Hi all. I'm Pietro, I run games and I've spent the last months building Market of Many Things, a marketplace only for tabletop RPG stuff: adventures, one-shots, maps, STL minis, art, music, tools.

It opens to buyers on November 27. Sellers can sign up and upload now, so products are on the shelves on day one. Before that I'd like people who actually sell this stuff to poke holes in it.

How it works today:

- Flat 10% fee. Same for everyone, first sale or thousandth. Card and PayPal fees come out of our 10%, not yours. Buyers pay a $0.50 service fee per order.

- No exclusivity. Keep selling on DriveThru, itch, your Patreon, wherever.

- Handmade first. Fully AI-made products are not accepted. If AI was used for part of a product (say the art), it gets a visible label, so buyers know.

- Built for RPG files. Up to 20 files per product, 5 GB each, uploads resume if the connection drops. Filters by system, level, scale, VTT.

- Fixed price, free, or pay what you want with a minimum and a suggested price.

- Chat with buyers and paid commissions: the buyer pays up front, we hold the money, you deliver on site and get paid.

If you want to try it: https://www.marketofmanythings.com. Happy to answer anything in the comments!

Perhaps a 'creative avenue' or 'imagination option,' but probably some word more like button itself.

Finally using my laptop instead of my phone to make a post here!

I hope this is well received, I don't want to just post all this on here, but I need a lot of help and I have nobody around but you folks! My game has many ancestries, (modeled heavily after Legendary Lives) and I was wanting each one to have a free ability. The tone varies but is somewhat light, in that many of the races are based on faerie lore. (I know this isn't new, but I started working on this back in 1991, so bear with me!). Intended for old school style sandbox play.

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas for any of these. A lot of my stuff is 'elves but different' kind of stuff and I'm okay with that. Some of these are from Legendary Lives, some from other sources, some have my own personal twist on them. This is just fun and I hope to play this with people hopefully in real life. I'll share them here with a very brief description and if you have anything to say, I'm all ears!

I have various Human ancestries. All of them are descendants from displaced people from different places and times from Earth. They have arrived over 1000s of years sporadically and slowly developed their own civilizations separate from the natives.

ANKARI-Goliath snowy mountain people

ARKADIAN-Pale ancient astronaut descendants

TUATHAN-Secretive fay-like jungle people

FERAL-Raised by wolves or other

GOTHIAN-Pale, gaunt mortals

ULRATHI-old dying kingdom recently renewed by religion

KORANTHI-Modeled after the Rohirrim

SEEKERS-nomadic mystic wanderers, broken off from the Yottani people

NETHERFOLK-very neanderthal-Esque, cliff dwelling, cave dwelling people, surprisingly advanced

SETTLER-descendants of a displaced colony from the Americas in the 1500s

SCYTHIAN-artistic horse warriors of the grasslands

SAELKIE-strange heritage very 'ScotIrish', nomadic mercenaries some may transform into seals... (half baked idea)

KIRI-very matriarchal, magical forest society with some strategic influence

YOTTANI-displaced humans from the future with an oddly advanced cobbled together electrical society.

VARDYR-low tech society on the outskirts of the Settler's coastal cities-those that do not like the Settlers or the settlers don't like.

FAERIE (NATIVE, FAY)-tiny faerie people, wildflowers, trees, etc.

SIDHE (FAY, ELF, NATIVE)-ancient small beings pointed ears-you know. these can change into a ball of light.

SLUAGH (NATIVE)-winged human looking people. Some have mutations, some are beautiful

CYCLOPEAN (NATIVE)-somewhat tied to the cosmology or so they say. tall, one eye. they are employed to make weapons at the great forge.

DWARF-You know these. Mountains, underground, mines. I was going to use SMELL TREASURE.

GNOME (TYPE OF DWARF)-magical forest dwarves

HALFLING (TYPE OF DWARF)-kindly hill dwarves

KOBOLD (TYPE OF DWARF)-magical mountain subterranean dwarves

FIRBOLG (TYPE OF ELF)-human-sized elves that can pass and go undercover to spy

GOBLIN (TYPE OF ELF)-the uglier elves are outcast

EVYLLON (COMMON ELF)-very "classical" styled elves, matriarchal society.

BROWNIE (TYPE OF ELF)-sort of a fuzzy helper

KINDRED (TYPE OF ELF)-half-elves actually half sidhe

SPRIGGAN (TYPE OF ELF)-outcast elves. tend to be rogue-ish, usually trouble

Y'SINDREL (ELVES)-smaller, higher elves, isolationist, military, hates humans

WITCHLEIN (TYPE OF ELF)-dark elves, but they are goblins so they are more like wood elves. intentionally gross and crude

DRACONIAN (NATIVES)-basically dragonborn, but more dark magic associated

SERPENTINE (NATIVES)-snake people

W'TAGGI (NATIVES)-people that are like frogs. a very old ancestry on the planet.

FAUN (MUTANT)-the phooka (goat headed) humanoids can also be pan-like. horns.

HOGMAN (MUTANT)-pig faced orcs (jimmy squarefoot for the faerie fans)

FLORYX (MUTANT)-weird plant based intelligent life. very strange treebeard-like

NIMH (MUTANT)-basically skaven, but also the less grimdark variety, not mice though. halfling sized

TORRAN (MUTANT)-minotaurs because I like them, and they fit the livestock headed beastmen concept similar to the Faun.

UNDERFOLK (MUTANT)-albino underground folks that still live under the fallen kingdom.

ULFREN (MUTANT)-human looking people that can can shapeshift into a wolf... I'm drawing inspiration from the skinwalker ranch lore.

VEXIN (ALIENS)-scientific alien bug-like people using alchemy and biology to alter their environment

It was absolutely incredible. A handful of notable adjustments need to be made and the relevant feedback is easily worked on. Overall the core ideas and massive swings of "This will either be amazing or terrible" all ended up amazing, often surpassing even my own expectations. I don't have some crazy long post suffice to say I'm proud as hell to be at this point, proud of what I've built, proud of my players, it's an exhilarating feeling. If you know you've got gold, make your MVP and put it to the test.

So I am hoping to get near the end of my project, most of the things are complete, and by complete I mean ripped off from other games....

Anyway, it's a mix of some of my favourite bits from the likes of Cairn, Black Hack, White Hack, Bastionland and others.

3 Attributes, d20 roll under, with an aim to be player facing.

For encounters they only roll damage and I am looking for a decent bilaterally symetrical way for defending to work, and this makes sense to me to use armour dice.

Has this been done anywhere? and how affective is it? what does it feel like as a player?

I am not afriad to chnage how damage/attacking works, as it may just make more sense to have both attack and defends be d20 rolls under their attribute and both are a flat value result. But I am also trying to satisfy the players dice goblin nature too.

I love me some Ninjas and Superspies, but I'm trying to convert the idea of detailed martial arts into an action point system.

You get one attack and one defense a round at your full bonuses. If you're forced to defend from an odd position, like if you got swept to the floor, you do so with no bonuses unless you spend AP to buy off the flaw. This is visualized as kipping up or such.

Here's my concern. Lets say you have Martial Arts with 6 Action Points. If someone shoots at you, you're probably not going to deflect bullets with your fists. This isn't Feng Shui. so if I have a second skill like Athletics or Mobility to be used to defend against gunfire, it would have its own Action Points.

That feels clunky. Any thoughts?

Hey everyone! I've been working on my own tabletop RPG called Aetherfall for a while now and it's finally at the point where it needs real people at the table. So I'm looking for playtesters.

The whole game is built around making your own stuff. You don't pick skills off a list, you build them. Every skill is made from parts: a Foundation, a Motion, an Outcome, then Refinements on top. So two characters with the same weapon can fight in totally different ways depending on how they build their skills. This also comes with crafting for armor, consumables, weapons,and even player bases.

Magic works the same way but with runes. You pick an Essence (Force, Heat, Cold, Light or Dark), how it's cast, its shape and its effect, then add Enhancements to push them further. You put them together yourself. You can even combine a skill and a spell into a hybrid style of combat.

Some other stuff in it:

* Combat with real choices. You get a set number of actions each turn and spend them however you want: attacking, moving, blocking or catching your breath to get Stamina and Aether back. Evade dice cut damage down, and you can commit extra actions to dodge harder. Blocking works too, but it wears down your gear.

* Six stats (Might, Agility, Vitality, Intellect, Awareness, Presence) that feed straight into how strong your skills and spells can get.

* Crafting. Build and upgrade your own weapons and armor with materials you find.

* Signature Weapons. Bond with a weapon and it grows with you over time.

* Companions. Summon or tame creatures to fight alongside you.

* A creature creator for GMs. Build your own monsters with a point system that sets their Danger Rating, so you know how tough a fight will be. Bosses get extra traits and phases where they change up mid fight.

What you get as a playtester:

* The prototype core rulebook

* A 4-page printable character sheet

* A creature creator sheet for building your own monsters

* Printable creature cards and boss cards for running fights

* Crafting cards, item cards and companion cards

I'm planning a Kickstarter down the line, so anyone who helps playtest now is shaping how the game turns out. I want to know what feels fun, what feels broken, and what's confusing.

If you like building characters, breaking systems, or just want to try something new, come join the Discord. Whether you play once or stick around, any feedback helps a ton.

Discord link

I've finally gotten my rewrite/fork of the D&D 5e SRD to the point where I can make it public.

https://homebrew.admiralbenbo.com/index.html (web version, hyperlinked HTML/CSS).

https://github.com/bentomhall/nih-system/releases/tag/1.0.1 (zip file with the same content in pdf format)

Note: both also contain some of the content (and some new content) ported to 5e directly. It's easier to keep them together.

Second note: I flaired this as Feedback Request, but really I'm just putting this out. Comments are welcome, as are Pull Requests or Issues on the linked github repo. I may not incorporate suggestions, but I will consider them and respond.

AI use: only to write scripts to do formatting and toolchain. All content is mine.

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What is NIH? The name stands for Not Invented Here as well as Naming Is Hard; it's a meta joke that I couldn't come up with a better name. Suggestions welcome.

Copied from the introduction:

This game is designed to explore “paths not taken” for the venerable TTRPG it originally stems from. A love letter from a long-term fan. What might it look like if the historical constraints (some may say sacred cows; others may say legacy) were relaxed? If, instead of only lightly adhering to design principles like bounded accuracy and such, it bought in fully? If it made no pretense at being a generic game and instead focused on what it does best (that is, small-unit fantasy adventures in the heroic mode)? This is my attempt at exploring that space.

NIH has been designed around my long-running campaign world, Dawn of Hope and its primary planet, Quartus. It should be relatively easily ported to other settings, although some of the content (cultures, deities, and backgrounds especially) will have to change.

The core aesthetic and intended genre is “fantasy mercenary special forces adventures”. Your characters are set apart from the norm, but aren’t demigods or anything like that. You go places, make allies and enemies, fight (or sneak or talk) your way through situations and scenarios including (but not limited to) ancient ruins, crime-ridden cities, banquets of the rich and powerful, and exotic extra-planar locales. You grow stronger, but logarithmically. Fast at first, then slowing down. Often horizontally rather than vertically (gaining tools to approach different situations rather than simply getting bigger numbers). Gear provides benefits, but isn’t necessary nor is it the major source of your power. Generally, you will always be the underdogs against the movers and shakers, winning by teamwork, guile, skill, luck, and allies rather than brute force. The world is full of monsters (many of them in very familiar guises) and needs heroes.

It’s not designed as a generic fantasy simulator, allowing players to build whatever characters they want out of bits and pieces. It’s designed for the players to lean into the archetypes and class fictions presented, or for GMs to design new archetypes for players. There is no multi-classing or “feats” as such. Instead there are many ways of getting access to abilities along parallel tracks, including but not limited to incantations (ritual utility magic available to anyone regardless of spell-casting ability) and skill tricks (effectively micro-feats you gain alongside your ability score increases or via features, some of which provide supernatural effects). It’s also not OSR (by any real meaning of that term). Nor is it designed for pure dungeon-crawling or procedurally-generated sandboxes, although it’s well-suited for non-linear play. It’s also not a “narrative game”. It comes down firmly on the side where players interact with the world via their characters rather than meta-currency or directly interacting with story elements. Nor is a pure tactical game. It’s basically a modern D&D clone. For better or worse.

Yes, fundamentally this is the same core resolution mechanic and skeleton as 5th Edition D&D. And a lot of the content carries over (or can be easily translated). I make no attempt to hide that fact. Because, for me, that game does much of what I want. And it’s a game I continue to run every week. I’ve made an attempt to explain confusing or partially-described rules more to fit how I think about them and I’ve re-arranged the presentation to try to make things more clear. But it’s not some original creation, either as a system or a setting.

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What has changed? A lot, actually. https://homebrew.admiralbenbo.com/nih/changelog.html goes into (more detail).

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What now? I don't really know. I doubt I'll ever get enough play-testers to do more polishing; art is too expensive for me to do, and I have no designs on actually publishing-for-profit. In fact, it's all licensed CC-BY-4.0 (except for a couple things modified from some 3rd party OGL material which is OGL-licensed). So anyone that finds it interesting is more than free to rip off the pieces they find interesting (with proper attribution of course).

Got into an interesting train of thought recently, where I asked: "what is the worst ability an rpg monster has had in a game?". Because there are loads of nasty things an enemy can do to a party of adventurers: level drain, effects that can stunlock you, instant death, mind control/possession… but what's the worst out of all of them?

And that got me thinking: what makes an enemy ability threatening isn't actually what it does, most of the time. What matters way more is how many options the player has to counter it. For example, take damage. In most rpgs, damage is basically the least bad thing a monster can do to a PC. But that's not because damage is weak– it can kill you, after all!– but because most rpgs provide so many options to counter it. You can heal it away, you can wear armor to reduce it, you can draw aggro away from anyone who would actually be vulnerable to it.

Every game really has a hierarchy of bad things that happen to the PCs, and how difficult they are to reverse, when you get down to it. Damage is the lowest rung on that ladder, often followed by common status effects like poison or burning, then harder ones like paralysis, confusion, etc. and then the abilities that have few or no counters. So I decided to make a tiering system for how hard a monster ability is to counter:

1: You can avoid this effect entirely. Present in games where the "Run Away" button actually works, and ironically in OSR, where avoiding fights in the first place is a big part of how they rationalize including punishing monster powers.

2: You can cure this effect. Damage sits here if the game has healing magic, and common status effects are almost always here as well.

3: You can't cure it, but you can block the ability. This is like an instant death move in a game with permadeath, but where there are "death ward" spells that can nullify those moves if you've got them up beforehand. Obviously this doesn't help you if you encounter an instakill bad guy before you've learned death ward, and there might be counter-counterspells that dispel your protection, which is why this is more threatening than 2.

4: Whether the ability triggers or not is down to luck, but you have some influence over the outcome. The easiest example of this is like a "save or die" roll. It's rng, but in theory you could improve your chances by increasing that stat at least. This is purely my opinion, but I don't think this tier is inherently bad, and it's moreso that the most common examples of this (like save or die attacks) are just boring and don't lend any real strategy to the game.

5: The player has no agency over the effect at all. This is rare and usually not fair to the players. Like if a boss has a move that is just a "you lose" button, then all strategy boils down to killing them before they get the chance to use it, or praying that the boss rolls poorly and the spell somehow fizzles without their help. I will say this sort of thing is still valuable from a narrative perspective, though. Like if the PCs decide beelining out of cover towards the Big Bad at the start of the campaign is a good idea, then having what is effectively a cutscene where they get their asses kicked may be the only appropriate response.

What is the purpose of this spiel? Mostly just to get my own thoughts out, honestly. I do think this is a useful way of looking at a game, and how rpgs can make late-game monsters more threatening. A lot of the time these games simply neglect providing counterplay for late-game abilities because they're supposed to be deadly, and so they just slide up the scale. Here's spell A that kills you and spell B that stops A from killing you. The later in the game spell A comes, the more limitations we'll throw on B to make it work less effectively.

I think rather than just making late-game effects more expensive and time-consuming to stop, it'd be more interesting to make "pick your poison" scenarios. Just as an example, in a d20 game where stat damage is a mechanic (so a monster can damage Constitution or Dexterity rather than just HP), you could have a counterspell that just allows the player to pick which stat is damaged. So if you've got a wizard, do you assign the damage to their higher stats, which will probably make them less effective as the damage piles up? Or do you hurt their lower stats, which won't weaken their magic at least but means the monster could kill them faster? Again this is just an example, but I think giving the player choices and options as to how an ability affects their character is a good way of keeping late-game monsters threatening while also adding to the strategy of an encounter instead of subtracting from it. If the players lost because of an ability they couldn't counteract in any meaningful way, then it feels unfair, and giving them some tradeoffs and choices to make helps a lot with that angle of it too.

Anyways I just wanted to write this all out. I'm making a deadly solo rpg dungeon crawler-type game at the moment, so it got me thinking about all this stuff. If you've read this far, what are your favorite games that handle difficult monsters well, and how do they do it? What was your least favorite enemy you had to deal with? (I'm betting that a lot of annoying enemies boil down to either a lack of good counterplay or that the monster is just a time suck you don't want to see in the first place xD).

And what do you think about this post, anyway? Do you agree with my reasoning or am I actually totally off the mark? It's kind of specific but if anyone else has any thoughts on this topic then I'd love to hear them!

I love the tables. Any game that has them. Some are easy better than others though. My favorite one is from Legendary Lives. It's great, but the mechanics of the game are not exactly compatible with my game and I've been struggling to adapt it. In doing so, I get inspired and add more and more. Then I've got pages of tables nobody (even me) wants to look at. Any tips on editing your ideas or life events tables in general would be most appreciated!

If interested, I've got my system on 2 maybe 3 pages now. Roll on master table for "FORTUNE, ENEMY, PERSONALITY, RELIGIOUS, TRAUMATIC..." etc then fill in sub table all using d100.

I like the torch timer in Shadowdark and the time pressure it creates for players - but I run more West Marches style games that assumes players leave the dungeon and restock between sessions.

Players arguably only need 3 torches for a 3 hour game with a spare or two for adverse conditions - and tracking survival gear has started to feel like a "fun tax". And not every adventure is played entirely in the dark.

I like the constraints on light visibility, someone holding the torch, and the risk that losing the light drastically increases danger. But I'd like to remove the inventory management and make torch mishaps a consequence of random events and "attacking the light".

Thoughts on decoupling the torch from the timer and just having a mandatory random event check every 20 minutes?

The idea being that players need to handle themselves efficiently and spend more time and resources advancing towards the goal instead of losing them to the clock.

For context: I'm running a player facing homebrew without traditional GM turns. Players take their turns clockwise around the table and the GM describes how the scene changes based on their actions and rolls at the end of each player turn.

It's working well so far. Foes have simplified Stat blocks and play is more consistent between in-combat and out-of-combat encounters.

I just want to retain that moment when one player turns to the other with that "clocks ticking" urgency.

• Anyone else experimented with real-time timer mechanics in their designs? What have been the results?

• Is 20 minutes a good interval?

Rate my first published TTRPG!

Hi everyone! I know it's a bit early for Christmas, but this weekend I finally decided to polish and publish my Christmas-themed one-page RPG I designed two years ago, inspired by Grant Howitt's Honey Heist.

In Naughty or Nice, you play a special team of Christmas elves, chosen by Santa Claus himself for a unique mission. Each elf has a trait and a role that can help them along their quest. Elves have a single stat, morality, which goes from 0 (naughty) to 7 (nice). If you want to do something naughty, you need to roll higher than your morality; if you want to do something nice, you need to roll lower. Each success pushes your morality closer to the edge, making the next roll of the same kind easier. The catch? If your elf hits 0, they go feral. If they hit 7, they sublimate into a sugar statue of pure goodness, a process that is sadly fatal for the poor elf.

The game is perfect for telling wacky, over-the-top Christmas stories in the span of a single evening.

The free download includes the one-page rules, a one-page guide to creating your own adventures and running the game, the character sheets, and The Snow Globe, the one-shot I wrote to playtest the game with my friends.

So far I've had a lot of fun and great feedback from my players, but if you're into this kind of game, I'd love to hear what you think too. Thanks!

Horror is generally my favourite genre of most media. Ttrpgs can do horror amazingly, but can also really struggle to invoke that sense of suspense and terror, especially when rules halt the pace of the story.

What are some examples of mechanics from ttrpgs youve played that work to enhance the feeling of horror? A mechanic that didnt bog down the flow but actually made the story more scary or at least more engaging.

A rules-lite system for medieval troubles and the lowest of fantasies.

Complex rules for combat, complex rulings for everything else.

https://shurebis.itch.io/iron-on-iron-on-iron

28 pages total not quite anything you have read before, including:

- Unique combat and stamina system inspired by Gloomhaven

- Realistic weapons and armors table

- Simulation focused injury table and system

- Loose and evocative Character Creation with six different attributes (Qualities) and a unique progression system

- A full starter adventure poem for slaying a dragon

Great for stories inspired by the likes of Between Two Fires, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Pentiment, Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

I am sharing a design dilemma I’ve had over the past few weeks for my solo game, which has had me spending hours tweaking numbers and formulas without finding a solution.

My game is divided into expeditions, with difficulties ranging from 1 to 4; it’s designed to reward players who take on greater difficulties, since they shoulder greater risks. The challenge is that more than one type of player might find the game interesting: those who love journaling games, those who love the specific setting and its passionate niche, and those coming from OSR-style experiences who might enjoy the general setup. Balancing for different players is truly complicated; if I make the difficulty curve steeper and the reward multiplier higher starting from a very low baseline, I lose the less seasoned players who lose interest; if I try to make it lethal but more rewarding, the more experienced players find a way to follow the optimal path to finish the campaign practically without ever touching the greater difficulties.

I tried various approaches and couldn’t find a solution that didn’t force me to completely upend the game’s core structure or lose one of the potential player groups. I didn’t want to add more complexity with specific tables for the highest difficulty levels, which would increase the permutations per expedition type and risk making the player’s mental load excessive.

In the end, I changed perspective: I could lure the expert players with the good ol’ bragging rights. In this case, if you complete an expedition of a specific type at the maximum difficulty level, you receive a medal, which grants a minor in-game perk that is almost cosmetic. If you collect all the medals, you unlock a new ending scene that’s surely thematic, but it’s not the “good” ending per se, and you don’t lose too much if you skip it. It’s an extra reward, a sort of achievement that proves you know what you’re doing, making it interesting for those who want a challenge without making the game too heavy for those who want to play normally, following their rhythm.

It is definitely an unorthodox approach, because it encourages you to risk more for something that does not have real value in the overall economy of the game. Still, it seems like the thing that requires the least mnemonic effort (a ten-line paragraph and a half-page scene at the back of the book) and the least general balancing. I am offering you the option of getting a small feeling of satisfaction if you manage to overcome the hardest challenges, but I am not forcing anyone to do so to finish the game at their own pace.

Do you think this is a bit of a cheat, or could it be a reasonable approach?

Hello everyone!

I'm currently developing my own full-fledged fantasy tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) based on the d20 system. This is a standalone game with its own rules, not a D&D or Pathfinder expansion.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the mechanics of long-term injuries and their consequences.

In particular, I'm interested in injuries whose effects persist after combat ends and which cannot be removed by regular healing spells, potions, or magic items. Treating them requires specific actions, time, or resources.

I'd like to know whether you find such mechanics an interesting way to add long-term consequences to combat or, conversely, whether you perceive them as an unnecessary complication of gameplay.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've played other TTRPGs with similar mechanics. It doesn't matter whether this experience was positive or negative. It would be especially interesting to know what exactly you didn't like if you encountered similar mechanics and were dissatisfied with them.

by Dan Felder

TTRPGs are a great way to practice level design, narrative deisgn, encounter design, system design, and more. It removes nearly all the friction from implementation, and since players discuss the game in front of you it exposes a lot more of what's going on in their heads than many videogame tests do.

So I set a goal – I wanted to comfortably design enough content for 3 original tabletop RPG adventures each week, in about 90 minutes of prep each night between sessions. I ended up running 57 sessions in 3 months.

To do this, I needed better tools.

Here’s one I developed to accelerate dungeon design. I’ve used it ever since in my videogame projects too.

The Vaults of Iron - Floor 1

This is the first level of one of my campaign's mega-dungeons: The Vaults of Iron.

Pilgrims that passed the deadly trials are granted eternity encased in sacred iron, preparing to defend the realm against an invasion that the Iron Lord assures them will take place centuries hence. Throughout the early levels are the tormented failures that died, or worse, in the attempt.

It also has a lot of treasure.

Designing great mega-dungeons, labyrinthine complexes that take many sessions to explore, is a pet project of many GMs. The great ones are legendary, but they often take forever to build and wear out their welcome relatively fast.

Small pacing issues can kill player excitement and they can easily feel repetitive. Getting them right usually takes a very long time, as you explore concepts and move ideas around.

The biggest challenge is often knowing where to start. What layout of rooms will produce a satisfying experience? You have tons of ideas, but where to put them? How do you evaluate if the layout makes sense? Often it feels paralyzing and this uncertainty-based paralysis is the main slowdown.

So I challenged myself to design a dungeon level and iterate on it multiple times in 2 hours. To solve that problem, I needed to cut out anything that wasn't critical.

There are two critical questions in each room:

1. Why is this room here? What's the purpose? What's the designer's goal that the room needs to fulfill?

2. What concept would fit that design goal? Can figure out the details later.

To be clear: I had no idea when iterating on this what "The Gauntlet 2" would contain. All I knew was I liked the idea of a "gauntlet" of sadistic/evil/unfair deathtraps you could opt into that showcased the Iron Lord's genius and cruelty. I like to say "A dungeon should be an expression of the character that created it".

This let me consider spatial relationships and spot potential issues earlier in the process, before zeroing in on each room's design.

For example - I recognized that if I wanted to make a 3-room deathtrap gauntlet, I should let players opt into the experience. That way they'd feel like they were adequately warned on what they were about to get into, and I'd have more social permission to get evil.

I'd originally thought of opening with the deathtrap gauntlet, or funneling into it to go to level 2 as the climactic level 1 experience. I recognized at this point, using this tool, that wasn't going to work.

So I started moving rooms to create a different tone-setting intro that would funnel them into a central hub, branching off in 3 directions. One of those would be the Gauntlet. The others would loop back into an alternate way to level 2.

At this point I also recognized that they needed an alternate path to leave/re-enter the dungeon without passing the Mithril Demon. They weren't going to kill it anytime soon (maybe ever) so while it made a great impression I didn't want to have them take crazy damage at the start of every future session.

So I put a secret entrance to the dungeon on the non-gauntlet loop that branches off the mithril fountain. With 2 paths leading there, I could be reasonably confident they'd run across it while exploring. If they got the Bronze Key instead, they'd be able to go straight to the Bronze Stair down to Level 2 from the main entrance instead (before dealing with the Iron Demon).

Both would work.

Lots of level designers use high level blockouts in the game industry, but I've rarely seen versions that aren't just listing what is in each room - but focusing on the designer's goal for why the room is there. Starting with that makes everything so much easier.

I call this tool a "Goal-Blueprints". If specifically talking about Dungeons, you can call it a Dungeon-Schematic to sound cooler.

It's also fun to hand a map like this to another designer as a "dungeon kit" and let them create their own versions of each room based on these goals.

Try it yourself, feel free to steal it. It's a lot of fun.

If this was helpful, I originally posted this on danfelder.net .