how to build a dungeon
This is a topic that many people are looking for. thevoltreport.com is a channel providing useful information about learning, life, digital marketing and online courses …. it will help you have an overview and solid multi-faceted knowledge . Today, thevoltreport.com would like to introduce to you DM Forge: Dungeon Building 101 (D&D Tips & Tricks). Following along are instructions in the video below:
so you want to know more about dungeons those deep dark places of the world well youve come to the right place hey guys welcome to a fistful of dice my name is Matt this episode of dungeon master Forge is entitled engine building 101 and were going to be taking a look at some simple ways to build exciting and grossing dungeons for your players the technique that I usually use to construct my dungeons is called the five room model and youll see this kind of all over the place online I use a slightly modified version of this of this idea but essentially the idea is that you can create a dungeon following this five room model and not just a dungeon but any sort of adventure you want to craft now thats not to say that your dungeon is only going to have five rooms but its called the five room model because youre going to have five landmarks in your dungeon that youre going to build the rest of the dungeon around Im going to show you how to do that today Im also going to be using my recent session with the provokers as an example of how I use this method because I used the five room dungeon building method to construct the dungeon that they recently delved into so the first room in your dungeon is going to be the entrance so Im just going to build a little room here the entrance and the entrance is also going to have some sort of Guardian now we draw our hallway were going to draw another room here this room is going to be a puzzle or roleplay challenge now here we have a little bit of a split with rooms three and four existing sort of next to each other one room will be the red herring the second room will be the boss now that seems like a complete dungeon but both of these rooms come to the final room which is the twist now as I said this isnt necessarily what your dungeon is going to look like its not literally going to be five rooms but this is a way of looking at your dungeon and laying it out in a way thats going to be fun for you and your players so lets talk about each of these rooms in turn and then Im going to tell you how you can expand upon this idea make your dungeons bigger and more complex so the first room entrance or guardian this is where your players maybe they havent entered the dungeon yet maybe theyre outside of it and they need to find a way inside so for example in the recent provokers campaign this entrance or Guardian level was the Scarecrow room so the the provokers had entered the dungeon after solving the the puzzle and defeating the barbarians up above in the temple and they had entered the the dungeon and had found scarecrows in these alcoves and there were four of them when the Scarecrow is activated there were also magical rooms in the floor that started to glow and I wanted to put a combat in this room that wasnt just kill everything and move on I wanted there to be something else going on and I wanted there to be a way for people who were less combat inclined to figure out a way to solve or to basically end the combat so in this case what I did was I put the four scarecrows in there I only had three activate and the magical circle in front of the one that didnt activate didnt glow so this tipped them off that the
magical circles had something to do with these things activating and the way they ended the fight was by destroying the magical circles which basically ended the whatever magical control was over these scarecrows so they were able to stop the fight both in combat and sort of out of combat so you had you know here Don and brass wick and Durgin sort of battling these scarecrows and dice is kind of running around figure what these magic circles do and then all four of them are starting to bash the magical circles that end it so you want this room to set the stage for your dungeon if your dungeon has some sort of theme you want something in here thats thematic so for instance the dungeon that I was doing was a it was a shrine to get e on this goddess of Agriculture and harvest and spring so I put scarecrows in here because you know when you think scarecrows you think farmers she think harvest do you think fields of wheat and grain and so I wanted to set the stage for this um for this dungeon both setting up that it was you know this sort of theme of harvest and renewal but also it had a sinister kind of edge to it where you know these scarecrows were put here to protect this place so this is where you set the stage this is where your players get the idea of what the rest of the dungeon is going to be about of all the rooms this ones probably going to be your most straightforward room maybe its just a combat umm maybe they have to bargain their way into the dungeon it might be a stone face that asks them questions you know something that is going to warm them up a little bit for the rest of the dungeon you wont you dont want this room to be too incredibly taxing an example of this room outside of a dungeon lets say your partys in a city and theyre trying to complete a quest the entrance or Guardian might be something barring their path a criminal under Lord that they have to negotiate with a band of brigands that they have to fight off something to set up the rest of the quest and set the tone for the adventure that youve set up now lets talk about the second room the puzzle or the roleplay challenge now with the entrance maybe youre getting something combat heavy something a little bit more straightforward the puzzle of the RP challenge is where you want your players to start thinking um maybe its a riddle maybe its a physical puzzle they have to solve maybe its something that they have to look inward something that forces them to talk about their characters their backstory where they come from you know their fears and and their goals you want this to be a place where your characters have a bit of respite before they move on to the heavier challenges within the rest of the dungeon so in the provoker campaign this was the room with the Dwarven ghosts they entered the room they saw that there was a some sort of cave-in and underneath the rubble of the cave-in they saw a dwarven skeleton that had been crushed by the debris that had fallen from the ceiling the dorvan skeleton had something clutched in its hand and as they entered the room a ghostly apparition appeared and it was the Borbon ghost the Dwarven ghost explained that he was a farmer here and that he was the caretaker of the shrine and that he had been here for some time the
ghost actually wasnt aware that he was dead he thought he was just sort of wandering the halls and still taking care of his job but the ghost had a riddle that had been plaguing him since his death and so the ghost presented the riddle to the party and the party was able to both um talk to this ghost learn more about the shrine and the town of Brooke learn about who he was and what he was doing there and also have a bit of a riddle so they solved the riddle again the mattock tied in with the rest of the dungeon and they also received a little bit of a of a little bit of a sidequest because the Dwarven ghost turned out to be the great uncle or the the uncle rather of Turrell the hill dwarf that they had met in that in the session prior now this dwarven ghost assumed that Turrell was still a young boy as he was when he died but Charles actually a grown a grown man now and this dwarf had a toy a little stone a dwarven warrior that he had made for Turrell and he asked the players to bring it to his to his nephew and the players of course agreed so in there youre getting youre getting both a puzzle and a little bit of a roleplay challenge you know the characters are having to negotiate with this person talk to them communicate and also think together and talk with each other um so you definitely want this you know keeping with the theme but try to steer away from combat in this area you want it to be something thats going to tax their minds rather than their character sheets if that makes sense now from here you want the dungeon to kind of split off into different through two different directions you want to present the players with a choice it might not be left or right but you want some sort of decision to be made thats going to set them off in two different directions the first Direction is the red herring this is a room that seems like its the end of the dungeon if that makes sense its a tough encounter the final resting place of an old artifact something that tells your players you have reached the end and youre about to complete the dungeon so in the case of the provokers it was the altar of get Aeon they arrived they found this altar there was nowhere else to go this seemed to be the end of the shrine there was an altar there with our the resting place where it seemed the relic was supposed to be but it wasnt there murals on the walls and things like that I didnt put any encounters in here or puzzles or anything roleplay oriented I simply wanted this to be a room that would inform the players that there was something else going on that they werent quite done with the dungeon so another option to do here though is to put an encounter here that is going to make the boss encounter even more difficult for your players something that wears down their hit points and their spell slots maybe its even a tougher encounter than the boss fight something that you can throw at them thats really going to challenge them and and make them have to think and be smart when they encounter the boss so it should be noted that the red herring can also be bypassed entirely if the party doesnt go to the red herring it doesnt really affect the dungeon as a whole its you know maybe
there are greater rewards over here maybe theres more leap to be had more treasure more experience but if they bypass this area of the dungeon completely it doesnt negate their quest theyre still able to accomplish their goal if they dont go in this direction this room over here the boss room now when I say boss I dont necessarily mean a boss I dont mean that youre going to go in and fight a Zelda monster although you know thats definitely feasible but its simply the final encounter the thing that is going to make this dungeon memorable the culmination of your partys efforts so in the case of the provoker campaign it was the al bear they realized that the relic was not in this room in the shrine but I was dropping hints that it might be elsewhere there was feather feathers and feces in this room here which told them some sort of beast had come in here and maybe it had run off with the relic so they backtracked to the hallway and went into the cave of the al bear where they found the relic in its nest and they were a little bit drained their spell slots they didnt have as many spell slots anymore and so this fight was was tough it was a pitched battle and they managed to fill the al bear and grab the relic so um this wouldnt necessarily need to be a combat it could be some sort of negotiation a role play challenge but I tend to have a combat be the wrap-up of a dungeon I want the last thing the players do to have a climactic battle I want it to be memorable I want it to be you know almost cinematic in that they you know come into this final conflict something thats been foreshadowed throughout the dungeon something that if they think about it they should have seen coming so for instance thats why I had feathers you know throughout the dungeon and sort of telltale signs that an al bear was roost in here so you definitely want to foreshadow either of these rooms kind of throughout the rest of the dungeon giving your players little clues as to what is what awaits them further on in the dungeon if they figure it out theyll be rewarded when they when they find out they were they were right if they dont figure it out theyll have an aha moment when they when they do finally see it whatever it is that awaits them in this in this boss room now you probably want to let this final room is about the twist this isnt necessarily a room in your dungeon but its something that you can put in your dungeon to to turn it on its head a little bit I dont always use this sometimes this is enough for a dungeon but the twist is something that lets the players know maybe um you know everything you did here in the dungeon maybe it wasnt all for the right thing maybe they accomplish their task and they go back to town and realize that they were working for someone shady in the case of the provokers campaign it was returning to the surface and finding out that the corruptor had returned to the temple and had killed the captives that they had left tied up on the surface so its kind of that punch in the gut uh the feeling of victory accomplishment only to find that it was all maybe for not um you know that to find out that they had caused the deaths of these of these barbarians who were you know in no
were who were defenseless and also finding out that they just defeated an al bear and now theyre going directly into a combat with this massive armored man who they have heard about for several sessions it is a punch in the gut its a its a sucker punch you know and its not to to piss your players off its to make them excited what I did here was I presented this twist and I ended the session I felt that it was a natural breaking point and it left them excited for the next session so as I said you dont always have to include this twist but use it as a tool use it sparingly added into your dungeons when you want there to be something thats just gonna turn it on its head just a little bit so lets talk about how you can use this five room model to expand on the dungeon Ive said several times that I dont necessarily mean that this is one two three four five rooms in a dungeon but its a way of laying out your dungeon and thinking about it maybe these are areas of a dungeon consisting of multiple rooms maybe in between these rooms theres smaller rooms maybe theres a trap in here in here maybe theres another area over here that goes off into a whole nother five room model this is an idea to where you can have one entrance and multiple five room models coming off of that so youll have your entrancing Guardian and then coming off of it youll have multiple puzzle and RP challenges multiple red herrings maybe a couple of different boss rooms you can really kind of expand upon this and make massive dungeons using these these tropes these these go to sort of templates for creating a dungeon room theres no reason why you cant build a fun fulfilling dungeon that feels dangerous and and deadly just using these five rooms on the other end the spectrum theres no reasoning to limit yourself to these five rooms five rooms theres no reason you cant expand upon these put hallways labyrinths in hallways in between these areas of your dungeon put rooms in-between put tasks in-between puzzles traps all of that sort of thing wandering monsters in all of these rooms but in all things I always say try to keep it simple you know dont overburden yourself with things that arent going to give you return in the long run if youre strapped for time if you are feeling like you dont know what you want to do if you dont want to lay it out you can use this model as inspiration as a base template you know laying the groundwork for anything you want to do whether it be a dungeon or a quest this can easily be applied to something thats not in Dungeons something in an urban setting something in the wilderness cave systems even just a roleplay sort of negotiation quest in a town somewhere or something so this is a really versatile useful idea I definitely recommend the five room model and I hope you guys with some use out of it I know I have gotten a ton of use out of this model and I use it for most of my sessions its a really easy versatile way to layout a dungeon and layout an adventure for your players so let me know if youd like some more dungeon building tips going over traps puzzles and counters that sort of thing Id be happy to do more in this series for Dungeon Master Forge so thats gonna be it for me take care guys and happy gaming all
tags:
dungeons & dragons, pathfinder, a fistful of dice, matt click, rpg, roleplaying game, role-playing game, tabletop, miniatures, Dungeon Master, how to, dungeo…
Thank you for watching all the articles on the topic DM Forge: Dungeon Building 101 (D&D Tips & Tricks). All shares of thevoltreport.com are very good. We hope you are satisfied with the article. For any questions, please leave a comment below. Hopefully you guys support our website even more.
