It seems that I work better under pressure. Especially when I have a deadline. I let this project simmer a bit but when I got an opportunity to playtest this, I had to get working. There's only one week to finish this.
Luckily I had most of the adventure already in some form or another. Various notes and ideas. What was "only" missing was something cohesive. I didn't really need to write it down in full detail for just a playtest, but I thought: In for a penny, in for a pound. Apparently I don't like myself very much. So I hammered onto my keyboard last week to get something to the table.
You get a room, you get a room, ..., everyone get's a room
As I explained in the premise, the idea of this gauntlet is it to provide kind of a demo or tutorial on what you might expect from the "full" game (as in a campaign). It should also provide you with an idea what each of the classes could do.
So I went ahead and assigned each of the rooms an attribute and to some an associated class.
| Room | Type | Detail | Attribute | Class |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Empty | STR | ||
| 2 | Empty | INT | ||
| 3 | Empty | DEX | ||
| 4 | Empty | WIS | ||
| 5 | NPC | Captive | CHA | Ranger (Herbalism) |
| 6 | Solo Monster | Mutated Spellcaster | INT | Wizard |
| 7 | Treasure | Guarded by Monster | CHA | Bard |
| 8 | Major Hazard | Long Fall | DEX | |
| 9 | Treasure | Protected by Trap | WIS | Priest |
| 10 | Boss Monster | Guarded by Minions | STR | |
| 11 | Solo Monster | Sneaky Brute | CON | |
| 12 | Major Hazard | Entrapping Terrain | CON |
Since we have six attributes and 12 rooms, this divides up nicely into two rooms each. The attribute is for me to help find challenges and situations that are more leaning towards that attribute. This should ensure that not one attribute "shines" above the others (and thus would be preferred by any player). Remember this should be a gauntlet and we actually want different characters coming out from it.
This is a good tip for creating a dungeon in general - provide a bit of variety of attributes you challenge.
Same goes for the classes, although I only choose one room for them. But this room is heavily biased to that room. Having a mutated spellcaster as monster is the perfect opportunity to showcase spells and stuff for a Wizard.
An astute reader might have noticed, that we are missing Fighter and Thief. I don't think we need specific rooms for those. Sneaking around is done all around in this dungeon and if you want to fight you can fight. So these classes are quite natural, we don't need to explicitly showcase them.
How empty is empty?
Roughly one-third of the rooms should remain empty.
- Gary Gygax
Apparently a good dungeon needs to have empty rooms. I'm not 100% that Gygax really said that, I have some vague recollection the he did - but I can't really find any evidence that he really said that (the only reference I have is this). Fun fact: If you look at his work, he mostly didn't follow his own rule. But we should be good, as 4 out of 12 rooms is exactly one-third (although we add two more at the end of it).
But what does "empty" really mean?
Some say, they should be truly empty. No set dressing, nothing. The idea behind that is, that you would roll for random encounters, so you needed some space for the players to retreat to (or even encounter one of these there).
Nobody really builds just empty rooms in a dungeon for no purpose though. Imagine having a room in your house that's just empty. A bit of wasted space.
Somewhat unfortunate we have 4 empty rooms at the beginning of the dungeon. This dungeon also doesn't really have an encounter roll - as we have a quite literal wandering monster in the orcs.
I'm more in the camp of having at least some set dressing (that somehow shows what the room might have been used before). It is devoid of any encounters or traps or the like. The players will probably start to guess the wildest things from this, but that's okay. It provides them a situation and it could help me as a GM to form the narrative in that way. And I can foreshadow certain things as well, so to create suspense and not surprise.
Adding detail
From here I can now begin to design situations. Some of them are pretty easy and clear.
Like room number 5. There's a captive ranger. When you befriend him (CHA) he might be able to help you in some form or other. But by whom might have he been captured? Maybe the wizard next door. What does he do? Some weird experiments perhaps. So I can already construct some sort of situation here. Maybe the players are even befriending the wizard. They could then help against the orc somehow.
Other monsters I also choose according to the attributes I designated to these rooms. Room 10 is attributed to Strength. So I choose a Grick, that uses strength to entangle. It's minions? Other gricks of course (young ones). Room 11 is a Spider. Sneaky and it's poison needs a CON save. And it's also a classic.
Empty rooms are a bit tricky. How can you attach an attribute to those? Room 4 could be for example that a WIS check (which includes perception) would allow to hear noises coming from the wizard in the next room. But having an INT check on an empty room, I don't know.
After all these rooms I've added the final rooms that finish this gauntlet. A room where they can level up and a room where they can test their new abilities - and ultimately flee.
Back in Dungeon Scrawl I gave the rooms their final form, now that I had a bit more of an idea what each room needed to look like to "house" the stuff therein.
As the old saying goes: The best laid plans, never survive contact with the players.
So wish me luck.