Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 160 - Wizards of the Coast Capitulation and Good Dungeon Maps

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

Good dungeon maps give players choices, have a good theme, and contents that support the theme and purpose of your dungeon.  But...how do you create dungeons like this?  Give this episode a listen and find out.   Also, hopefully we've heard the last of Wizards of the Coast trying to get rid of the OGL 1.0a. #dnd #opendnd #ogl #pathfinder #paizo #orc   Resources: Wizards of the Coast announcement:  https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1439-ogl-1-0a-creative-commons    What it means to “Jaquay a dungeon”:  https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon   Great interview of Jennell.Jaquays by The Wandering DM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd1wrdSSc60

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. You'd go into one room and there'd be a pair of carrion crawlers. One open doorway over, there'd be two dozen kobolds. Wouldn't the carrion crawlers start picking off kobolds and eating them? While we're on the subject, what did the kobolds eat? Certainly not the ettin one room over from that, or the ancient red dragon just down the hall. over from that or the ancient red dragon just down the hall. Hey, wherever you are, thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast. This week it's episode 160, all about designing good dungeons and dungeon maps. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Monks. I always wanted to become a Gregorian monk,

but I guess I just never got the chance. Okay, it wasn't that bad. Come on. It wasn't that bad. I haven't had many podcast reviews or ratings lately, so if you have a moment, please like, rate, and review wherever you happen to find this podcast. It would help others find the podcast as well. In what is hopefully my last update for a long, long time about the Wizards of the Coast's attempt to deauthorize the OGL 1.0a, Wizards of the Coast's executive producer of Dungeons & Dragons, Kyle Brink, issued an apology, stating they were leaving the OGL 1.0a in place and as is, untouched. They will not be rescinding the license in favor of their original plan of replacing it with 1.1 or 1.2 version of it. More than 15,000 people took the opportunity to provide feedback

about the 1.2 version, and the results were overwhelming, effectively forcing Wizards' hand. The 1.0a license that has been used to produce third-party content since D&D 3.0 in the year 2000 is staying in place. Further, they released version 5.1 of their system reference document, a subset of all the D&D rules, under the Creative Commons license, which is even more open than the previous license was. Content providers can choose which arrangement they want to release their content under, and it gives those of us who create content even more flexibility than we had before this whole mess started. For those of you who haven't heard of the Creative Commons license, it's not owned by Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro, so there's no real danger of them

trying to sneak in restrictive modifications to the SRD in the future. Mr. Brink went on to say that they will not have a restrictive virtual tabletop policy and that this change to make the game even more open is a one-way change that cannot be undone. This is maybe the most successful protest of a gaming company ever, and it proves that grassroots activism can work and make a difference. Financial news organizations, the NPR and CNBC were all reporting about the uproar my friends Forbes yes that Forbes published an article titled a beginner's guide to Pathfinder 2e by Rob Wieland Forbes I never thought I'd see this day Hasbro who owns Wizards of the Coast have finally heard the hue and cry of thousands of content

producers and fans, and probably the plunging subscriptions to D&D Beyond, and has capitulated. Is the fight over? Absolutely not. The price of freedom is vigilance, and Wizards of the Coast still own the rights to OGL 1.0a. Given that they've tried to make changes to this gaming license with the release of D&D 4.0, and again this year, the cynic in me says that this isn't the last time they're going to try to mess with the license for the sake of profits. But for now, no more doom and gloom. The gaming landscape will remain open, content providers can still publish their material under the original OGL, or they now have the choice to use Creative Commons, and they don't have to worry

that Wizards of the Coast will yank the rug out from underneath them. That being said, damage very much done. There's a lot of players, DMs, and content providers that have lost trust and faith in Wizards of the Coast, and they've fled to other game systems, and I'm concerned that the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie may suffer because of it. We may lose an opportunity to evangelize the hobby to people who may have been interested in learning more because they watched the movie. Paizo, while Wizards of the Coast were busy making ham-handed mistakes, took advantage. They offered some of their core products, like the core rulebook, beginner's box, at a discount, and offered one of the key lore books for Galarian,

The Lost Omens World Guide, online for free. Players responded, and Paizo announced that in the last two weeks they have already sold out of their core rulebooks they had in stock, and that stock was supposed to last eight months. Paizo also announced that they are going to release the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC, as a commitment to the irrevocable, perpetual, independent, system-neutral open license that will serve the tabletop community via non-profit stewardship. They anticipate a first draft of the ORC come in February,

and they are going to solicit comments when they do release it. I fully intend on supporting this license and any content I ever produce, adventures, homebrews, whatever, will be released under this license. Am I advocating a mass exodus from D&D 5e and a boycott of 1D&D? No, that's not how I roll. If you've listened to me for a while, you know I'll tell you to play what you want to play. Find a game you enjoy with people you enjoy with, and let those D20s fly. Focus on the collaborative fun and storytelling, and I promise you and your friends will have fun doing it. Oh, damn it, it's too early for that tagline.

You know what? I love you all. Now on to the episode. Let's start off with a caveat. This episode is not about good battle map design. I covered that topic back in episode 35 when dinosaurs thundered across the plains of North America, and I talked about adding variations and interesting obstacles to your battle maps rather than making them just flat open plains with infinite sight lines. This episode is focused more on larger maps, those of an entire dungeon that you run your party of characters through, chop them up into cat food, and leave the survivors

broken, empty husks of their former selves. But to define what a dungeon map design means, we need to take a half step back and define what's a dungeon. Most of us immediately think of ruined buildings with deep hidden basements or cave systems that run deep into the earth. But dungeons don't have to be holes in the ground that the PCs go into. Dungeons come in a wide variety of designs and themes. In short, a dungeon is any place where monsters and treasure can be found. Traditionally, yes, it could be ruins like an old castle complex or an abandoned town. But it could also be an occupied location like a lair, a temple, a prison, or a sunken pirate ship.

It could even be a tomb like a pyramid or catacomb. It can even be a natural location like a cave, cavern, or area in a forest like a set of clearings. It can be two rooms or 200. forest like a set of clearings. It can be two rooms or 200. The only limit is your imagination about what can be considered a dungeon, a crashed spaceship, abandoned school campus, offshore oil rig, volcano complex, the innards of a dead god, whatever your creative mind can think up. Apropos of nothing, by the way, but for my money, if we're talking about abandoned buildings here on Earth, there is nothing creepier than an abandoned church. I don't know why, it just kind of gives me the willies.

It's supposed to be a place of togetherness and support, regardless of your faith, and now it's abandoned. Empty, hollow, and dead. This has been the Sharing Our Neuroses podcast with Jeremy Shelley. Next up, I'll talk about trypophobia, which is the fear of f***. Whatever your dungeon of choice looks like, you'll likely need a map of some sort. It should go without saying that you do not have to design your own map. There are a ton, and I mean a ton, of good map designers out there. Find one you like, whether free or commercial, buy it or download it for your game and use that. I would ask, though, if you do use someone's map,

support the map maker if you use their stuff. Some of them are very, very good at what they do, and I'd like to see them keep making maps. My fellow GMs, we have enough to prep for each session. And if you don't want to design your own map, don't. Draw it freehand as you go on a dry erase board. Do it theater of the mind. I'll admit I like having a map for an entire dungeon,

but if you're like me, you'll probably find a map that's almost right, almost perfect, and the differences may occasionally drive you to create a map of your own. Use what you prefer to make your map, by the way. What I'm going to focus on are some tenets of good map design, not the tools you use to do so. I'm not going to recommend a particular map-making software in this episode. I've used a bunch. Dungeon Draft, Dungeon Fog, Incarnate, Dungeon Painter Studio, Campaign Cartographer 3, and many others, including Graph Paper and a Pencil and a Pen. You know, like the bad old days. It doesn't matter what you use.

But suppose you do decide you want to build your own dungeon map. What makes a good one? I'm glad you asked since that's the topic of this episode. You know, I should invite you to more recordings. Yes, you should. Has anyone told you how handsome you are? Not lately, and thank you so much. I am so happy to be here.

You really should love and forgive yourself more, Jeremy. I should, but I find it very difficult sometimes. I'm sorry, everyone. Sometimes he gets like this. Where did I go just now? Dungeons can be designed a variety of ways, but there are some basic rules that you should follow when sitting down to design the Crypt of Count Kellig or the Reprobate Caverns or the Forbidden Grotto. The first thing you need to think about, what is the theme of your dungeon? Is your dungeon a ruined temple to the God of Rivers? A lost city for a nation that was conquered by merfolk? An isolated group of lizard folk living in a cave? Having an idea for your theme will pay off when it comes to putting monsters and decorations into the various rooms of your dungeon.

Monsters should be logical for your dungeon. An active, thriving home for locothaws will probably have them and their pets as primary encounters. I doubt they're going to have a group of kuatua living in their home. Unless they're diplomats here to negotiate peace between the two species, which would be an interesting twist to an adventure. If the party goes in and like attacks one group or the other, the attacked group will blame the other one and war could be declared simply because the PCs showed up. Damn, that could make sense and would make a fun campaign and just completely shattered my example. Okay, here's another. I doubt a family of owlbears will have a gelatinous cube running around their den eating their leftovers.

A group of humans aren't going to tolerate a harpy nest in their temple tower. You get what I'm saying. Part of the theme should be thoughts about what types of creatures you'll want to fill it in and what types of creatures work well together. No detail, don't go into all sorts of heavy lists at this point. Just start thinking undead and vermin would likely be good in crypts. Maybe dark elves in caverns that lead to the Underdark. That level of thought.

Make sure the contents make sense. If you have a group that doesn't think too hard about it though, then maybe you don't have to waste a lot of cycles on it. They don't think too hard why there's a trap outside the only working toilet in the dungeon. In the bad old days of dungeon design, the adventure writers really didn't give two shits about whether the monsters in the rooms made sense. You'd go into one room and there'd be a pair of carrion crawlers. One open doorway over, there'd be two dozen kobolds.

Wouldn't the carrion crawlers start picking off kobolds and eating them? While we're on the subject, what did the cobalts eat? Certainly not the ettin one room over from that or the ancient red dragon just down the hall. And while we're at it, that dragon is gargantuan. How did it squeeze its big old butt in a 20 by 20 room with a 5 foot wide door? Teleport? Shapeshift? When asked, the DM would just wave their hand and shrug and alright, whatever, let's start combat. These days, we can do better than that. I'm a fan of realism and if the monster is in a location, it needs to have a way to eat, rest, and reproduce, even if that way is to leave the dungeon to do so. So it needs to be able to do all those things

in some way. Monster population could be an episode all its own, so I'm dropping these thoughts here, and I'll pick them up in a future episode. Make sure the stuff that you find in this dungeon, the various rooms, makes sense. Another term for this is dungeon dressing. The torture room in the castle probably has implements used to torture prisoners. If it's an actively used castle, those implements are probably fairly neat and orderly. If a castle has been abandoned for a century, there's probably pieces missing, but some that are there may be scattered on the floor instead of kept in their places on purpose

built racks. Temples probably have religious iconography and relics. An abandoned wizard's tower probably has rugs, books, mirrors, a nice comfy chair. Cellars may have busted wine casks or maybe poorly maintained pipes that now drip water. If I'm a player in your dungeon and you tell me that this natural-hewn cave has a bunch of, I don't know, grandfather clocks, a feather bed, and parts from a broken ferris wheel in it, you can bet your bottom dollar my character, if it has an intelligence of remotely high values, is going to try to get to the bottom of why this weird assortment of shit is in this cavern. Is there a gnome tinkerer that lives here? Is it time or space displaced inhabitants? Is it a gold dragon who collects mechanical devices? I'm going to want to know.

Not everybody's like me though, I will admit, so you may be able to throw whatever you want in your rooms, and this step becomes easy. But I do strongly recommend you think about your dungeon dressing and make it make sense based on the type of building it is and the current and former occupants. Second thing you need to think about is a rough plan of the way you want your adventure to flow in your dungeon. Remember, I'm ancient.

I'm approaching lich level of age and manage a ton of projects in my corporate life. So the way I plan my dungeons, I like their projects. I usually start with a flow chart. I outline the general rooms, the areas where choices need to be made, and the results of those choices.

Is the dungeon mostly linear, circular, branching to dead ends? Are there crossroads? What's at the end of those? Are there a mix of designs that merge together? For example, is it a stone temple built out of the base of a mountain that has worked stone walls for a while, but abruptly changes to natural caverns about midway through? If so, you can build your structure accordingly.

Is there a major intersection that leaves different directions for a great distance? If so, now is the time to set those layout plans in pencil. A word of advice, though. In general, linear railroad dungeons generally, generally aren't interesting. Giving the players choices in your dungeon usually results in a better experience and more buy-in from the players, knowing that they made an active choice for their characters. I just wish sometimes they'd make the damn decision a little faster. You know what, I've got a lot more to say on that, and that'll probably

come to you next week, so stay tuned. Once you have an overall layout idea of your dungeon, the third thing I'll do is to come up with detailed ideas for contents of the dungeon based on the theme. What monsters and traps should go into the various rooms? Flesh out your creature and content ideas from step one into things that are a little more detailed. Suppose this is the work area of a reclusive gnome who's been collecting clockwork devices. Chances are they'd have some clockwork creatures running around. Rooms may contain haphazard piles of parts and equipment, maybe tools, or even half-finished clockwork creations. I'm picturing, by the way, a partially finished like clockwork humanoid propped up in a corner with discarded parts on it. The party starts looking around the room and the clockwork head attached to the half-finished body slowly turns to look at them and then says,

You're not father! And it starts screaming an alarm that echoes off the walls. Well, so much for a stealthy entry to this dungeon. Areas that aren't lived in would likely have vermin like creepy crawlies, spider webs, and other indications that no being about the size of the PCs has walked through here in some time. Unless they find a lone set of footprints in the dust leading into the recesses of the ruined factory. Whose footprints are those? Are they friendly? What size shoes are we talking here? If it's a tomb, maybe there's lots of undead. Caverns could have vermin, creatures from the Underdark. Sky citadels could have giants, orcs, or dwarves, depending on your world and its lore. Fourth thing to think about, how do you want the dungeon to end?

Does it lead to another level of the dungeon? Is the staff of magical what's-it-what in the last room? Sometimes a dungeon is just there as a, sorry for using the term, side quest, and doesn't have to be intricate and involved. The dungeon isn't really part of the main world-saving adventure, but the noble ask you to recover the family heirloom sword lost by their child when they wanted to go adventuring in the local caves. Most owlbear caves, for example,

won't have switchbacks and loops with intricate traps, and there may even only be one or two rooms in size. So the dungeon ends when the party kills the owlbear and retrieves the sword and takes it back to Baron von Schmuckmeister in exchange for 250 gold pieces and the recipe for Brunswick stew or whatever the fuck was promised. However, if the dungeon is in support of the main quest, you need to at least think about what happens when the players reach the end, or the exit of the dungeon. Do they return to the previous quest giver? Does the party discover key pieces of information that lead them to the next quest hub?

Do they find the magical MacGuffin that will better enable them to kill the big bad? Decide this from the very beginning and it makes the overall design work a bit easier. Decide this from the very beginning, and it makes the overall design work a bit easier. Fifth tip I have for you. Your design should allow for character failure. Unless you're letting the PCs succeed no matter what, and let's be honest, that's pretty fucking boring, then chances are characters will have to make one or more checks when they proceed through parts of the dungeon. That means if they're making checks, there's a chance that the PCs will fail and not be able to do whatever that check happens to be. To state the obvious,

one potential showstopper check is combat. There's a chance that a certain monster will be much tougher than you expect. The PCs could be poorly built for a particular encounter, and that fight with a pair of carrion crawlers that you expect of the PCs to walk over in a laugher becomes a combat that's a nasty fight for the PCs, and they have to flee because they can't win. But non-combat can also be a showstopper. Season 1's critical role party was notoriously frustrated by locked doors. Look at your dungeon design and find the choke points, the obstacles that could grind party exploration to a halt. Maybe four different hallways in your dungeon funnel down to a single bridge. You have a great idea to have the bridge be destroyed years ago by an earthquake to give the characters a challenge, but what if they can't fly? They have no ladders. They forgot to buy rope.

Or what if one of the characters falls? I mean, is it just insta-death and roll up a new character? Maybe. Or maybe the real adventure becomes saving Slippy McFalls a lot. Another example. Suppose the key to get to the magical vault is located in a prison cell hidden behind a false stone in the floor. What if the characters never go to the prison? What if they go and they bomb all their perception checks and never find the key? Do you have a plan for how the adventure moves forward? Maybe an alternate way to unlock the door or creative way around it? RPGs by their nature have a bit of randomness to them,

and there's a chance that the universe's random number generator will be stacked against the party that night. Prepare for your PCs to fail, and don't let that stop the adventure in its tracks. Sixth tip, and it's kind of a corollary to the last one. Don't just prepare for failure. Reward amazing successes and creative problem solving. Suppose you have the center part of your dungeon with multiple levels, all visible and reachable with the right combination of skills and creative problem solving. If your sorcerer can cast levitation and carry a rope from one bridge to another, and the

party is able to make the appropriate checks to get from one bridge to another along using the rope, bypassing 1, 3, 11, or 155 rooms, let them. Raise them. Reward them for it. It makes sense in the game world, and it's a great idea. Give the appropriate XP for solving the problem in a way that maybe you didn't even think of. The work put into the skipped rooms isn't wasted. Stick those ideas in your GM notebook and use them at the next dungeon down the road.

For another example, suppose the party is breaking into a dilapidated fort with a wooden palisade around the perimeter that has gaps in the wood. The gaps are too small for the party to get through, but the summoner casts a spell and brings an intelligent creature into being on the other side of the wall and gets them to unlock the gate from the far side. That's not cheating. That's creative problem solving. Reward them for it. In that same vein, my seventh tip is to have secrets in your dungeon. Sometimes in the literal sense, like secret doors, secret rooms, hidden areas, etc. If your temple has an area that only priests or clerics were allowed to enter, put it behind a secret door and if the party discovers it, there's some valuable religious items behind that door that have remained

untouched during these centuries of neglect. But another interpretation of secrets could be secrets about the purpose of the building or area that can be uncovered, whether it's through exploration, documents, logs, or the contents of various rooms yes it was a tavern in its heyday but the party finds evidence that the back entrance through the caves were was used for smuggling slaves out of the city this rewards the players for being thorough and buying into your game world my eighth tip no matter how long you think it will take to complete the dungeon, it will take longer. Parties like to discuss options, roleplay, crack jokes, etc. You never know when some treasure discovery is going to descend into laughter as two players roleplay the scene from Return of the King, where Diagol and Smiagol find the ring going

line for line in the movie because they've both seen it two dozen times. That's okay. It just means that your prep work making the dungeon will go two sessions instead of one. Or in the case of a lot of my friggin' groups, six sessions instead of five. Now, after all of these tips, there's someone from RPG Pass that I want to introduce you to. Janelle Jaquaze. Janelle is a classic map designer, designing maps for adventures like Caverns of Thracia, Dark Tower, Griffin Mountain, and a half dozen other old-school classics for Judges Guild, Chaosium, Flying Buffalo, and TSR.

Later, she started to design maps for video games. In the latter capacity, she recently wrote some essays on maps that she designed for Halo Wars. She believed that good maps rely on some very simple and easy to learn premises, like maps should have multiple possible entrances. Maps should have branches and loops. If your dungeon has multiple levels, have multiple ways to transition between those levels. Connect distant levels to each other so there may be a way to skip from level 2 to level 7 in the dungeon. Have secret and unusual paths on your dungeons.

Connect different dungeons together in multiple, varying, and interesting ways. Have minor elevation shifts within a level, so like a half flight of stairs, if you will. And think about a dungeon's verticality. and think about a dungeon's verticality. This episode is already in danger of wanting 50% long and Janelle Jaquais has written essays on dungeon design. I'm going to include some links in the resources for this episode. You can see these links in the episode description or by coming on down to taking20podcast.com and clicking on the episode.

If you really want a deep dive with someone who has the equivalent of a PhD in dungeon design, go read some of her tips and tenets at thealexandrian.net and watch a YouTube video of an interview that Janelle gave from the Wandering DMs. Someday in the future, I may do another deep dive on her tips and tricks, but I kind of need to get ready for gaming tonight, so let's wrap this up. Map design is both art and science, and while much can be learned from studying maps from published adventurers and the way others do it, in a lot of ways the best way to learn is to make dungeon maps. Just do it, if you will. Think about the way a dungeon will flow, design with the end in the mind, reward creative problem solving, and plan for ways around character failure.

Take some tips from Ms. Jackways, and I bet you and your players will have fun doing it. Please take a moment to subscribe to my podcast. Even better, like, rate, and review me wherever you found it. Mikey Golshinsky, and Mikey, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. If I'm not, please accept my deepest, humblest apologies. He mentioned my podcast over on the Dungeon Master Resources Facebook page, and I've had a couple of people reach out to me because of it. Thank you so much for the kind words, Mikey, and for helping spread the word about the podcast. I sincerely appreciate

it. You know, it's been a long time since I've had a player episode, so I think it's time for one. Tune in next week when I'm going to focus on dealing with indecision as a player. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Monks. I once played a monk who only used his feet and couldn't really tell jokes. He just couldn't deliver a punchline.

This has been episode 160, Principles of Good Map Design. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2023. References to game system content are copyright their respective publishers.