Blog Book Club #50 Dungeon Design and Stocking

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Welcome to this week’s blog book club. Happy 50th entry in this series! While we close out the month of July, in our timeline of great blogs we are also closing out 2012. Today we will be discussing “Dungeon Design and Stocking - with examples!” by Gus L on his old blog.

Next week is “OSR Dogma Recency” by Brendan S of Necropraxis.

You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

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This week’s post is about Gus L demonstrating his dungeon design process by creating an intro dungeon for his Land of 1,000 Towers campaign (AKA the setting of Anomalous Subsurface Environment). Gus uses a natural approach to making dungeons, he selects an appropriate landmark, bases the structure of a dungeon on what features that type of building would logically possess and populates it with factions, traps, and treasure.

Readers hoping to follow in Gus’s footsteps are steered toward the right questions. For example, what is the function of the dungeon in the campaign? In the example given its an location designed to seed with the information needed for players to discover the megadungeon at the center of the campaign. I appreciate that Gus shows us the art that inspires the dungeon creation. While choosing the right floor plan is of course important, I think sometimes its too easy to skip finding a good source of inspiration and a mood to convey to the players.

Over the years Gus’s work has maintained a fascination with fallen worlds containing old ruins that fester with dangerous life. We’ve all experienced bad adventure back story but here Gus makes a good case for understanding the history of a dungeon so details about its construction, former use, and hidden secrets of its builders are on hand to inform the referee. This is contrasted by how a dungeon may have been reinvented by new inhabitants. This layer of detail help players imagine that a space is living, without becoming excessive. The use of color coding to group rooms by theme highlight several examples.

While naturalistic, I appreciate the example is still centered on the utility of a dungeon as a space for playing a game. Its not an exercise of building a tower for its own sake and cramming as many goblins and robots as would be ‘logical’. Enemies are chosen based on what an early level party could survive. Ultimately, I think Gus understands that for a location to feel adventurous its got to have elements that are detrimental to parties in some situations and beneficial in others. In this way the traps and factions encountered create openings for inventive players and provide danger for unlucky ones.

I enjoyed this post. I don’t think I have the skills to follow the steps Gus uses here to make a satisfactory dungeon without relying on randomness, but I still appreciate following along with the exercise. How’d you like it?

P.S. for those that like this post and may be unfamiliar, Gus is still at it over on his new blog all dead generations. Enjoy!

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Good stuff. I’ve never been able to stock anything completely using random tables. Once I get a couple of entries generated and placed, I start filling in around those using a similar approach. The only way I’ve ever been able to use the random tables, even, was to roll for entries just to provide a cast of creatures without any specific map placement. Rolling for random moster to fill a room just hasn’t ever worked for me.

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FYI the link for “Dungeon Design and Stocking - with examples” is wrong, it links to the Keystone Readings list.

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The only time stocking via random tables has worked for me is in a megadungeon environment where I’ve already put enough work into customizing the random monster tables per level/sublevel/faction that I can look at a block of 30 rooms, identify and stock the tentpole areas, and then let the dice fill out the rest.
Well, I guess I can also use the tables to restock cleared rooms if necessary, though then I’ll often use a more generic table because the population of this level has changed enough that my careful balance of morlock and troglodyte faction encounters is no longer operational due to adventurer-induced population collapse among the morlocks.
In both cases, though, I reserve the right to use the rolled result either as a final answer or as a spark to think about. “Huh, restocking this area I rolled kobolds, goblins, goblins, and hobgoblins. I think those kobolds are actually going to be another group of goblins, but with some sort of divided loyalties that make them a subfaction…”

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Thank you! The link should be correct now.

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I really enjoyed this blog post.

I have also generally approached dungeon design as a combined naturalistic & game design problem. But I had a nice chat on Mastodon recently with Brian Rogers (@SubplotKudzu@dice.camp) - Dice.camp about how they are stocking Dyson’s Megadelve that also appealed to me:

Essentially they are using the Basic Set stocking tables to determine which rooms have monsters, traps, treasure, puzzles, special encounters, but then uses his general concept for the area (or in this case, the one in Dyson’s notes) to determine what those monsters are. He also notes that at the end he shifts things around to make it make more sense.

I think this approach might speed things up for me by preventing me from getting stuck looking at a blank page.

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Yeah. I do like the Basic Stocking method (and I use a variation of it for most of my 20-minute Dungeons). I go into the process a little bit in the final page of my [Dolmenwood Dozen](d4 Caltrops: Dolmenwood Dozen), but basically I lean into it for inspiration, and never really feel completely beholden to the results. Things might fit better in different places, or need to be adjusted a little bit as I go. But it can be a great way to get things started!

I eventually ended up doing a [Dungeon Stocking - Expanded](https://blog.d4caltrops.com/2024/12/dungeon-stocking-expanded.html) version of the table that features some additional “prompts” and links to some of my other d100 Table Resources. I find that sometimes, resisting the urge to discard those results outright and instead seeing where the dice take me ends up producing things that are far more interesting had I sat down and attempted to script the entire thing from start to finish.

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