Over the last few years there’s been several large-scale creativity memes floating around the RPG blogs, like “Gygax 75” and “Dungeon 23.” Having spent the past several years embroiled in grad school I didn’t really have much creative bandwidth to participate in such large ventures, but for the summer I’ve got a notion for a smaller-scale project.
Whether it’s through Dyson, Paratime, or the generators at Donjon (to name a few examples I tend to peruse), there’s no shortage of freely available dungeon maps out there. Dungeon maps are all well and good, but when it comes to game time, what’s actually in there? One can always improvise and roll pure random style, but the results might not be wholly satisfactory, especially if one is aiming for a conceptually developed space that has an intended place in the “plot”—it might be a little weird to have to rationalize two crocodiles showing up on the fourth floor of the Tower of the Iron Legion. (Of course, the Iron Legion might be improved by the spontaneous dice-driven lore that they make use of Guard Crocodiles instead of something more mundane and predictable like guard dogs.)
So, I propose we engage in a good old dungeon-stocking exercise. Here’s a map from Paratime, the first of the “Friday Freebies” posted on that site back in 2015. What would you do with it? Make it a level one trainer dungeon? A volcano lair of some Fire Giants? The Lost Crypt of the Necropharoh? Level 8C of your local megadungeon? Take it run with it as a summer creativity prompt. Keep the map as-is, add or delete rooms, embellish with more traps, decorate with furniture, and, of course, throw in some monsters and treasure. Re-draw it, make it an elaborate 3-D model—just sculpt it into what your campaign needs, whether its a traditional dungeon or a cyberpunk facility.
And show/tell me what you make! I’m just a micro-site run by a guy who posts something a couple times a year, but if you’re not an automated web crawler just here to index things, go ahead and let me know what you cook up. I’ll link to it, repost it, or otherwise try to showcase it in a manner of your preference. The Paratime map linked above is, like most of the Paratime maps, made by Tim Hartin and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License, so the map is basically free to use and remix under noncommercial circumstances with credit to map’s creator. What’s that all mean? It means just loosen up and make it for the sake of making it without worrying about whether you’re allowed to “sell on itch” or whatever. Think of it as a jam session, and let’s see what we can make as a creative exercise.
Now let’s see if I can cook up a little side quest dungeon for Wednesday night’s game…