Mediums and Messages

Schematic Dungeons from Everyday Objects

Artist Unknown. Illustration of “The Colossal Elephant of Coney Island” from Scientific American. 1885.

What?

One of the great joys of playing Mausritter earlier this year was really living with the idea that anything could be an adventuring site. An old stump? It's hollowed out and beetlefolk live in it. A trashcan turned over on its side? It's the trash-filled lair of a giant racoon.

The nice thing about these kinds of spaces is that it's easy for players to grok where they are, not just in the current room, but in the overall structure. Everyone at the table has a mental model of the adventuring site and an intuitive understanding of how the different parts of that site relate.

The issue, of course, is that most dungeons don't occur at Lilliputian scale. This is where simile helps us. The dungeon doesn't need to be an overturned trashcan, it can be like an overturned trashcan. This give us not only a point of visual comparison, but a set of schematic relationships that we can use to arrange our dungeon rooms in space, making the overall structure easier to communicate at the table.

How?

The basic process looks like this:

  1. Select an object.
  2. Make a list of the parts of that object.
  3. Describe the relation of those parts.
  4. Transcode: the parts are your rooms and the relations are how they connect.

Let's walk through an example. For my object, I'll describe this cheap lamp on my desk. It's parts look like this:

  1. Lampshade
  2. Lightbulb
  3. Lightbulb socket
  4. Ceramic shell
  5. Power cable

Simple enough. Now we describe the relation of those parts:

  1. The lampshade rests on top of the bulb socket, supported by thin wire.
  2. The lightbulb is concealed by the lampshade and screws down into the bulb socket.
  3. The bulb socket holds the lightbulb and emerges from the ceramic base.
  4. The ceramic base supports the bulb socket and contains the power cable.
  5. The power cable snakes through the ceramic base, connecting to the socket somewhere hidden inside.

Note that each of these relations expresses a contingency. In grammar, we might call these hypotactic relations, descriptions of how one object's state depends upon another.

I find this useful to express as a diagram:

You diagram might look more like the thing you are describing, but mine usually don't. I prefer to have the space for notes. What matters are the connections.

Now we can transcode. Parts become rooms but the relations remain the same. Maybe we make a few tweaks if a particular passage or vestibule makes sense.

This arrangement of space is already significantly more intricate and varied than most grid-based dungeon maps, but its easy to describe the spatial relations between the parts.

It's up to you how much of the inciting simile you share. If you just say "this dungeon is shaped like a lamp" then you gain access to all sorts of convenient phrases like "these stairs spiral up towards where the bulb would be." If not, you can break it out if the going gets especially confusing: "the necro-orrery hangs above the soul cannery like a lampshade hangs over a bulb."

With a little practice, it's easy to merge this approach with something like Marcia B.'s Bite-Sized Dungeons to generate complete dungeons on the fly. You can also meaningfully communicate that an area is strange by defying an expected spatial relationship. For an example of this in action, check out The Sky Giant's Bouquet.