch should have five things:

1. Something that advances your dungeon checklist

2. 3-6 keyed rooms

3. An intentionally blank room that can hold a key for a lock in another section of the Underworld. I should call these spaces potential connections.

4. A gate that connects to a different section of the Underworld.

5. An evocative name

Basic brainstorming

My patch will start with just the germ of an interesting idea: "An animate wooden golem ventriloquist dummy torturing a dressed up halfling."

I want to write patches for His Majesty the Worm, so I'm going to ground my writing in one of the dungeon seeds that are included in the game. I flip through those for a little while until I find one where it seems to fit: The Castle of Crossed Destinies. One of the most vanilla dungeon seeds. 

Warren's position in the Designing Dungeons Course is that making a 30-room dungeon is essentially the act of using the elements of the B/X stocking procedure to make six-room nodes five times:

1-2: Monster (50% chance of guarded treasure)

3: Trap (~30% chance of trapped treasure)

4-5: Empty Room (~15% chance of hidden treasure)

6: Special (which are unique rooms)

I'm not writing towards this stocking procedure, but having prompts (2 monsters [1 with treasure], a trap, 2 empty/lore rooms, 1 special) is helpful for any exercise. I'll keep this ratio in the back of my mind.

Sketching out the core concept

This dungeon patch will be centered around a monster: a human-sized wooden doll controlling (horribly) a halfling as a living puppet.

This is a related concept, but not quite right

We Need to Talk About Kevin Pinocchio

I'm picturing the wood golem to look like those mannequins used for drawing references

The idea of a ventriloquist's dummy feels very modern to me, but a Punch and Judy puppet feels perfectly cromulent for a dungeon game. So the wooden golem will be a mannequin--an uncarven, unpainted blank slate--but its prisoner will be forcibly dressed like Punch, and tied up like a marionette. 

I always thought Lady Elaine from Mr. Roger's looked upsetting. Maybe this is how the halfling is dressed up.

Perhaps self evidently, Googling pictures for inspiration is part of my creative process.

The wood golem puppet a living creature both as revenge (maybe?) but also to express itself in a way that it cannot without being completed. A believable need to be understood, but escalated to an upsetting extreme. Also, perhaps the wood golem could be completed as a matter of negotiation. Perhaps an enemy-to-friend scenario? And if the players don't do a good job, the golem goes berserk?

What sort of room does this duo call their lair in the Castle of Crossed Destinies? I assume a theater? In a makeshift puppet's theater in a courtyard? In a woodcarver's workshop?

I'm inclined to say all three might exist. The empty puppet's theater in a courtyard will point towards the more adult theater inside the castle. Backstage of the theater will be the woodcarver's workshop. Perhaps the woodcarver's workshop is the wood golem's main lair.

Finalizing the stats will be come later. This idea will give me enough to flesh out a room description.

Brainstorming additional rooms

Since I want to focus my energy on a single node--a cluster of rooms--I'd tuck "outdoor puppet theater" away for later development if I was building out an entire dungeon level.

Right now I have two rooms: woodcarver's workshop and an adjoining theater.

Aiming for ~6 rooms, let me just write out some other ideas. I'll select the ones that are most compelling for development.

Box office. I know that the term "box office" comes from Shakespearean times where patrons' money was collected and kept in an office in a strong lock box. Players love picking locked boxes! Maybe a box office. [Trap + Treasure?] Although, on second thought, if this stage is part of a castle, would there be paying patrons? Perhaps not.

Backstage. If there's a theater, there should be a backstage. The empty room would have unused scenery, prop weapons, costumes, wigs, etc. ["Empty" room?]

In Disney's Pinocchio, Geppetto had lots of cuckoo clocks. Should those feature somehow? [Trap? Treasures in their own right?] 

This reminds me of the terrifying clockwork music box doll from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Can that complement the idea of cuckoo clocks? Is a finished full-sized doll what the wood golem was supposed to be, but it is still unfinished? [Special?]

Puppets were a plot point in Being John Malkovich. Maybe I should put a tiny door somewhere in here because that's just a nice dungeon feature to have. Perhaps that's the gate that connects to another dungeon level. Maybe the door is very small and requires the players to cast Shrink before using it.

Hang on. What sort of things would an olde timey theater have in them anyway? Well, wait, let's look up Renaissance theaters. The most famous one I know: The Globe.

OK cool, I found this map online.

At first glance, I thought 12 keyed locations would almost be enough to make several patches out of a theatrical section of a castle, but on closer reading, many of these would be a single room key. I think the only meaningful ideas from reading this pamphlet was that calling the dressing room "Tiring House" would be flavorful and that the stage itself should have a trap door. There's a trap for us! [Trap]

Where did the marionette-ified halfling come from? An adventurer, I assume. Perhaps some of his old companions are still lurking here as undead. [Another monster]

Final rooms to be keyed 

OK, that's enough brainstorming. Let's actually conceptualize what rooms I want to write.

This dungeon patch is part of the Castle of Crossed Destinies.

1. Theater. The stage of the theater has a trap door. Under the gallery, there is a curiously small door that leads to another section of the Underworld. [Trap, Gate]

2. Under the stage. Mechanisms that power the trap door. An undead adventurer (fallen victim to the trap) has some loot. [Monster with Treasure]

3. Backstage. Storage for stage props, including other blank but inanimate mannequins. [Empty]

4. Tiring house. The dressing room for would-be actors, filled with different stage costumes. This will be a type of treasure. [Treasure]

5. Puppeteer's workshop. The workshop of an artisan who created the puppets, the sets, and other objects of the theater--now haunted by the Rude Mechanical, an unfinished wooden golem, who puts on performances with Tom Joiner, a captive halfling dressed up as a marionette. Valuable cuckoo clocks hang on the walls. [Monster, Treasure]

6. Storage room. A storage room near the puppeteer's workshop. This room's key will be intentionally left  (mostly) blank to form a potential connection with another patch. [Potential Connection]

This area will be called the Theater of Tragedy. Because of har har, stupid joke. It contains a reason to fight, a reason to talk, and a reason to explore.

Saved ideas: I liked the idea of a cuckoo clock/music box room and an outdoor puppet theater that would connect conceptually to this patch, but don't want to lose focus. These ideas will be saved for later development.

Further reading from other big brains about this subject

Murkdice had the idea of "Patchwork Megadungeons" a while back as a way to chunk the work. Great minds!

Aryxmaraki reminds us that patches (and hexes, and points) are all just a type of node. 

The first to heed the challenge of the dungeon patch for Worm

Lusunati of the Worm Discord was the first person to accept the challenge and show off a dungeon patch for Worm. They've created a couple others in the past as well!

By the by

If you're interested in reading my process for building dungeons, I've written a course on the subject. It's free! It won a golden ENNIE this year.

The play's the thing

For people who get upset about reviews of modules unplayed

Would you get mad at playwrights giving feedback after reading a script on a play not yet produced?

This post brought to you by: microblogging.

The Elemental Level of Megadungeon Construction

There was a post on Facebook (cess pit that it is) that I found really inspirational. Here's a screenshot so you don't ritually defile yourself by going there.

It's a node-based megadungeon. It looks sprawling! 

They clarified that each node was 4-5 rooms large. If you have 54 nodes and 5 rooms a node, that's 270 rooms. That feels solidly megadungeon level--past the point of "Is Pluto a planet?" and "Oh yeah, that's Mars."

KJ Davies of the In My Campaign blog has been working on similar projects since 2014. A storied career, with many blog posts, ideas, and dungeon design to support their work! Check out their last nodal megadungeon! (Each level doesn't seem quite complete to me, but they're what His Majesty the Worm would call a dungeon seed - a jumping off point to be fully mapped, Meatgrindered, and filled with monsters and treasures.) 

Gus exchanged some of his own nodal megadungeon ideas with KJ Davies, and even did this cool picture of their dungeon:

[SIDEBAR] As has been said, blogs create ruins. I'm so glad that these ruins from 2014 are still around for me to crawl through! It also just goes to show you how many people want the thing you're making but can't find you. Marketing isn't efficient, but it's an attempt to connect the author with the audience. I wish I had found them sooner! [/SIDEBAR]

I said when I was writing Worm that writing a megadungeon isn't hard (I still hold by that statement): it was just making a series of atomic choices. 

Some things are atoms. (And everybody thought atoms were the smallest thing imaginable, until scientists hit them with a hammer in 1932 and a lot of like, quarks and neutrons and shit fell out.) But the more I work on megadungeon design, the more I understand that we don't want atoms. We want elements. That's what we make things out of.

In the Worm Discord, we've had this concept dungeon quilts. Not a dungeon in toto, but a patch that could be sewn into it--drag and drop it in wherever. Nodal megadungeon design is parallel development to this concept.

A dungeon node / dungeon patch of 4-5 themed rooms is an element that is usable. 

It resonates with Sean McCoy's advice to write rooms in pairs: 

You can think of these rooms as sequels and prequels to the rooms you’ve already come up with. Setups and punch lines.

Writing in pairs builds connectivity and halves the amount of work you have to do.

This gets you in the mindset inherently of connecting your spaces rather than thinking of a dungeon as like thirty different themed rooms. Once you start doing this it’s hard to stop.

It resonates with what Gus talked about in his Jaquaysing article:

By breaking down even a small dungeon into these kinds of nodes, and limiting their connections, players can better understand the space, and the designer can better imagine it, creating rational connections between the keyed locations that allow for more complex play rather than a sort of directionless ramble.  With larger dungeons shortcuts and alternate entrances become more important, either as ways to quickly get to unexplored areas or to change the direction that the party approaches certain obstacles from. Faction territories can be logically delineated by choke points or defensible areas, disrupted by secret passages.

By way of example, let me break down one of the levels from The Castle Automatic: 

Art by Guy Pradel

This is the Sanctum of Swords, one of five levels of the Castle Automatic. It's not a huge level: only 18 rooms. But you can think of it as a series of discrete nodes. 

• Purple: The Black Oil Heart (which powers the mechanisms in the level) and surrounding trapped rooms. An entrance to the level. Underground. 
• Teal: The lair of Pimple the Vampiric Torturer and surrounding rooms. A guarded exit from the underground section of the level to the above ground section.
• Honestly, the distinction between purple and teal is a little arbitrary on my part. This could also be an 8 room patch--an underground section.
• Red: Four rooms connected by a theme of a moat flowing into an underground river. 
• Yellow: The Court of Swords, including all the noble NPCs (and the boss of the level, the King of Swords).

All of the patches have at least one exit or connection to another level (not just another node in this level).

• Purple: A mirror portal connects room 201 (current level) to room 101 (entrance level).
• Teal: There's a trap door in the ceiling of room 209 that connects to room 310.
• Red: The moat leads to room 311 if you solve the riddles of the Moat Twins.
• Yellow: This node has multiple exits--doors to the Threshold Tower, doors to the Palace of Pentacles, and unlockable mirror portal in another level that teleports adventurers into room 215.

The level is cohesive, but is also chunked into discrete clusters of themed rooms. The map could be rearranged in any pattern the excellent Guy Pradel wished as long as those nodes were kept together. The Meatgrinder (overloaded encounter table) ties the level together thematically, even though many of the patches have different environmental details and dungeon construction.

Having conceptualized this more fully, I issue this challenge: Write your dungeons in 4-5 room elemental building blocks. 

1. Start with a kernel of a good idea. One of the things your dungeon needs: a reason to explore, a reason to talk, a reason to run away, etc.
2. Build out 2-3 rooms around this core idea. 
3. Connect an intentionally blank room to it. This blank will be filled by the dungeon assembler. They can either repurpose it into a lore room or make a connection to another patch using it--a lever that opens a door in another area, an idol with empty eye sockets that activates when gems from level 5 are placed into it, etc.
4. Put a gate that intentionally connects to another level (not just a door to another patch).
5. Give your patch an evocative name: The Pit of Pain, the Tomb of the Clown Prince, Lift of the Condemned, Wyrm-Hole. 

As a writing exercise, try writing a dungeon patch every week for a month. You'll have a 16-20 room dungeon at the end of it!

Post your dungeon patches on your blog so your friends can use them. Take dungeon patches from your friend's blogs. 

Make your megadungeons like a quilt.