A theory on dungeonness

 What exactly makes a dungeon a dungeon? I've previously thought about the minimum size of one but the very nature is something else entirely. I've been working on a series of novellas lately (expect a link to the release of the first one in October – but it'll be in German) and started wondering, what of the adventures my hero has actually constitutes a dungeon.

I believe that there are three hard factors and a checklist of soft factors that make a location into a dungeon. Of course, your personal definition may vary but this one is mine:

A dungeon must be an enclosed location. Open air maze? No dungeon.
A dungoen must have some sort of treasure in it. That treasure can be abstract, like an information, knowledge etc.

Now it also needs to confirm with my minimum dungeon size (see link above) so:

A dungeon must not be completely visible from the entrance. If it's just a single, unobstructed room, that's no dungeon.

Let's talk about soft factors. The dungeon should have at least two of these (and it can be multiples in the same category):

A dungeon should have an obstacle.
A dungeon should have a riddle.
A dungeon should have a trap.
A dungeon should have an enemy.

These make up the dungeon-score. Let's put the thing to the test using Indiana Jones (because I'm writing pulp adventure and don't want to spoil my own stories.

The temple in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

-Is an enclosed location.
-Has a very obvious treasure.
-Is pretty damn big and cannot be overseen from anywhere.

So check for the hard factors. Soft factors?
-Has an obstacle (pit that Indy and his lackey swing across).
-Has a riddle (the trap trigger underneath the golden idol).
-Has (at least) three traps (spikes, arrow-launchers, stone-ball self destruct mechanism)
-Whether or not it has an enemy is arguable but let's say it doesn't.

So it comes out with a dungeon score of five. Pretty good.

The excavation site in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark:

-Is an enclosed location.
-Has treasure in the form of information: Where is the Ark?
-Has nooks and corners.

Check for thard factors. Let's go to the soft factors:
-Has an arguable obstacle: Indy needs to climb into the place, after all.
-Has a really cool riddle with that staff and the light and all.

This one comes out with a dungeon score of just two but that's enough to qualify (if not much more than that).

The well of souls in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark:

-Is an enclosed location.
-Has arguably the most valuable treasure in the world.
-Has nooks, corners, and even hidden rooms full of mummies.

Hard factors are check. Soft factors?
-Has the same arguable obstacle of needing to climb into it.
-Has another obstacle in the shape of a wall Indy must tear down.
-Has what is either a trap or an enemy in the form of swarms of snakes.

So it has a dungeon score of three. I have this as a Lego set sitting next to me (my kids gave it to me as a birthday gift). Love it.

How big does a dungeon need to be?

 When it comes to dungeon sizes in games, the differences are vast. From a design perspective, the bigger of a dungeon you create, the smaller the level of detail you can put into each room. I've been experimenting a lot with world sizes in my games. The trick is to make a few rooms seem a lot bigger. But how do we do that?

10 Sapient Aliens

Dan over at Throne of Salt posted 10 sapient aliens for Mothership. I figured, I'd join the fun. Some of these I have actually used in roleplaying, others are brand new.

Note that in my games, the word "alien" is derogatory when talking about a sentient being. Aliens are animals. People are Xenos.

Bacon Game Jam: GunMaker 4: Gold Edition

So, hi blog, long time no see... I've been part of a team of guys participating in the Bacon Game Jam over the weekend. The result of our work is GunMaker 4: Gold Edition, a title that I am proud to announce is totally overselling the finished product. But finish we did and the result can also be a fun tool to create weapons for any cyberpunk-RPG. I even released the graphics as CC3.0 so you can do pretty much whatever with them, as long as you mention me. Check it out and come back to read about my experience with this particular game jam after the jump.

When you only have 48 hours, cloning graphics is your best friend...

Pen & Paper: Sandbox or Railroad Campaign?

So, I've been GMing an RPG set in space recently. The group took the first part of the campaign to escape from an interstellar prison-planet (yes, it's Butcher Bay. I know). Some characters died during a prison-riot that the group had started in order to form a distraction, but most of the group succeeded in escaping, forming bonds in the process, being cool and all.

Playing a campaign in prison had some advantages for me as a game master. The environment was limited, so were the NPCs to interact with - I made an exhaustive list of them and how they were grouped and what they were like. I had no plan how the group would escape the prison. They would have to figure one out themselves. It was a small-scale sandbox for my group to play in. Now, for what we call our second season, we have some new characters, some old ones, and the whole thing is set on a small ship escaping from the law. We basically went from Butcher Bay to Firefly. Which is nice. But entirely different in structure.

Making a Roguelike: Some General Ideas

A friend and I are in the process of making a roguelike (or rogue-like or roguealike or rogue-lite or whatever. Screw the Berlin interpretation!). I won't tell too much about the greater concept yet but let's talk about some general ideas and design decisions regarding the game.

Our game, which is barely playable right now (it does generate a cave and one can wander around in it and even pick stuff up but there is little to no adversity as of yet - dehydration is currently the only true enemy), has a simple premise: You are a person, assumedly in some medieval time, walking through the forrest/mountain at night when you fall into a hole that is the entrance to a cave-system. You need to find a way out. When you think about it, this can be a rather terrifying thought and I had the idea when visiting a cave on vacation over New Year's 2011/2012. That particular cave was discovered by a man named Baumann (after whom the cave was susequently named) who was a miner in the olden days and got lost in it after his light went out. After three days he managed to find an exit (and tell his tale) only to die of being half-starved and being lost in a cold cave for days. This, I thought, could be made into quite the game. And then I decided to add monsters and some low-key magic. So what about those monsters?

Pen & Paper: Creating a World part 5 - Recent History

In part 5 of my little world-creation we'll take a look at the recent history of the setting. Recent history is important as it is what makes a world seem alive and seperates it from a static setting. Things have happened in recent history and they play a part in what people think of the place they live in and may even create reference points for snide remarks, prejudice or even popular culture in-game. Let's take a look...

Okay let's talk about recent events that have shaped the world that my players are currently experiencing (and interacting with in ways that may result in mid-scale changes temselves). Now as I am making this up as the game progresses, the history directly influencing the lives of my player characters is what I have fleshed out thus far. This limits the recent history of the world to the eastern hemisphere, as out of the seven PCs six are from the Western Empire and one is from the Kalifate. The latter, being the siltent foreigner of the group, does sometimes wonder about the way things are handled in the Western Empire but is okay with the group running around in the wilderness, doing savage things as she is an animal-trainer in search of rare and (from her view) exotic animals to capture and tame.

Pen & Paper: Creating a World part 4 - Spirituality

My world-building series continues, this time we'll talk a bit about the spiritual world-order that the fantasy-setting I'm creating for my bi-weekly gaming group is like. Religions, spirits and ghosts are present and active in the world - what is that going to be like? Let's explore! (by the way, I am aware that I said I'd go for the recent world-history this time, that'll be up next - promise!)



So, this is a fantasy world. By now we have given it a geography with some basic notions of empires/cultures, as well as some non-human sentient species roaming about, doing non-human sentient things. As I have also started playing with my players, I can now start letting their ideas and thoughts influence the further details of the world they're in. One should always listen to the players, they take over a lot of your work as a GM if you play your cards right...


So, spirituality is this posts topic. For this to be a fantasy-world, there needs to be a supernatural element. This is something I find hard to balance, as too much magic tends to replace technology in any given setting and I usually don't like these settings. Say, "there are no airplanes but we can summon flying horses at will, there are no cellphones but we have speaking-stones, there are no robots but we have golems for everything - but everyone still fights with sword and bow..." - you already lost me there. You can use magic to replace technology, but that results in a sci-fi setting, rather than a fantasy-setting (see Exalted when playing in the first-age - it has the internet and even power-armor). So, nobody in my setting is going to throw fireballs or simply raise the dead when need be. Magic is primeval, mysterious, rare and scary. Supernatural creatures are even more so.

Pen & Paper: Creating a World part 3 - Geography

In this sub-series I will work out a setting for a game of (low-) fantasy pen and paper role-playing that I'm running as a GM right now. The series is inspired by this  and the interpretation/variety of it by one of my friends, although it will be substantially different from both. Find the introduction over here. This time around I will introduce the world geography, including a map that a friend of mine drew free-handed.


When it came to the geography of The World, I had ideas for some of the political entities and mysterious locations that are to be found in it but no real idea on how they are placed and what the overall map of the world would look like. I asked the aforementioned friend to draw me a world-map that is not of our own world and she went at it and drew some continents and islands on a piece of graphing-paper. She gave it to me and what I had to do next was to fill in the white of the map, make it a habited world. So the basic first version of it looked like this:

Pen & Paper: Creating a World part 2 - Fantastical Races

In this sub-series I will work out a setting for a game of (low-) fantasy pen and paper role-playing that I'm running as a GM right now. The series is inspired by this and the interpretation/variety of it by one of my friends, although it will be substantially different from both. I have introduced the whole thing over here and in this post I will tell you about the different fantastical sentient creatures that inhabit The World.


There are several different sentient races besides humans inhabiting The World. As I mentioned previously, they differ enough from humans to be a problem whenever they find themselves in human settlements so they live either on the fringe of the human empires or have their own empires. Let's introduce some of them.

Pen & Paper: Creating a World part 1 - The Basic Setup

In this sub-series I will work out a setting for a game of (low-) fantasy pen and paper role-playing that I'm running as a GM right now. The series is inspired by this and the interpretation/variety of it by one of my friends, although it will be substantially different from both. Over the course of this series I will cover the cultures and races that populate my fantasy world, as well as the geography and mystical aspects including religion, gods and magic. This first post will only feature a brief introduction and overview of it all.


First of all it is important to mention that the world we're going to play in has no name (or many of them). For its inhabitants, who are on a level of technology variing from stone-age-like over the European middle-ages up to early medieval Persia and China, it is the world and as they are unaware of other physical planes besides the possibility of other planets being discussed by some elite philosophers, it is simply The World. None of the cultures living there has actually fully explored the planet, thus the world-map I will introduce later is something hypothetical to the inhabitants of the place, a GM-tool rather than a possible in-game artifact.