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.
