Designing Hall of the Five Moons

Recently I published my first dungeon, the Hall of the Five Moons. It was originally conceived when thinking about putting together something with a heavy puzzle element to run for a one shot. Ultimately, it spiraled from the initial plan of a one-shot length dungeon into a thirty-five room dungeon that's probably at least two-three sessions- but it was still a fun one shot. 

 

 

Building a Dungeon

The first thing I did going into it was build a very limited scope design document to guide the process.  This was a really small scope caging of the goals of the dungeon and ended up as:

• Dungeoncrawl
  
• Puzzle Emphasis
• Multiple Routes
• Cairn
• Moon themed

And that was about it, short and simple. After this, I decided to try out something I've been seeing bouncing around here and there: Cyclic Dungeon Generation (CDG). The idea behind Cyclic Dungeon Generation is to create circular linked dungeon rooms, similar to common Zelda designs. As a fan of the Boss Keys Zelda series I was curious about how this would work- and I was looking for some actual inspiration for how to design the dungeon itself. My typical dungeon design procedures are pretty "shot in the dark and figure it out as you go" which has lead to some- from my perspective at least- boring and uninspired designs. 

After reading through CDG I refamiliarized myself with Into the Odd and Cairn, then got to work rolling on the tables in CDG. These tables were to initially generate cycles, circular looped dungeon chambers which would have a theme and be made of a few key points:

• Start: The start of the cycle, usually a single room
• Goal: The end of the cycle, an obstacle, a reward, something useful
• Arcs: Two lines that connect the start and the goal. There are short and long variants, with short arcs being 1-2 rooms and long arcs being 3 or more.
• Insertion Points: Point in the cycle where a subcycle may be added- nesting even more cycles inside of it. 

 

At this point I had started getting some general ideas of how I wanted the dungeon to flow. Taking some Zelda-eseque dungeons in mind, I wanted to have a central hub room with branches that all draw the adventurers back into the hub eventually. With this in mind, my first cycle that I rolled was a simple Lock-And-Key. This would be a short path to get to the goal, which would contain a lock, and then a short path to the key. I then started rolling a few more sub-cycles and put them all together in draw.io to create this rough map:

I had intentionally treated room 6 on this diagram as the hub room and ran two additional loops off of it, creating what would become the Ooze Wing and the Heretic Wing. 

Rooms Rooms Rooms Rooms

With some vague ideas of how I wanted to proceed, I started off simply with the concept and decided to treat 1 as a descent into the dungeon. The first loop that would be encountered is a Change-Return-Loop. The idea is that by reaching the goal in 4, the players should be able to return to 2 to find it altered. This is where I started to get the ideas for the Moons that must be collected through the dungeon, and the first one I settled on was the Drenched Moon which absorbed moisture. After that the wing became a mechanical puzzle with light on bone pits, pipes, tumbling machines, and once the players removed the Moon from its containment it would not only awaken all of the Desiccated Adorers but would also unleash the vampire in the sacrificial pit that 3 turned into. 

As I went, I was mapping in dungeonscrawl to build out a better map of the dungeon itself and tweak where I wanted rooms to run out. The free version of dungeonscrawl is pretty decent for this, but there were a few problems with actually mapping things where I wanted them to be or conveying nuances (can't even mark a secret door and have it look pretty with the free version) that I just couldn't do- but the dungeonscrawl map was good enough for me to run off. 

Eventually, all of the wings were rounded out and I did a check against the Dungeon Checklist to see if I had everything and felt satisfied that I did. It's worth noting that I was doing all of my keying for the rooms in ghostwriter in markdown, which ended up being pretty easy to read on the fly. The whole process took about two days/8 hours or so. I probably spent more time tinkering with Cairn to see if I wanted to tweak something and procrastinating actually getting dungeon on map. 

After the Run

With the run finished I got a worm into my head about actually polishing the dungeon up into a format that other people could run. I've had some players who have become dungeon masters of their own who have asked if they could see what materials I used to run previous dungeons and campaigns, but usually my own notes for running are nigh incomprehensible. So, the solution? Uhhhhh figure out how to format and  make a dungeon. Thankfully, Luke Gearing has us all covered and I only had to learn a little bit of LaTeX to get it all working. 

Format-wise, on hindsight I entirely failed to follow the Cairn SRD for how monster descriptions are written. But otherwise I thought I'd start with their stats and follow on with everything else useful to know. For the room descriptions I tried aping the style used in The Dark of Hot Springs Island- which I think was successful in conveying the intents for each room but, to my taste, feels a bit bulky. Of course, with a dungeon filled with puzzles I think this was sort of inevitable, but we'll see if I'll try other styles in the future. 

The last thing I did was the art for the pages and the map- all of which I did through Playscii which I've had a bit of fun working with before.  The art is pretty barebones, but it did feel like it added something to the experience of reading the dungeon- even if it's only intermittent. 

 

Summarizing, that was the basics of the process used to make the Hall of the Five Moons. I enjoyed it but will definitely try a few different things in the future for format and generation. Of the whole dungeon, my favorite part is everything in the Heretic Wing- and especially the Last Word that can be entirely missed in one of the last rooms in the dungeon. The whole process was engrossing enough that I then went and feverishly cracked out Bars Aplenty- which I might chat a bit more about later (1d12 is superior to 2d6 in almost every case for those random tables etc etc).

If anyone runs the Hall of the Five Moons- let me know!