Dungeon Designs

I have been looking at my own mission writing in a critical way lately.  As you might have seen, we are re-releasing the Endless Dungeon series and if it does well, we’ll be finishing it as well.  But I take far too practical an approach to dungeons.

I recall one of the famous trap books published decades ago had a corridor that was actually hinged, and as the party walked down it, it would tilt and become vertical instead of horizontal.  OK, at the age of 13, I absolutely would have used that trap, but I’m a bit older and more cynical today.  Why would someone create a building that looked like a corridor and then excavate enough room for it to be hinged and actually tilt.  Think about the dungeon excavation required for such a task.  It just doesn’t make sense to me.

You see, that’s the eye that I use when crafting dungeons.  Yes, when I was a tween, I drew out elaborate dungeons where elves, orcs, ogres, green slimes, traps and tricks all were contained in tight little boxes.  But I don’t any more.  I have a habit now (and I guess I did back in the 90s if you look at some of the Endless Dungeon missions) of keeping like with like.  Since it doesn’t make sense to me to have truly random monsters wandering around the same place, missions tend to have a limited number of monster or racial types.

Take Blood in the Slave Pits for example:  There are only goblins here.  Admittedly, there are two factions of goblins and one of them has dogs and a huge wolf, but really there are only goblins here.  That’s my style of mission writing.  One type of monster makes it vastly easier for the GM to concentrate on what these guys can actually do, as opposed to trying to remember the bonuses for elves and orcs and goblins and trolls and dragons and slimes, you get the picture.

This isn’t laziness, it’s practicality.  The players get to concentrate on their one guy and use him to his best abilities.  The GM is juggling multiple enemy characters.  If you want to both GM them correctly (as in without making blatant rules errors) as well as effectively, using their best abilities, you can’t be distracted by what type of creature they are.

So, while I do think about drawing out those crazy mixed up dungeons we use to play when we were kids, it isn’t going to happen.  There are ways to do it - if you give yourself enough room to play with - but it isn’t easy.  But I do think that this is OK too.  Not only do you as the GM get to focus your strategic thinking on one race, so too do the players get to focus on defeating this one type of enemy.

Matriarchs Among the Yugsalanti

A companion piece to our Fortune Tellers edition

Yugsalanti families are not all matriarchal, but some are.  Culturally only the women become fortune tellers, because the men can make money in other ways.  Typically, it is the uglier girls who are taught fortune telling; they are told this is because they are smart, but more honestly it is because they cannot earn as much as “dancers”.

For a male to be taught any magical arts, he would have to show that he was gifted in magic before anyone would “waste” the time to train him.  The assumption by outsiders is that fortune tellers are women, so few customers will want to visit a male fortune teller.  This doesn’t mean that they are useless to the family.  More often, they can teach a somewhat clever girl to become a fortune teller, but if they find such a talented young man, they will have someone teach him a more robust style of magic, such as necromancy or one of the other schools of magic.

For those families that are run by their women, the number of fortune tellers is often quite high.  Because the women are the main earners, these families tend to congregate in the major cities.  Outsiders may never know how many of the fortune tellers in their home towns belong to the same family, as it doesn’t help the women to allow their customers to know when secrets might be shared with other fortune tellers.

In these families, the men are quite often guardians and protectors of the women.  After all, these women are learning the past, present and futures of their customers; blackmail is almost certain to follow.  Though not every matriarchal fortune telling family practices these con games and extortions, most of them do.


This post was written as part of the upcoming The Miscellaneous Anniversary Edition aka All About Everything Else, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Every other Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing small items that didn’t make it into earlier editions, mainly due to size.
We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! stay tuned to this blog.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full Game Masters’ edition, click here.

Why not create hundreds of vampires?

A companion piece to our Creatures of the Night edition

When we talked about vampires, we often mentioned that there were very few vampires in the Noble Vampire’s court.  But why?  It is a simple matter of logistics.  The Noble Vampire concept works because a large number of “peasants” can maintain a small number of vampires.  Once the number of vampires increases, you need to have a huge number of peasants.

This makes it more difficult to administer, and it allows powerful subordinates who believe they should advance to the top of the heap.  You are putting a greater strain (demand) on your food supply, as well as building up your own base of enemies.

By keeping things small, the dark lords should be able to not only control their people, but also their cattle.  Besides, the neighbors become nervous living near a couple of vampires.  They become positively paranoid about a couple dozen.  No need to give them motivation to come attack you.

This post was written as part of the upcoming The Miscellaneous Anniversary Edition aka All About Everything Else, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Every other Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing small items that didn’t make it into earlier editions, mainly due to size.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! stay tuned to this blog.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full Game Masters’ edition, click here.