Pictured is the first draft of the Foulrevel dungeon cross section after I decided to roll my own rather than using the Judges Guild "4-level dungeon." Click to enlarge.
It's not even remotely to scale right now, and I forgot to add surface connections to the "caves" region. The names are currently placeholders.
Additionally, two of the regions, the Undertemples and the Dwarf Grottoes, aren't really meant for looting and pillaging, although there's really nothing preventing completely antisocial parties from giving it a go.
The regions of the dungeon and their equivalent "dungeon levels" are as follows:
Undertemples: 2 levels, dungeon levels 1 and 2.
Dwarf Grottoes: 1 level, dungeon level 1.
Caves: 2 levels, dungeon levels 1 and 2.
Goblin Grottoes: 3 levels, dungeon levels 1-3.
Lesser Evil Temple: 2 levels, dungeon levels 3 and 4.
Evil Magician Level: 1 level, dungeon level 3.
Deep Caves: 2 levels, dungeon levels 4 and 5.
Greater Evil Temple: 2 levels, dungeon levels 5 and 6.
Maze of Despair: 1 level, dungeon level 6.
People who've been following the project may note that I've wrapped the "Maze of Despair" dungeon into the lowest level of Foulrevel.
Also, here are my current notes on evil Man-types and their adaptation to the dungeon environment:
Delvers will quickly ascertain that the dungeons of Dwarf-Land are the haunts of various evil Man-types in the service of secret societies and weird gods, as well as bands of miscreants up to mere skullduggery. For unknown reasons, the troglodytic lifestyle and an enthusiastic commitment to diabolical mischief confer certain advantages upon these malefactors, mainly such shopworn but useful gimmicks as the ability to see in utter dark and to pass through doors that prove stubborn to delvers not similarly immersed. Such avowedly bad apples are marked with the Evil descriptor and operate unimpeded in the dungeon in the same manner as other "natives."
Dungeon life is not, as best as is known, particularly associated with first-generation albinism or melanism. Evil Man-types look just like other Man-types, albeit with a tendency to opt for blackened armor, distinctive facial hair, and other commonly accepted signifiers of malevolence.
Looking good. Those profile views of dungeons are all you need to get across the scale of the thing.
ReplyDeleteroll my own
A take it or leave it suggestion, if you mean here that you are going to randomly generate the dungeon I advise against it. I have never seen one that didn't look utter shit. Better to back and study Jaquays.
By the way can you recommend any of the Dover Land coloured fairy tale books over any others. Im getting three and thinking of blue red yellow?
A take it or leave it suggestion, if you mean here that you are going to randomly generate the dungeon I advise against it. I have never seen one that didn't look utter shit. Better to back and study Jaquays.
ReplyDeleteKent - I take it you're referring to random architecture and not (partially, at least) random stocking? How do you feel about geomorph use?
I haven't gotten good results from random architecture either, in the sense of the tables from the Gygax DMG or online maze generators, but I've found geomorphs (even randomly selected ones) useful to as a base, which I then modify to create something more holistic.
A take it or leave it suggestion, if you mean here that you are going to randomly generate the dungeon I advise against it.
ReplyDeleteI'm using it to mean "to roll one's own cigarettes," i.e., designing it myself rather than using the JG map.
I have never seen one that didn't look utter shit.
Not going to see one from me, either.
study Jaquays
I can study him all I want to, just like I could study Rembrandt. My stuff's still not going to look that good. My deficiencies as a cartographer are writ large in my dungeon maps.
I understand you mean verticality, though, and I'm trying to integrate it to some extent. One reason I'm not using the 4-level dungeon is that it's difficult for me to quickly parse the connectivity in a heavily-vertical dungeon if I didn't design it myself, which is a big issue when keying the place. I never had a problem with Thracia, oddly enough, but the 4-level has a lot of connections even by JG standards.
(In case it's not clear, I'm not randomly mapping the dungeon. I just woke up and have apparently become an elderly bare knuckle boxer.)
ReplyDeleteApropos the topic, one of my favorite 'self designed' dungeons had lots of randomly assigned treasures and monsters. I started out just rolling randomly via the monster & treasure assortments but found that if I rolled a few and stocked some others myself (and was not afraid to move or remove/substitute a random creature), it was actually a lot more interesting than if I tried to plan the whole thing out. For example, there was one level with connecting sub levels that had ghouls in one location, goblins in another, orcs in a third and giant ants in a forth. I expanded it so that the goblins controlled one series of rooms between the orcs and the ghouls... the ghouls would take over rooms as they could and the goblins were nailing shut doors and barricading hallways as different areas got taken over by the ghouls.... and the orcs controlled the goblin's access to the outside and were not worried about the ghouls (yet)... while the ants lived in tunnels that connected the levels and dragged away the dead for food. It made a little series of factions that could interact with the PCs (the ghouls and ants wouldn't negotiate, but the orcs and goblins might both try to hire the PCs to wipe the other out).
ReplyDeleteI'd suggest if you get stuck, just roll a few different locations, jot them down and then put on your thinking cap and try to make an adventure out of whatever the dice churned up. Remember also that you can have the most intricate relationships between the creatures in rooms 1, 2 and 3 and the players might skip room 3, kill everything in room 2 and retreat from room 1 and never figure out what that intricate relationship is... especially if a session or two of real world time intrudes between their adventures. The player characters might have just been in room 1 just 10 minutes ago... but if the players haven't met in a week, they are unlikely to remember all the details.
I absolutely use random stocking methods and then fancy up the results so they at least make sense to me.
ReplyDeleteScott, what about the lang recommendations or are they much the same? I thought you said you had many of the books.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to Dungeon,
I have been surprised at how well the geomorph tiles look when slotted together. Wouldn't use them myself but its a neat concept.
I don't randomly stock either. I am not a fan at all of random tables unless it is to achieve something exceedingly complex.
Scott, what about the lang recommendations or are they much the same? I thought you said you had many of the books.
ReplyDeleteI have all but the Rose Book, which (I'm led to believe) was incomplete on Lang's death and consists mostly of stories printed in other volumes of the series.
Given what I know of your tastes, I'd opt for the earlier volumes in the series. I don't have them to hand, but my memory is that as the series progresses, he ranged farther and more often from the Western fairy tale corpus.
Definitely get the Dover Thrift Editions with the H. J. Ford illos. On a related note, I recently got a thrift edition of the Lang/Ford Tales of Troy and Greece. The Ford illos are unimpeachable as always (and are the reason I got the volume) but the cover is a truly wretched 2nd edition-D&D-looking dragon-fighty thing completely unrepresentative of the book's contents.
Ta.
ReplyDeleteGiven that your interest in caverns reflects my own somewhat I think you would like:
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Deep-Deadly-Descent-Treacherous/dp/0446527092
You really get a feeling for the real dungeoneering obstacle of water filled tunnels - sumps. Great story, great maps, poorly written.
Thanks for the book pointer, Kent, it looks pretty good.
ReplyDeleteAllan.