• he/him

A tabletop enthusiast, for better or worse.
Where to Find Me After Cohost:
Blog

Projects & Campaigns:
Clouder's RPG Spreadsheet
dungeon23: The Tree & The Tower
D&D: Old Flames
Break!!: Mossgrave
Erasure Adventure Prep


I thought this one would take longer tonight, but honestly it all came together real quickly! The room is an aged dwarven plaza. It shows signs of damage from long-ago wars. Two large ramps spiral down to lower floors. A statue sits near the center, and behind it a stagnant pool; if the pool can be cleaned the water spirit inside would grant a boon and perhaps join any Spiritist character in the party.

To the north, a large hole is broken though, damaged by either the undead or the bearmole from 1/24. Regardless of who broke it, skeletons pour forth and assault a wooden barricade to the northwest. The barricade in-turn is manned by Poppets, who strive to push back the skeletons.

The door to the southeast is locked from this side, but leads to 1/23. Another door to the southwest is bricked over and would take time and tools to breach.


This is a possible mini-boss area. If not here, then in the room to the north will be a skeleton lieutenant that is producing a tune that's animating the skeletons. I don't have a clever name for them yet, but they're in service or thrall to Dorn, The Threnodic Harp, who I figure is the boss of the first slice of the dungeon.

Spiritist is the working name for one of the jobs I am noodling with behind the scenes. I am trying to hit on something between Deedlit from Record of Lodoss War and a Pokemon Trainer. They start off with an elemental spirit that can do some themed magical things and throughout the dungeon they will get opportunities to recruit additional ones. Assuming I make the job actually work!

Even though I am noodling with rules and such in the background, I am feeling the pinch of having lost a week of prep time back between the December holidays. I only have a couple jobs roughed out and still haven't figured out how much XP and treasure I should be looking to handout each floor. On one hand, I can punt on this - I ultimately want to have fun making a draft of a dungeon - but on the other hand, I historically am terrible at giving out XP with any sort of regularity and having that sorted out would help with things.

So far I've settled on roughly two floors should grant a character one level. I decided on this after reading a bunch of blog posts and going "this feels fine." Specifically, I read these two B/X Blackrazor posts ages ago - Stocking Per Moldvay, Part 1 and Part 2 - and figured the six room ratio in it is a good rule-of-thumb for dungeon design. And then I read this new Delta's D&D Hotspot post about Advancement in Classic D&D and kinda just felt out that roughly 4 or 5 sessions should work out. My floors are 14 rooms, so should take roughly 2 or 3 sessions to navigate. Add two floors together, and that's about 4 to 6 sessions to get a level, which feels like a good working number for now.

Past that, some other stuff I need to consider is what grants XP. I want to minimize combat XP. Normally, that means going with treasure = XP, but I also want to reward exploration, crafting, and helping folks out (the last one being very inline with the YA and JRPG adventures I am pulling from). I also just don't like working with the obscenely large amounts of coin that go hand-in-hand with B/X D&D leveling. For now, I'm going to re-read Traverse Fantasy's OD&D's XP Penalty is Extraneous post and see if I like her ideas for lower XP totals.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Clouder's post:

You can assign each area an XP reward: once the area is explored (100% or about 90% if you want to be less precise about it), it is rewarded, as if per combat or treasure.

That's an enticing idea! It's a nice way to mimic how some dungeoneering video games, like Etrian Odyssey, incentivize you to map and explore by paying you for turning-in copies of your maps.

Ryuutama directly ties your character's experience and level up (and the world expansion itself) to travelogues that both characters write (in-world) and players write (out of game, in concise form); for travelogues to happen the party needs to travel, so it diegetically encourages it.

Maybe this idea would be somewhat of use?

It might. I doubt my players want to write travelogues - their schedules and the ways they interact with tabletop games haven't led them there before - but that feels like a good idea to look at and play around with. I pulled out my copy of Ryuutama the other day to flip through for the vibes, so this is a good reason to read through it again.

That'd be ideal. The biggest hurdle is a mechanical one - I play using a VTT at the moment. That turns exploration into a task of clearing fog-of-war from a map instead of players making a map. But particularly for a dungeon crawl, it feels like it'd be more fun to have players making maps.

It'd also just be nice for me to have one less thing to worry about with VTTs. I am absolutely over the amount of extra work that playing in Roll20 generates for me.

Could work. Particularly for the Tower portion of the dungeon, large parts of it have to fit into a confined space (it's a tower, after all). That would be easy to template out. At the least, I'm adding it to the list of stuff to think over. It's a good idea!