A Halfling Baker's Dozen or What Is This Blog About?

What is this blog about? What even is this? Why, and more importantly, wherefore?

It is about my relationship with the design of table top roleplaying games. I have 5, or maybe 6, probably 7 projects underway at the moment where I try to develop roleplaying game tools for fun and profit. More accurately, for fun and understanding, for wisdom bringeth more profit than gold, even in a gold for XP system.

I am going to undertake half-a-dozen RPG related projects to help me understand the design principles of roleplaying games. It would be nice if these project lead to something useful and tangible or engagement with other people but mostly these are my notes about what I’m thinking and learning about RPGs. I’m going to try and write these as if they were for an external audience. Two reasons, firstly a bit of self-discipline, secondly, if anyone wants to engage I’d like them to have something of a reasonably quality to engage with.

A common feature in my work is the use of procedural generation as a tool to provoke improvised structured content. I want to be able to produce useful gameable content. Content which supports player lead engagement whilst reducing the burden of preparing and running that content and supports collaborative and imaginative emergent gameplay.

Let’s see if that turns out to be a manifesto or an indulgence.

Over the next few years I am going to pursue the following RPG projects

Pavements and Princes – the eponymous and original purpose of this blog. Pavements and Princes is a project to develop a system agnostic ruleset for generating and operating urbancrawls as a sandbox campaign. I’d like to be able to support someone running a West Marches style hexcrawl campaign or a Barrowmazes dungeoncrawl style campaign in a city. I was tempted to call it Easthome. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps one day my sons and brothers will. What I think makes this different from Dungeon 11011 and Hexnut is that I don’t think a fully worked up set of processes exist for urbancrawls. They are the most under developed of the three milieu. Let's see if that is a problem with the author or the material.

Dungeon 11001 is my spin off from failing to get very far with Dungeon 23. This is my project to collect or develop a toolkit for generating, presenting and running a sandbox dungeoncrawl, at least a small one. This was my intent with the original Dungeon 23 and one of the reasons why I didn’t make much actual progress with that. I was distracted by trying to understand the how and why and wherefore rather than generating any actual content.

The Octarchy is my RPG setting project. It’s an Italian Renaissance themed Old School Revival setting with an emphasis on espionage, intrigue, trade, factionalism, the seeking out of new knowledge and lands and the industrialisation of magic. I want to poke around in the design principles of what makes a setting work and the design choices you can make to make a setting easy and compelling to take to the gaming table.

Walk on Part in a War is design project for a series of adventures. These adventures share two common elements. Thematically they all involve the player characters starting as minor players in a wider more complex conflict. They are also what I am going to call Unfolding Fractal adventures. That is adventures that start with an initial scenario and a set of procedures to generate longer, deeper enduring content that the players can interact with and the player characters can inhabit.

Chassis is my attempt at an RPG ruleset. This is definitely one that I’m doing to understand the way RPG’s work. I want to come up with a working set of rules for a crunchy semi-classless fantasy-themed RPG system. I’m currently looking at magic systems and skill systems and how character advancement can follow a Do It to Advance It ethos. If it works I'll be, more baffled than surprised.

Lastly, Hexnut, which is to hexcrawls what Pavements and Princes and Dungeon 11001 are urbancrawl and dugeoncrawl sandboxes. Like Dungeon 11001 plenty of material already exists, so this is more a project about me finding it, understanding it and applying it as a tool to help me codify it for me.

So that’s what this blog is about, a half-a-dozen projects to help me work out how to be the sort of the roleplaying game designer that I want to be by learning how RPG systems work by building my own.

 

Dungeon23 Gross Content Process

 This is the Gross Process for generating the first tranche of content for each Cluster. It’s largely procedural. Dice are rolled, tables are consulted, notes are taken. What I’m trying to get to at the end of this process is a skeleton to flesh out, to move from an entirely blank canvass to a sketch of a picture. Or some other such analogy. I roll some dice to I have a “HERE” to look at when I start thinking “but what goes here?”

I’ll talk more about the tables I’m using in a later post.

 

Gross Layout

I roll for a Gross Layout for my Cluster from a table which I'll post and discuss once I work out how to convert pdf's to pictures or how shared drives work.

 

Which is based on this blog post

And then roll for orientation of the cluster, flipping or rotating it and its position relative to the last created cluster, north or south or south-east, and up a bit, or down a bit or directly above.

I also roll for the Cluster Connector, it’s type, location, size and where it goes.

Then I roll for the vertical qualities of the Cluster, does it change height, in what direction and how steeply and how suddenly.

Finer Layout

I roll randomly for the size and shape of each room. A Large Square Room or a Tiny Circular Room or  Huge Irregular Room.  

I roll randomly for the size, type and qualities of the Links between the Rooms. These might take the form of a corridor or tunnel or they might be just a door, or the fact that Room 1 opens directly in Room 3.

I’m experimenting with some more thematic tables for this so that different areas can have different look and feel driven by a different demographic in the table. So, the base table might have more medium Rooms than any other type and define a medium Room as X square feet and a large Room as 2X square feet and have Links that tend to be short corridors with doors. A different area might favour large Rooms and define a large Room as 3X square feet and have Links that tend to be longer and more open. This area would feel more expansive and open and bigger.

 

Gross Content

Then I roll for gross or generic content. Again, based on this blog I’m giving each room a 2/6 chance of a Keyed Encounter, a 1/6 chance of a Trap, a 3/6 chance of Treasure and a 1/6 chance of a Special.

I also have the concept of a False Content. If the roll is 1 less than the roll required to place actual content I will try and place content that looks like it might be real content but turns out not to be. A False Keyed Encounter might be a noise that sounds like a monster. A False Trap might be a set of dangerously corroded pipes that contain hot but not scalding water. The idea here is to create opportunities for foreshadowing or clues and also to keep the PC’s in a state of meta-uncertainty.

What I’m finding half a dozen Clusters in is that this is giving my quite a broad range of density or interactions. Some Clusters have lots of stuff in them, some have less stuff. Some have multiple Traps. Some have Rooms with Traps, Treasure and Keyed Encounters all layered on top of each other. I’m okay with that outcome. The Clusters will be randomly located next to each other so overall a larger population of Rooms will average out to about the classic proportions of content. Different densities of content give the opportunity for different pacing of exploration and for PC’s to make some choices about how hard they engage with the content at any one time.

I follow the rule that procedurally generated content is a starting point and guide. If the procedurally generated content is borked in some way, I change it. If I need to adjust it in order to make the theme or the flow work a bit better, I change it. I’ll be revising each Cluster about 3 times over the course of the project. Once when I review each level of its Jacquay qualities and its fit to a cyclical generic dungeon. Again if future content creates back links to the current Cluster. Again, once the whole thing is finished and is ready to be edited and polished.  

Template for Creative Activity

That process gives me a rough map of the next area to be populated and the sorts of content that need to go in to it. I also have an idea of where the Cluster fits physically in to the bigger picture.

Now it’s time to come up with some interesting content.

Glossary, Terms and Definitions

Room – a keyed location in the mega-dungeon. Named, referenced by a) date of release and b) Cluster and Room Number Code. Rooms are not necessarily rooms. They are locations for keyed content. They might be a room, or a cave or a  forest glade or the branch of a tree, a hovel in a village, a bookstack in a large library. They might be a smaller part of a larger space which is keyed because something interesting is happening in it.

Link – a link between two Rooms, referenced by Cluster and Link Letter Code.

So Rooms C2R3 and C2R4 and Rooms 2 and 3 in Cluster 2. They are linked by Link C2LD.

Connector – a special Link that leads from one Cluster to another Cluster, either in the same or different Levels, or even to the outside. Referenced by the  Cluster it was generated in, so  C2C1 would be the first Connector generated in Cluster 2.

Cluster – a group of 6 rooms plus connectors developed in one generation session. Rooms in Clusters are likely to be thematically linked in some way.

Level – a collection of 3-5 Clusters which make up a classic dungeon level i.e Level 1 is easier than Level 2 which is easier than  Level 3 and generally speaking PC’s need to progress through Levels 1 and 2 to reach Level 3.

Keyed Encounter – an entity, something that can be role played by the GM, which initially is more or less tied to specific location on the map. An entity that has an agenda and which can  be interacted with, spoken to, negotiated with, tricked, fought, intimidated, charmed or which might do the same to the PC’s.

Trap – a dangerous piece of content, it might be deliberately created and placed by NPC’s in order to harm intruders like a spiked pit, it could be a naturally occurring hazard like unstable rocky slopes or a machine which is broken or just dangerous to be around. Operates mechanically in game terms; is not role played by the GM.

Treasure – something of value, either monetary value, a useful tool or weapon, valuable information or very useful adventuring supplies.

Roster Encounter – an entity that is based in or near the current cluster and moves around it or dynamically responds to PC actions, such as guards patrolling and responding to the noise of a fight.

Random Encounter – a random encounter from a random encounter table.

Special – none, some or all of the above.

Beginging Dungeon23

I’m going to try and run a Dungeons and Dragons project in 2023; namely #Dungeon23.

The idea is to create a mega-dungeon; 1 room per day, 1 area a week 1 level per month and end up with a 365 room mega-dungeon made up of 52 small areas and 12 levels.

Here are some links to some blogs explaining the pretty straight-forward concept.

I’m going to have a go but with a few changes to the default procedure of designing a room a day.

Firstly up I think dungeons are better if they are

Jacquayed – having several routes through the dungeon with meaningful choices

Factionalised – having many, active factions with their own agenda experience in media res in their own story

Encounter Area driven – rather than having static rooms experienced in sequence, group the rooms as clusters of rooms in which a multi-room rolling encounter can take place. Encounters should be based on faction rosters with probabilities of specific encounters and which react to stimulus rather than a monster plonked in a room waiting for the player characters to arrive.

Dynamic – firstly the status quo of the dungeon should be one of change as the existing factions interact, secondly player and characters should be able to interact with this dynamic status quo and influence and thirdly, dungeon areas should restock in response to stimulus.

Does this clash with the classic concept of a mega-dungeon as a series of static vignettes waiting for the PC’s to kick the door down and murderhobo their way through 365 rooms of mad-house fun? Is that even the classic concept of a mega-dungeon? Let’s play to find out?

I think this requires a little more holistic an approach than producing 1 room a day.

Secondly, I am working on a procedural generator for another project so I’d like to use largely procedural generation as a content prompt.

Thirdly, I have been having some fun with the ChatGPT tool with some Dungeons and Dragons.

Fourthly and lastly, I was really impressed with this simple but very clear and useful  cyclic dungeon generator

So what I’m going to do is to do one level of 4 clusters of 7 rooms a month. I’ll use some procedural tools to generate content and to act as prompts for content generation and I’ll describe the rooms in a weekly cluster. I don’t intend to try and keep to a posting schedule but if I can get a bit ahead in the content generation, I’ll schedule weekly posts.

For the cluster I’m going to use the 6-Room-Bite-Sized Dungeon in this blog. I’ll pick a layout of 6 rooms, pick some general features and content, such as the faction or factions inhabiting the cluster and some themes in the cluster. Room 7 will be a room that links to another cluster. I may need to go back and revise previous clusters if they get an additional link to them.

Once a month I’ll refine the existing levels with some Jacquaying of the current dungeon, some holistic faction management and I’ll look for opportunities to apply some of the generic cyclic dungeon structures.

Why am I doing this?

I need a home for all the little ideas that bubble up to the surface of my brain whilst I’m reading or thinking about role-playing games.

I want to complete some creativity by turning it in to a thing that exists that other people can see.

I want to document and critically reflect on a process (my process I suppose) for creating rpg content. I want to create that process through by using it in to existence and then seeing what worked for me. That’s going to involve some practical thinking about rpg design philosophy. It’s also going to involve rolling some dice and looking at some random tables.

I also have an eye on a second project developing a procedural generator for an urban-crawl. This is a practice for creating and documenting a procedural generation tookkit.

So I’ll be discussing the content and how I generated it and the design choices I made in parallel to the release of the actual content.