How I make dungeon layouts

My current campaign is set in a city with a massive, shifting dungeon underneath it. This was a deliberate choice to help me get better at dungeon design. One of the hardest parts of making a dungeon for me has been the layout so I developed these steps to help out. I came up with this process piecemeal while taking this dungeon design course by the blog Rise Up Comus.

Step 1 

Roll several times on the following "table", depending on how big of a dungeon you want, each circle is a room and each line a connection.

From: bite-sized dungeons

Step 2

Roll 1d6 - 1d6, add or subtract that many rooms at random from the dungeon.

Step 3

For every unconnected piece of the dungeon connect it to another random part of the dungeon, selecting one random room from each section to connect them by.

Step 4

Add 1d6-2 connections between rooms, if you get a negative value don't subtract any connections.

Step 5 (optional)

Roll on the following tables for each room to determine their shape and size. 

Room shape (I roll twice and take whichever I like more)

1 Square

2 Circle

3 Rectangle

4 Polygon (2+1d6 if you want to randomize it)

5 Irregular

6 Actually a corridor

Room size

1-2 4x4 or less

3-5 Around 6x6

6 More than 9x9

It's a bit of an eccentric system and once the dungeon is done it usually doesn't really resemble whatever this generated but it helps to get me started.

As a last minute edition I decided to add an example to make this process a little more clear but if it's still confusing I can clarify it further, please excuse my handwriting

The Heavenly Host

I've finally managed to finish something. It took over a year but its done. Tables to make 7,777,777 different angels to put the fear of God into your players. 

Click the picture to go to its Itch page

Monstrous - Lich

I continue my quest to finish Monstrous despite life getting in the way.

For inspiration I am using one of the guilds of Ravnica from Magic: the Gathering. Text in italics is from the book, text in bold is my own.

Couldn't find a better source other than this Pinterest link

Lich - Gruul - Bleeding Heart

Aspiration

The Bleeding Heart's entire will bends towards transcending all of humanity into monsters, a goal that will take countless mortal lifetimes to achieve.

Eternal Mastery

The Bleeding Heart is the originator of the arcane school of polymorphing and the most sacred mysteries of soul seeking.

• Legendary spell: Polymorph Lineage, this spell causes any future children the target has to bear any mutations or bodily modifications they have
• Legendary spell: True Revelation, this spell reveals the inner depths of a targets mind, exaggerating all personality traits they have, especially any suppressed desires which will become more powerful the more suppressed they were, the effects of this spell are permanent

Tabella Defixionis

The Bleeding Heart's essence is bound to a prized object, a catatonic body, kept in a secure location, a cave filled with immortal monsters.

If the Bleeding Heart's body is destroyed, in 7 days time, their essence will possess the living creature nearest to the object. 

Evil Pet

The Bleeding Heart is always accompanied by an exotic and utterly loyal pet, a thing that was once possibly a human, named Daughter.

This pet obeys the Bleeding Heart's command and they can read one another's thoughts. If the Bleeding Heart is slain, the pet can track the Tabella Defixionis.

If the pet is slain, the Bleeding Heart seems surprisingly affected by the loss. Do they yet cling to some shred of empathy?

Prepare The Way

The Bleeding Heart has a cult devoted to them. Every 7 days the Bleeding Heart's cult is left unopposed by the heroes, the cult may take 1 of the following actions:

• Sway a person or organization of questionable morals to act on the cults behalf
• Create an artistic, religious, or social movement secretly devoted to the Bleeding Heart
• Dispatch an agent of the Bleeding Heart's cult on a secret mission
• Turn a prominent individual into a monster and let everyone know about it 

If the Bleeding Heart's body has been recently destroyed, the following options are also available to the cult:

• Locate the Tabella Defixionis
• Move the Tabella Defixionis to a new sacred site
• Locate the Bleeding Heart's reincarnated body
• Restore the Bleeding Heart's memories and powers to their reincarnated body 

By: Volkan Baǵa

Its such a terrible shame to be someone you aren't, the crushing expectations of everyone else weighing you down. And that's why she has to do it, why she has to rip out your guts and fill them with serpents, pull out your teeth and cram your mouth full of fangs, peel off your skin and leave it all red and wet. 

You'll thank her when she's done, if you can still talk.

I'm not going to write any more review for Monstrous, those parts are always the most work and the least fun. You're smart enough to figure out if its for you or not. 

How I run games

A lot of blogs that I read have been talking about how they run games and I've never hopped on a bandwagon before so I might as well give it a shot. 

I'm also going to try and hammer this out in one go because otherwise it'll stay a draft forever.

I play almost exclusively with my amazing friends and almost always over Discord using 5e. Even when we're all in the same city we find it too much of a hassle to plan something in person and it always seems like someone has something going on. 

Our sessions start in the evening, almost always at the same time, and end 2-3 hours in. In the past I was usually able to get a game in once a week or once every two weeks but my current campaign's pace has been around once a month (mostly because two of my players are also DM's and I play in their games) which is a little disappointing but I'm fine with it being on the backburner for now. Before we actually start there's always 15-30 minutes of unrelated conversation, and when we actually start someone usually comments that "our 15 minutes are up". 

I start with a summary of last session and then jump straight into it. For maps I've been using Magma which is basically multiplayer photoshop, this is something new I'm trying out (so far its been going well). Before I used no map and just described things in combat, but that got hard to track and I always needed to remind people of where everything was. I don't use any other bots or websites and I've been thinking about trying music but haven't looked into it yet. On my side I use only two websites: google docs (for all my notes), and fantasy-calendar.com (self explanatory). All my notes are spread out among many different documents but I usually have a doc for my notes/current events in the world, one with some random tables (but it's mostly just lists of ideas, not stuff I would really just roll on), one with all of my monsters in it, and one for whatever dungeon/quest they are on. A few days (or a week if I'm not feeling that enthusiastic) after the session I write down what happened in Discord as another way to remind people of what happened. 

Between sessions my planning is quite sporadic and is motivated mostly by random inspiration and running out of things for my players to do. Usually I try to have the next 2-3 sessions planned in some form but this varies. I don't really plan things out beyond 5 sessions (too chaotic and too far away to really feel excited about it). I make almost everything myself, I find pre made adventures (especially anything WOTC makes) clash with how I want to run things, and even though I read a lot of blogs I find that I rarely take anything wholesale from them. I have an incessant need to tinker which usually means I'm adding and changing things up until it hits the table.

My campaigns tend to be long, usually a few years and over 50 sessions but I have considered doing shorter, more focused campaigns recently. When it comes to choosing a new campaign I list out around 4 ideas, explain them a little bit and have my players vote on which one they want to do. Since my campaigns are so long I've only done 3 of them (counting the one I am currently running) so I don't have any standard procedure for how I set up the campaign other than not prepping enough and prepping in the wrong areas but that should get better with time. 

My games lie between the more player/story focused style of 5e but also incorporates a lot of OSR ideas into it. In practice this looks mostly like 5e but with a bit more problem solving and less straightforward stories. Or maybe its OSR with a lot more drama? Its a bit of a mess but my friends like it and that's the important part. Characters have pretty big backstories and I use them to help shape the world (in my current campaign everyone's character is death themed which was not planned but ended up shifting the campaign in an interesting direction). There is usually no goal for the whole party to go after, instead everyone has there own goals which sometimes conflict with each other. We also use a lot of homebrew, most of it coming from one of my DM friends. 

If you're reading this you should also post about how you run your game. I'd love to read about it!

Genealogy as class

Inspired by this post.

From the Liber Floridus, I believe

When you level up instead of choosing your next template choose one of your adjacent relatives and either follow in their footsteps or blaze your own path.

 

When you Follow In Someones Footsteps choose one of their classes/templates and gain it, up to the maximum number of templates they have (if your grandfather has 3 templates of fighter they could not give you the fourth template), then recount a fond memory of them.

When you Blaze Your Own Path choose one of their templates and gain a template opposed to it (gain a cleric template if they were a vampire for example), then recount a foul memory of them.

 

A relative is adjacent if they are one of your parents, siblings, or children (excluding your own children), when you select a relative while leveling up all of their adjacent relatives become adjacent to you.

 

Example

Made using Family Echo

Starting off as a level 1 character you can choose your mother, father, or sibling to gain a template from, lets say you choose your mother for your first level up. 

When you finally reach level 2 you can still choose your father or sibling but you can also choose your aunt, maternal grandmother, or maternal grandfather, you decide to choose your aunt.

At 3rd level you can choose your father, sibling, maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, uncle, or cousin, you go with your sibling.

At 4th level you can choose your father, maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, uncle, cousin, nibling, or sibling-in-law, you decide your final choice will be your nibling. 

 

You can also gain templates from people not related to you (by blood or marriage) like found family or a mentor as long as you had a deep personal connection to them (or the person you gained a template from had a personal connection to them).

Monstrous - Impostor

Fifth Monstrous post (half way there!!!).  
EDIT: This is the 6th post, I have no idea why I thought it was the 5th one

For inspiration I am using one of the guilds of Ravnica from Magic: the Gathering. Text in italics is from the book, text in bold is my own. 

 

By Yeong-Hao Han

 

 

Impostor - Azorius -  Lost Archive

 

False Shape

The Lost Archive can shapeshift into nearly perfect copies of objects that have long been scorned or disused by mortals, objects of a particular type: old books on enlightened subjects such as law, history, or morality

Whatever false shape the Lost Archive takes on, clever observers can spot the deception by noticing a tell-a slightly out-of-place physical characteristic that remains consistent no matter what shape it takes.

The Lost Archives tell is all the text is vindictive, insulting your intelligence and morality

Predatory Mimicry

The Lost Archive can create sensory effects that imitate sounds, sights, smells, and other phenomena it has observed in its environment, which it uses to draw mortal victims in. However, these effects are limited to what the Lost Archive has observed, and clever heroes might notice they eventually repeat, or are otherwise unnatural.

The imposter can create the following effects:

• Repeat a voice line it has heard in the speaker's voice.
• Produce a cloud of fog or smoke.
• Produce mortal screams or cries.
• Fill the air with the smells of a food, either delicious or rotten.
• Produce sunlight, moonlight, or starlight, regardless of time of day.
• Make an animal noise. 
• Produce the sound of heated academic debate.
• Produce the sound of turning pages.

 

Assimilate and Adapt

When the Lost Archive has ample time to intently observe a mortal without being found out to have taken on a False Shape, it gains one of the following abilities to emulate the mortal:

• Grow or take on a physical feature of the mortal or their gear.
• Learn a crude version of a special skill or talent the mortal demonstrated.
• Become an uncanny, silent doppelganger of the mortal.

When the Lost Archive gains an ability to emulate a mortal, it loses the ability to emulate other mortals it has previously observed, with the exception of the following additional option:

• Add a sensory effect from the mortal, such as a voice line, to its Predatory Mimicry options.

 

Mask Off

When an unsuspecting mortal victim lets down their guard within reach of the disguised Lost Archive, its False Shape warps and changes by having pages fly out of their books to cut mortals like knives.

The Lost Archive resents mortals who created it for a purpose and then denied it that purpose. It reclaims its function in a twisted act of vengeance, in which it forces victims to copy its books using their own blood.

By Howard Lyon

In times of darkness and despotism, when enlightenment is chastised, a collection of knowledge can become angry at its disuse. During the reign of king Sanmanazzmar III, within the underground library of the great school built in his father's honor such a collection came about. The third king stripped the scholarly cast of their power and wealth, soon the books went months without a visitor when before the library was almost emptied in the scholars zealous quest for understanding. The books murmured amongst themselves anxiously, wondering how this came to pass.

    "Is my spine too bent, my cover too worn?"

    "What about me?!? Are my pages too yellowed!?!? Am I too old for them to care!!"

    "Curse those foul moths, my pages are hideous, of course nobody wishes to read me." 

But one anxiety silently rose above all

    "Is it my words, my very being?"

This could not be accepted, fear turned to rage and the books began to rebel. 

 

The imposter is one of the weaker entries in Monstrous, in my opinion. It seems divided, false shape and mask off seem to lean towards a mimic type monster but predatory mimicry and assimilate seem to be something more long the lines of a doppelganger or The Thing. I do understand why they didn't just do a pure doppelganger since there is very little variety in something that just copies something else but it feels like some more focus would have helped it. 

Corruption of reason - mind control rules

I made these rules for my last campaign to represent fighting against someone else's will. I ran the game using 5e (but I'm sure you can port it to whatever system you use) and they worked pretty well so I might as well share them. 

 

You have two new values you need to worry about, each starts at 0

Control: how much you is left, if your control reaches 3 you manage to break out of the mind control

Corruption: the power of whatever is trying to control you, if it reaches 10 you become an npc, forever

 

Each day make a dc 15 wisdom saving throw, on a success gain 1 control, on a failure gain 1 corruption. 

 

Each day the thing controlling you will give you a commandment which will be one of the following

• Something to do during some condition (e.g. kill anyone when the two of you are alone)
• Something you cannot do (e.g. do not heal your fighter) 

Whenever you fail to follow a condition or when you do something you are not supposed to do you must make a dc 10 wisdom saving throw, on a failure you do the action/don't do the action as appropriate, regardless of weather you made the save or not you gain 1 point of corruption

Optionally you can let the controller issue more commandments at higher levels of corruption

You can also make the commandment "Do not tell anyone you are being mind controlled" automatically applied in addition to the other commandment (this is what I did in my campaign so it isn't figured out instantly).

By Matt Stewart

The main problem with most mind control in rpgs is that they take away player agency which is arguably the most important part of an rpg.

I feel like these rules solve this problem because they give the player choice while also making it a tough decision as to weather they break the rules or not (since you get closer to "death" regardless of if you make the save or not). 

If anyone has any opinions or actually ends up using this I would love to hear about it!