What keeps your traps in good working order over the years? Sure, we can always fall back to "magic", but what about huge waterwheels and massive counterweights? Continually flowing water works as a powerful source of kinetic energy to keep ancient dungeons continually moving. Second, who made it and why? What purpose does the dungeon serve? How exactly does it work? What keeps it still working over the years? In Tomb of Horrors Gary Gygax had little demons and devils that ran around the tomb resetting traps.
#Campaign cartographer 3 make all walls thicker series
What does it resemble? What metaphor can we use from real-life that helps to describe it? Is it a series of tunnels similar to an underground train station? Is it a set of crypts like those found in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? What makes this dungeon familiar enough that players can relate to it? We can, of course, apply these to our fantastic dungeons.įirst, players have to understand the dungeon's function.
These included making locations familiar, functional, and fantastic. Long ago in a lost D&D podcast, D&D developer Rodney Thompson described three key criteria for good locations called the three "Fs". (art by Sebastian Wagner commissioned for the Five Temples of the Earthmother) Familiar, Functional, and Fantastic So we have an idea what dungeons are, but what makes a dungeon awesome? When we talk about dungeons, we're really talking about a series of rooms or chambers connected by halls or passages of some sort. Decrepit crypts, moldering cellars, sinister prisons, decaying temples, ancient catacombs, castle ruins any and all of these can be considered "dungeons" from our roleplaying game standpoint. Today we're going to look at how best to make our dungeons awesome.įor the sake of this article, we're going to use the term "dungeon" widely. They even make up 50% of the title of the game. Note, this article has been updated from the original written in October 2010.ĭungeons are one of the staples of Dungeons & Dragons. It's a nice map, I like the layout, and think it's the perfect size.New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! Making Awesome Dungeons Other than that, I can't pick any more faults. The house on the bottom right has half of the window missing. Me personally, I'm not a big fan of 1 tile roofs, they look too weird in my opinion but if you like it like that then that's fine.I'm also not a fan of the trees on the left, I feel like you should either replace them with bigger ones, or make them more sporadic, and split them up a lot more, once again it just looks weird to me. The top left part of it has a wall end (don't know how best to explain) but the bottom left does not, both should be like the bottom left. The house on the bottom left, with the wood log walls, look at the section stick out on the right, with the door.
I completely disagree with Mako Star, don't make it bigger, but that's my opinion. Think of the three tile rule, every three tiles or less, break the walls up a little bit, if you get what I mean.
Woould suggest breaking up those cliffs more, it looks too structured at the minute, you might have been able to get away with it if the town was more structured (not that I'm saying it needs to be, the layout is fine) but because the town looks quite natural, the structured cliffy bits seem too out of place.
0 kommentar(er)
