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!