The Word of the Dungeon

Designing dungeons seems easy at first glance. It did for me. And when you really think about on a room-by-room basis, it is easy. You just need to draw a box, describe the box, and possibly throw in some monsters, traps, treasures, or puzzles.

But it's more than that.

First, the dungeon map needs to look good. It doesn't, but it does for me. This means I need to spend retime making it look good. And I'm still not satisfied with how adungeon.com maps look. They serve their purpose, but they are not yet good enough.

Then you also have to worry about how you describe the room. Is it going to be big blocks of text or very short descriptors that hightlight the important bits and leave the heavy lifting of describing the room up to the DM.

Big blocks of text is something a DM can just read. Nothing gets missed.

However, there is also the way I've seen others do it. Dolmenwood provides a good example.

Here, the descriptions of the rooms are highlighted, but they aren't just blocks of text you should read verbatim. Rather, they are a mix of objects or things and then describing those objects and things, or providing some other reference. I feel this is deceptively easy, as you have to be much more intentional. Writing descriptive rooms might mean more words, but editing this down to something much precise takes time and skill.

The thing is, I like this style. Because the truth is, blocked text is easy to get wrong. You can't assume the entrance (players can literally enter through a wall or just teleport in or through the north door instead of the south door), you can't assume the state of the room (is it clean, empty, dirty, destroyed), you can't assume the presence of monsters (are they in the room in the middle of the night, did the monsters here leave because they went to support friends, etc). So, the descriptions here are made to focus on things, along with important details should they be needed. It allow a GM to embellish as they see fit.

In addition, the bold text makes it easy to scan and find the things we are looking for. The statue is a fair elf or human woman, blindfolded, fingers raised to her lips, facing the stairs. Beseeching silence is a great descriptor and implies more than just fingers raised and shows intent.

If I were to write this room out with full descriptive block text, I would say:

A 15' diameter room with a statue of a elf or human woman in the southwest corner. The woman is holding fingers to her lips as if asking for silence as she looks upon a passageway to the the northeast: stairs going down. Passageways lead out of the circular chamber to the north and east.

I would then need to go into further descriptions of the pristine steps and what carvings are there, the dimensions the plinth, the ceiling and walls as needed, and more. This requires more text, more space, and more editing. It also makes for awkward text. Talking about passageways leading out the north and east and the stairs is odd because likely that's where players are coming from. Why would I need to describe the the way they are coming from in the text? You do this so you don't have to rely on maps, and you can give your players accurate information and they can map it out on their own. But is that really necessary? Especially with the tools we have at our disposal these days.

And honestly, I want to write for the way I want to play. So while boxed text is the way you always see it done, the reality is it's not needed.

The Look of the Dungeon

This is also a critical part of what I'm doing. The original tileset started as simple 10x10 "pixel" art. They were actual 100x100 pixel art, but I chopped them up into 10x10 blocks with each block representing a 6 inch square. (5 food tile split into 10 blocks gives you 6 inch squares). Anyways, this meant all the early tiles were limited to just those 10x10 blocks to do the art.

And while I enjoyed it somewhat, it was too limiting. So now I can just create the tiles a pixel level fidelity.

Let's take a gander at the current tile editor.

So, you can see the rounded fill feature in action there. But, there are a lot of buttons going on, each distinct tools to help me draw these tiles. I am am not an artist, so most of what I do is based on math. For example, rather than draw out rounded rects to fill the center, I built a pattern fill tool that gives me this.

I talk about how this works in adungeon-stone-stacking. But using algorithms and math, I can make things look better, at least in my mind. I still have a way to go. There is more I want to do to make these tiles look better. For example...

Tile Variations

I want to have the same tile that have several looks to it. For example, the tile above has blue stones. Maybe I want variations with different colors. Or maybe I want variations of walls. Or variations with different decorations of the floor.

Layers

Right now my maps can only contain one layer. I would like to layer tiles. That would means instead of having to create bespoke tiles for everything, I could just add something on top of an existing tile.

More Shapes

This one is simply about making it easier to create stuff. I would like stars and polygons with me defining the number of sides. And then of course rounded polygons.

Mirrors

I would love to draw on one side of the tile and have it repeat on the other side of the tile to give me a mirror.

Gradients are Hashmarks

This would be nice to add texture. There are various ways to do this with pixels and make it look nice. I just need to build it.

Selection Rotation

I do have a Select tool, along with a Copy tool. When I got to paste, it would be nice to be able to rotate the paste before pasting it.

Anti-aliasing

It's all the way down here, but this one is the one I'm most interested in I think. Seeing if there is a way I can do this.

There is a lot here, and each adds to what I can build.

Regardless, maybe the next thing I do is talk about the room editor (and then the floor editor) and how that all works.