The Tower in Thunder Rift

 Tomorrow is the big day, the day I need to do this for real! And of course the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that... The really important day, of course, is the first day I don't want to work on this, or forget to do so--how do I recover and keep a habit going? But I'm sure tomorrow will be pretty simple. What is the space I'm working with? Let's make a few assumptions. Combat is the biggest space demand in the typical room: after all, I want any room to be a potentially interesting space for combat. A single move action is 25 ft, and to make that meaningful, speed differences, etc., I want a typical combat room not to be traversable in a single stride. So at a minimum many rooms should be at least 30 ft on a side, probably a bit bigger. Let's say 35-40 ft on a side (7x7 or 8x8  five-foot squares) so that movement choices are meaningful both tactically and for character building. This leads to a bit of a problem, though: I have to get ab...

 Ok, now for getting on paper a few things I've been thinking about, so I don't forget. At least for me, I think this dungeon needs a story. A story means I can understand the dungeon's role and place in the world, which means I can understand what each room is doing, why it exists, what its purpose is, what it once and currently contains, etc. I want any players going through this dungeon to be learning new things, and I want them to want to discover more about the place. Exploration can be its own reward (and I'll probably reward them for major discoveries with xp). The story so far The tower is very old, predating the legends of the people who live in the region. All they know is that people who go in don't always come back out. There are legends of a magnificent treasure inside, but sensible people don't believe it. The tower was the long-ago fortress of some civilization. I'm not certain what kind of people manned there. At the moment I'm actually t...

 Hello to any readers! This blog is going to serve as my way of organizing my thoughts and leaving behind a record as I work on the Dungeon23  communal homebrew challenge, however much I achieve. Since I'm planning on primarily mapping on paper, I'm not necessarily going to be sharing detailed images of every room, let alone a complete dungeon jpg. This is more where I'll put in some description, thoughts, musings and brainstorms as I work my way through this. I hope I'll have an entry covering every day, but I know I won't post every day; at least frequently I'll have bigger posts covering multiple days. Also, I will try to maintain the goal of designing 1 room a day, but life happens, so I may miss a day and then do two rooms the next day, etc. And I won't stop myself from designing an extra room on a day if I'm in a groove or if it makes sense to work on a pair together. But I'm not going to work too far ahead, both in the spirit of the thing and ...