Dungeon Craft: Segment 4

Revision is always important. Since the last post I have worked more on creating the campaign. I have also begun making it in a word document that could be linked on the blog, once complete, so anyone who reads this can see the module and use it. More importantly this post should talk more about the process of revising, and maybe even how I like to make custom hostiles/monsters with their own stats. After all using the average guard is all well and good, but the same mob gets boring, tweaking that into two other things the players can fight, gives a flavor to everything.

What initially started out as a dungeon has become its own campaign, which I did mention could happen. I've been working on making a well formatted document to link in the future, so people can use this module (a prepackaged D&D adventure), but its important to discuss the process too.

Figure 1: Draft of Bran

It has been mentioned before, but still vital to running a Dungeon and Dragons game, or any game that behaves similarly. Be flexible because you will never be able to plan for every outcome. In that same vein always be prepared to change things, which is why at the beginning of this post series it was advised to right down your core ideas.

For example Figure 1 is a draft of the capital City of Bran. It was drawn with a normal Staples #2 pencil, graphite HB for you art savvy people. There was a lot of effort put into making the city's layout believable, yet feeling constrained. This is partially why there are multiple sections drawn. It makes sense that the most defensible area is where the royal family is, a town rose around it, then they made walls, but the town expanded encouraging more walls with few transition space, entry and access areas like gates.

That way the players would have this relatively large area to roam and get into trouble with chances for random encounters, but they were walled into that area. What keeps them from simply moving from the canal district to the west over into the inner part of the city? For this I had to come up with some background, and the idea I came up with was that the city is under siege. Being under siege movement from quadrant to quadrant of the city would be much harder, especially from the outer sections which are much easier for spies and saboteurs to get into.

As more work was done on the backstory of the dungeon itself to give motivation for players, context, various reasons to use as many of their skills as possible, yet still be able to fight a bunch it morphed into a campaign. This isn't unorthodox as there is a beginner's guide module for Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition called the Lost Mines of Phandelver. Phandelver has only a handful of dungeons split out over an overworld map of the land southeast of Neverwinter in the base D&D world of Faerûn.

Figure 2: Map from Lost Mines of Phandelver

No spoilers. There are only maps for the first encounter, a cave system, the main town of Phadelin, Cragmaw Castle, some ruins, and of course the lost mines. The town itself has text highlighting key locations and anywhere else is considered unimportant and most players will go to the places named out, rather than say "no lets go to this unknown alley in town to see if anything is there"; it's up to the DM and improve at that point if anything is there.

That being said I'm okay that was meant to be a dungeon with a large amount of fighting is more of a short campaign than singular massive dungeon. At some point I'm sure I can make such a thing without issue, or even the final event of this module I've built over the course of these posts will be the players fighting on the walls, through the streets, and everywhere else against one or two of the factions included.

Figure 3: Preview of Bran Module

This might work out better because by then they'd have built an understanding of the city landscape, both geographic and even political with the numerous sub factions, and having a battle to defend or conquer it could then have more emotional impact.

Time will only tell with that as I've still been unable to get the group I initially was making this dungeon for together. I imagine though that I can simply use this at some point for my Saturday group though. It's always useful to take any premade adventures lying about one's home and tweak them for your own campaign, or maybe pull out one dungeon and change some of the enemies to fit your campaign's setting.

That's all for now but this has certainly been a lesson in creating new things, hopefully my next post will be a link or attachment of the pdf. Then all the Dungeon Craft posts will be used to create their own page talking about the process of creating a dungeon, most likely using my Wraithrest dungeon as an example to keep things fresh for the usual readers.

Be prepared to change things.