Writing rooms in pairs - Failure Tolerated

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Sean McCoy drops this little banger of advice.

I also really like the idea for making hexcrawls and general adventure writing. I was thinking this morning that you can expand this infinitely.

  • 1 room in a dungeon is paired to make 2 rooms.
  • Those 2 rooms have a counter-pair, making 4.
  • That 4 makes up a wing of the dungeon, which is at war with another mirrored wing.
  • Etc
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It’s one of those short on point posts that make me wonder why isn’t that advice more common?

I love your addendum for using it outside the dungeon as well! Will keep that in mind! It pairs well with creating relationships with NPCs around a village/region/setting.

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yes yes! relationships, patterns, and motifs, repeated at all scales, creates a creative coherence that is playable and interesting.

and speaking of pairs, what is built in here is that sometimes you use sympathies (like, goblin-goblin chief) you can also have opposing/antagonistic pairs (boring/empty room conceals an exciting secret door, orc room has hiding goblin). kissing cousins (tangentially related, thematically related, like a “tree room” followed by a “dirt room”). I dunno… other stuff as well.

I think this advice doesn’t get that much play cause its more like general “good writing” advice. which is hard to give and hard to get cause writing is hard.

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