D&D: Five Ways to Design a Quick Dungeon
Need a dungeon in a hurry? Here are some quick tricks to help you design your next delve. Never be caught too unprepared again!
Dungeon design is one of the few bits of fun a DM can get up to without needing to even have a party or a game ready to go. But despite that, many a DM has been caught unprepared by their party’s sudden decision to go into the foreboding location you were warning them against.
Now you need a dungeon in a hurry. Well, don’t worry, we’ve got your back with some quick and dirty dungeon design tips.
Theme Dungeons Make Life Easy
When you absolutely need to design something quickly, pick a location, pick a theme, and go from there. Sometimes this might suggest itself through play. The party is looking for the location of the idol of a lost/forgotten snake god. Serpent temple is pretty easy.
But even if you can’t think of one, just pick a central theme and go crazy with it. Often, theming the dungeon around a certain type of monster works extremely well in a hurry. Examples include
- Snakes – Nagas, Yuan-Ti, Giant Snakes, Snake Cultists
- Bugs – Giant Bugs, Demon Bugs, Some Kind of Queen
- Demons – Lesser Demons, Demon Cultists, Maybe A Cult Leader
But you can also use a location as a theme:
- Ancient but weirdly magically advanced ruin – Constructs for days
- Trap-filled Temple – Spikes, Scything Blades, Snakes
- Vampire Castle – Anything Gothic, from Vampires to Skeleton Knights
Be Lazy and Roll
Of course, you don’t even have to make any decisions at all. You can let the dice decide for you. The various D&D books and random generators out there are full of ideas and all you have to do is act that alea and let your dice pick what monsters, treasures, and even what sorts of rooms you’re going through next.
Grab a Blueprint and Flip It
You can find blueprints for a surprising number of well-known and unknown buildings online. Just grab one and turn it around so it’s upside down. Take something like a Natural History Museum and spin it on an axis until it suits your purposes as a temple of an ancient evil. Every display area can be an encounter spot.
Just be wary of the herpetarium.
The Easter Egg
Or if you’re really stuck and pressed for time, just remember, everyone steals. But if you do it right, it’s a loving homage. Like the Wilhelm scream. Or the Akira slide.
And the same can hold true with dungeons. Take the design for something like “the Nostromo” and make it fantasy. You don’t even have to change the plot, just the details. Instead of a Xenomorph, it’s a demonic insect or whatever.
Or grab something like the Beast’s castle from Beauty and the Beast and make a dungeon full of animated objects that your players encounter. Just leave references like a breadcrumb trail to gently lead your players to recognize their surroundings. If you let them “realize the truth” they’ll feel like they’re in on the joke and you’ve saved yourself time and effort because all you have to do is copy the thing you already like,
The Villain’s Lair
When all else fails, here’s a three-room formula that hits every time. Pick a boss fight you want to have, pick a room. Put two rooms in front of it that have monsters loosely related to the boss, make the third room a big boss fight arena, and you’ve got a whole entire session’s worth of play right there.
It works in pretty much every video game, from Skyrim to Destiny 2 and beyond!
What are your favorite tricks to get a dungeon in a hurry?
