The Logline of the First Session Beset by the wrathful corporeal goddess Arya, the company escaped a dungeon and caused the rebirth of the corporeal god Radakaeim the Wanderer, gaining his favor.
Frontloading the Cool Things
The campaign opened as the player characters and their companion, the caravan-master Radakaeim, having just entered the first region of the campaign, the Jade Plains, were attacked in cinematic fashion by a goddess!
In this campaign, the gods are corporeal; they walk amongst humans. As this is a unique feature of the world (and I think, a pretty cool one), I wanted to display it immediately and give the players a sense of the power of such beings.
The goddess attacked the caravan - the explosion from her attack created a crater through which the company fell - thus they ended up in a dungeon without the means to escape the way they entered.
Dungeon Design - The First Delve of Many
I abided by the most basic and effective rule of dungeon-making: figure out the aesthetic and purpose of the dungeon and go from there. This dungeon is a mausoleum of a long-dead empire. Once I decided this, it was not too difficult to fill in rooms. A mausoleum should have crypts, ways to ward off graverobbers (mainly traps, especially portcullises), and of course, several monsters that managed to circumvent the mausoleum’s defenses.
The company explored maybe 60% of the dungeon, before leaving to find two minions of Arya lying in wait to finish her work. I designed the dungeon knowing that the players likely wouldn’t explore all of it.
There are a few key rules I use when designing dungeons:
There should be an obvious main path through the dungeon.
At least some of the coolest treasure should not be along the main path.
The more dangerous a threat in the dungeon is, the more obviously its power and location should be telegraphed.
You might be thinking that 1 is weird (especially in a dungeon where the goal is for the players to escape it), 2 makes sense, and 3 sort of makes sense. So let me explain!
Adventure Design - Clarity Über Alles!
Fundamentally, adventure design needs to prioritize clarity. The players need to clearly understand what their goal is, what stands in their way, and what the possibilities are for interaction with said obstacle. Whenever you the DM obscure information about those three things, the game is put on hold while the players (often incompetently) try to figure out what they need to do to play the game. This is not to say that you should never obscure things in TTRPG campaigns - just that you should never obscure the basic information which the players need in order to feel like they are able to take meaningful actions in the game.
1] Removing Analysis Paralysis & Enabling Exploration
This is the foundation for dungeon design rule #1. If there is an obvious main path through the dungeon, it grants clarity to the players about how to progress through the dungeon, about where the dungeon wants them to go. It gets rid of a some analysis paralysis right off the bat.
This rule is especially important because it allows the players to “subvert” the main path, which is also known as exploring. The feeling of exploration occurs when a player feels like they are doing something of their own accord, independent of the path laid out, and if no path is laid out, they are deprived of the potential for this feeling.
You can create a main path with simple visual cues - for example, in my dungeon, the main corridors were twice as wide as all the side corridors. You don’t need to do anything super extravagant as smart players will catch on fairly quickly to your dungeon design if you’re consistent. [Notice in my campaign that even when the goal of the players is to escape the dungeon, I’m not really obscuring the “main” path which inevitably leads out of the dungeon, primarily because the more interesting obstacles in the way of escaping a dungeon are the things in the dungeon that want to kill or trap the characters. The players will inevitably find their way out, so trying really hard to obscure that isn’t ultimately that interesting - it just makes the adventure take longer. Instead, put cool encounters in their way.]
2] Incentivizing Exploration
Dungeon design rule #2 shouldn’t be too controversial, but it is extremely important. If you’ve provided a main path which the players can subvert, you open up the possibility of exploration that feels like exploration. The second necessary component is to reward players for exploring so that they aren’t just wasting time when they go down a side path. Every time the players decide to go down a side path rather than the main path, they are choosing to spend precious time (made precious by a wandering monster role every 10 minutes or so in-game time) and expend resources facing whatever threats lie yonder. If this choice is rewarded the same as just going down the main path, or worse, not rewarded at all, then the players will quickly realize it’s not worth it to explore. You should totally put really cool treasure on the main path, especially if there is a boss encounter at the end of the main path, but I would recommend putting the coolest treasure on a side path, somewhere the players could skip over. Yes, they will skip over it often. But when they choose to embark on that exploration and find that really cool item, that will be a moment they will remember, assuming there was an obvious main path through the dungeon in the first place for them to go off of!
3] Incentivizing Creative Planning
Dungeon design rule #3 is yet another actualization of clarity. It is a good rule to follow in general when designing adventures, but it is especially important on dungeon crawls which are typically higher risk, higher reward endeavors. It does a few things. Firstly, if the more dangerous something is the more you telegraph its threat, you will rarely end up in a situation where the players feel blindsided and arbitrarily squashed. Being squashed is okay. Being squashed arbitrarily tends to decrease investment in the game because it erodes the player’s trust that their decisions (one way or another) matter to the end result of an encounter. On the other hand, players are whiny, awful, hypocrites who never seem to complain about the myriad of arbitrary things in their favor. Understand that even telegraphing threats won’t satiate the lust of the players to ruin any actual challenge in the game, but it will make it more likely that the players learn to anticipate danger and get over themselves so that they can actually face it. Am I being too harsh towards players? Yup, but only slightly.
The other benefit to telegraphing high threat encounters is that you enable the players to actually do the thing us DMs always harp on them for not doing - plan! It is very difficult for the players to make a plan to face a challenge if they don’t know what the challenge is, and harder still if they don’t know when they’ll face it. Seriously, the more information you give the players about the threats they will face, the more you will get to experience really cool outside-the-box thinking from your players. When in doubt, clarify more, not less.
A few recommendations for telegraphing:
You can telegraph a powerful enemy’s attack types and their magnitude by the level of devastation the players are able to perceive before they encounter the enemy. For example, put a a string of severely-charred corpses in the corridor that leads to the dragon to show that it has a fire attack. You can show the magnitude of the fire attack by the types of creatures to whom the corpses belong - charred trolls show more threat than charred goblins.
You can telegraph the location of the enemy simply by having an obvious main path through the dungeon - presumably it leads to them. Further, if the enemy has a certain aesthetic or dwells in a certain domain, then make that aesthetic or domain more and more in the players’ faces the closer they get. The obvious example of this is webbing - everyone knows webbing means that spiders are nearby. If most of the webbing in a corridor looks to have been trampled through by other dungeon denizens or burnt away, this shows that there are spiders somewhere, but if the webbing starts to get really dense, that will signal that the threat is near.
You can also telegraph powerful foes by literally telling the players about them via an NPC. This is best done sparingly and as a reward for the players having gained the affinity of an NPC. Typically, show don’t tell. But it is also better to have clarity than obscurity when it comes to TTRPGs, so if this on-the-nose method is the only one you have access to in a given situation, it ain’t a bad idea to use it.
Wrapping Up the Session
The players made it out of the dungeon and came to chasm where they had an epic fight with two minions of Arya, the corporeal goddess who attacked them before. It was here that Radakaeim revealed himself to be a corporeal god who was stripped of his powers by the Arya long ago - she attacked the company because he was coming close to regaining them. The players decided to help Radakaeim and succeeded in restoring his power, earning a powerful ally.
Next session, the company plans to make for the nearest settlement, a small outpost called Lim where they can resupply. Reaching Lim opens up the full sandboxiness of the campaign - an initial home base, and a plethora of leads for the players to pursue.
And that’s that! The birth of a new (as of yet still unnamed) campaign.
More to come!