I’m preparing for the eighth session of my second campaign set in Hitherland, a setting I started working on immediately after getting interested in the OSR in 2020. Things have been going quite well from my end, and I’ve been enjoying both the prep and the play. There have been two character deaths and we just got our first second level character, a thief named Vich. An unnamed torchbearer has also died.
We’re still working on our second dungeon, which is at least intended to be quite large. Right now they are only about halfway through the first quadrant of the first floor. Downtime activities have been pretty substantial, but most of our time has been spent in the dungeons. Travel back and forth has been dramatic with many random encounters, but these are few in comparison to the density of stuff underground. I aim to talk about my experience building the first dungeon we played in in this post.
The Church of St. Éla, the Dreamer is located in hex 1105 in the East Town district of the fallen city of Inverness. It cuts a dramatic profile, with the sanctuary built extending from a hill and the offices and living quarters of several servants of the cult living deeper, in stone-hewn halls. It also holds a secret: a demon-minotaur slave ran amok during the chaos of the coming of the forest, killing every human it could lay its hands on. It is still deep within the church, dragging heavy chains behind it as it wanders without hunger or thirst.
Setup
We are playing online on Owlbear Rodeo. For the first session, I gave my players two characters each, a torchbearer, a porter, and a written hook:
The Church of St. Éla is the only authority that remains in the last human stronghold in the ruins of Inverness. They have contracted you to venture into the forest-overrun city to a chapel built into the side of a hill, there to recover a cache of magic items. The instructions from the robe-bearer were as follows: In the office of the abbot is a passage beyond the walls of the chapel, which will take you to a place where demons once dwelled. There you will find a coffer marked with the sign of Éla. You are to return this to us. In return for this act of devotion, the Church is prepared to give you 1000 gold pieces and it’s thanks. Go with the blessings of the saints.
The coffer contains rods that deal automatic damage to minotaurs, causing them great pain. The minotaurs, of which there were many hidden away in church holdings throughout Inverness, are in fact totally evil demons. They were used to power magical devices - great wheels of pain as in Conan - which in turn provided magical energies to the civil authorities of the city.
With all that explanation out of the way, and with my notes linked here, it’s time to describe the process I used for creating dungeons.
Creating the Dungeon
To start with, I use a ton of random tables. The sheer amount of coming up with cool ideas for a dungeon I find to be a lot of work, and offloading some of that work to tables saves me time and energy. I also enjoy the constraints this enforces on me: I might disregard what the rolls say, but they often encourage me to think outside the box. I usually start with an idea of dungeon level and size, as well as some thoughts about what’s generally going on, then I often generate a map using donjon or some other tool. I very often redraw these dungeons in Dungeon Scrawl. I produce both player facing, and DM facing maps.
Once I have a map, its time to key. This is the most time-consuming part of creating a dungeon for me and can be fun or exhausting depending on how easily the ideas come to me. For this dungeon, I used the stocking chart from the 1E DMG. This went alright, but gave me too many empty rooms, and moving forward I’ve adjusted the table to have more monsters and treasure. I roll once on my stocking table to get a sense of what sort of interactivity might be in the room, and I roll once on Courtney Campbell’s table from his empty rooms PDF (now included in a really great book) to get a sense of what the room is or might have been. This second roll is discarded more often than that on the stocking table - sometimes I just don’t need another oubliette.
Once I have a general breakdown of what’s in the dungeon - how many empty rooms, monsters, traps, and so on - I start brainstorming, broadly following advice from this video. I mark each idea with the kind of room it might fit into and start placing things.
At this point we have usually something like half of the rooms populated. Now I start looking at the map and what’s placed. I use what’s already in place to inspire more ideas: should this whole region be populated by the monsters I have from this room? The intention is that by this point there should be enough to bootstrap finishing the dungeon or dungeon floor. I then go through and fill in things like HP per monster, NPC stats and personalities, and other mechanical stuff like treasure.
Treasure I usually generate on the first pass. At the moment I’m working on the assumption of something like 100GP per level per room, not including magic items. If there’s too much or too little treasure in aggregate, I adjust, but I also don’t particularly mind it being pretty out of wack as long as I’m not handing out 100K GP on the first level. I use Courtney Campbell’s excellent treasure PDF to help think about this, favoring handing out bulky art objects and such instead of just coins.
A last crossing of t’s is determining how the doors and walls of the dungeon work and look. Now the dungeon is basically done. Obviously I fiddle with it, write some nice read-aloud text maybe. But it’s more than usable at this point and my time is probably better served doing something else.
