Designing a Dungeon in 3 Easy Steps! 

One of the ways I use the "pick some monsters and see what sticks" method is starting with a creature type or two. Party in the forest? Beasts and monstrosities. Tomb? Undead. Mountains? Dragons. Underdark? Aberrations. Hotel? Trivago.

Worth noting, in real life, buildings are rarely designed with every room's intent fully planned out. It's okay to have rooms in a dungeon be just a general room.

1:45 Kelly: "Location..." Me: Aha I know where this is going Kelly: **says something else that isn't also "Location"** Me: Oh no

You guys need to stop reading my mind. "I need to find a tutorial about designing dungeons" And then this appears.

Most important point that I like to stress is a Dungeon wasn't always a Dungeon. It had a purpose before. When you style it, make sure the rooms reflect that. And creatures likely aren't going to stay in the same room (especially if your PC's try to long rest in a room). Feel free to be a bit fluid if your PC's are taking a super long time.

For designing randomized dungeon maps, I've found a fun way to start creating a floor plan. All you need is a piece of paper (graph paper is my preference) and some dice. How many dice depends on how many rooms you want, each dice representing one room. Then just roll the dice across the paper. Where the dice land indicates where the rooms are, and the numbers rolled determine how big the rooms are. I like to use the number rolled+2 as the number of 5' squares on the grid, so a rolled 1 would give you a roughly 15'x15' room or a 4 would give you a roughly 30'x30' room. Once you have the rooms in place, just connect them up with pathways however you like, and you've got your basic floor plan.

As a new DM, this and your other DM videos have been incredibly helpful

Uhhhh! That sounds like an awesome video... Why do I get the idea that by the end of the video I am going to create dungeons out of boredom, while still not having any friends who wants to play it?

My favorite dungeons are ones where the conflict is already baked in for the players. In one campaign, I started the crew off as work slaves for red wizards in a factory, with collars that magically bound them to each other such that if one died or left the factory, they all died. The goal for them was to destroy the factory and escape, which at level 1 is very hard and necessitated lots of cooperation and coordination. The red wizards weren’t the enemy to fight, the factory bosses were, so no high level magic to worry about.

I'm amped to learn about putting some D in my D&D ...can I look forward to a Dragon video soon?

As a musician, I found many parallels in this to songwriting. I could write a decent song with just a blank sheet of staff paper and pencil, but it’s way easier to get the starting ideas from just sitting with the instrument and improvising. Thanks Dungeon Dudes!

Content idea. Kelly gives us a tour of his amazing fave movie t-shirt collection. Might have to be a 3-parter.

I made a dungeon a while ago I was pretty proud of since it was my first I made from scratch. It was an old fort on top of a hill, abandoned because the cliff was eroding making the state of the fort too precarious. But now a group of bandits was using it as their base of operations. They were holding some villagers hostage in presumably the brig of the fort to ransom them, and there were far too many bandits for the level 2 party of three people to take on, so it was a stealth mission. There was a room with sleeping guard dogs, a courtyard with sparring bandits, bedrooms to steal from, one with someone sleeping, a workshop to find useful potions and weapons, an abandoned hallway with poison damage-dealing mold to dexterously dodge, another hallway of crumbling foundation that's cracks in the stone tiles created a minesweeper style puzzle to cross without falling through broken tile off the hill, a supply room that held a safe that was guarded by a gray ooze, a room of bandits gambling, a kitchen with a back door, a big empty war room with a supply closet full of maps and hints toward further adventures, the old general's office and bedroom which were connected with a bookcase door they could use to spy on the bandit captain or find info connected to the main quest, stairs to a food cellar with swarms of rats, stairs to the roof where bandits were keeping watch, and of course the brig with the prisoners with the chance for them to either break through the hole in the precarious floor and scale the cliffside down to the river below, try to sneak or distract their way out, or what ended up happening, getting caught, failing to parlay with the bandit captain despite much leniency on my part as the DM leading me to make a very dumb NPC feel bad they didn't get supper and come feed them in the middle of the night and offer to leave the door open so they could go to the privy as long as they promised they'd come back in order to give them a fighting chance to sneak out.

Important: When you walk around in the dungeon, what do you feel, see, smell and hear? A cold, dark cave with dripping water....being soggy and wet. A hot desert tomb with scarabs running around and you hear a wind every fifteen minutes and the place reeks of sardines? etc etc

"Choose a quirky and a practical magic item" I made one with the quirky Decanter of Endless Water and the practical Saddle of the cavalier. My players made practical use of the decanter and basically threw away the saddle.

When they talked about using pre-existing locations, I just thought of the candy cottage from disenchantment or (as dark as it can be) like a continuous SAW trap.

Monty: I am a pretty big believer that you shouldn't spend more time designing a dungeon than it takes to play it at the table. Me: ... Me: ... Me: ... Me: *Flips the table* Is this a personal attack? But seriously. That is a great policy.

Every single video you guys make is so informative. I'm sure I'm going to be designing dungeons for the heck of it now

Taking notes, saving video, memorizing each line. God how I love this channel

Populating the dungeon has always been my bete noir, especially in 5e. It'd be neat to have a regular 5e Monster Manual that a) provides a list of monsters sorted by their difficulty/level; and b) provides suggestions for how to build encounters off of that monster, additional monsters to add that complement the encounter both tactically and thematically, and discusses overall strategy on how those monsters work together to challenge the player. You know, like that other edition that no one wants to talk about.

Love the Tshirt Kelly, I'm off down the Winchester.

Step two is probably where I always stumble up on and lean into pre-generated dungeons to save myself some time. Thankfully I have some blank maps similar to Dyson Logos by a different creator and can use those to start working out my next dungeon that I'll need in, oh... two days. 😅

Great advice. I am the kind of person who LOVES to create maps and spend way, way too much time on them. I wasn't surprised to see Dyson Logos mentioned, since his work has been an inspiration for myself as well. I am particularly impressed by his standard of regular production of quality work.

Awesome video guys! The flowchart step is especially helpful. I just discovered you today and you seem really cool! I'm binging through your content now - your dungeon design videos are truly thought-provoking. :3

5:41 the map show is like the style of maps for EverQuest MMORPG back in 1999 love it.

Thank you for this amazing video! I think my favorite thing to add into Dungeons is diaries that gives clues about any mysteries the party might be looking into.

This video is exactly what I needed. I’ve really only made one dungeon before and it’s very linear but it takes place in an underground bunker, and decided that there weren’t very many ways to get round other than straight through. Now I’m having trouble trying to think of nonlinear maps and what I can do with them.

This was an amazing video! I feel super inspired to go make dungeons now and I feel very equipped to do it which I definitely did not before. This is one of those videos I can tell I will be watching many times

This video couldn't have come at a better time. I'm making a really silly dungeon for a one/two-shot to run for my friends, and I was having serious dungeon-block. Thanks dudes!!

I think that some of these ideas for dungeon design will really be helpful for overall game design, thanks as always dudes!

I loved to your recipe for dungeon creation and making a flowchart is just genius. Thanks!

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but I love how the flowcharts illustrated here follow the same rules for a user flow in a software app. So cool

My biggest obstacle with some recent homebrew content was not being able to visualize anything... so I did a Google image search for the kind of environment I had in mind, and everything fell into place.

I just loved how I opened this vid trying to make a dungeon, they suggested dysonlogos, I opened it and the first map I saw on the landing page was flawlessly perfect for what I intended

How did i miss an episode? This is fantastic info for any level of dungeon master at any stage of creation or play!

Thank you for doing these videos, Dudes, they are fun, informative and well made :D

Y’all are extremely helpful as always!

8:15 This! Since I'm a lazy dm when I want something more custom, I use this and helps me a lot!

Love this video! Super inspiring and helpful.

I love how the t-shirts go so well together. Solution and Problem.

good advice , as always. difficult lesson = design just enough to run the session, then adapt as the story will develop.

Rewatched this as I fill in a dungeon map for a Mini BBEG battle and man! I literally had light bulbs going off as I named the baddies that would be in the catacombs and lore... y'all doing great!

3 Easy Steps to kill you PCs with joy.... Love you Dudes :D

A 9th level Wizard with Mason Artisan Background can use magic to make a good dungeon in one year. The dungeon has 136,000 cubic feet of open space, is inside a permanent Mordekainen's Private Sanctum and has a permanent Teleportation Circle. Pick any location. Fabricate 125 cubic feet of 10 lb bricks from an area of rock three times/day. Use Mage Hand to move these onto a pallet and eventually hollow out the area of the spell. Then, Floating Disk them to a Teleportation Circle. Send them somewhere for sale. The sale of bricks, some with ore or raw gems, pays for the Circle.This creates 375 cu. ft. of open space that can be illuminated with Light and cleaned up with Prestidigitation. That's 136 (10'x10'x10') cubes of open space per year. Cast Mordekainen's Private Sanctum every day for that year to make it permanent throughout a layered dungeon area. The Circle is also made permanent by daily casting, but is outside the area of the Sanctum to work. So, in addition to self use, the Wizard could make this for any CR level of minions or as the henchman for a higher level character. Arcane Locks and Glyphes of Warding can be added at an additional expense.

You helped a lot! Thank you!

Really helpful video guys. Thanks!

It's ancient elven dungeon time tonight thanks for the help guys!

Good info. Thanks boys!

Great points! Love your videos and looking forward to the fruition of your Kickstarter. Have y’all seen Dungeon alchemist? I chipped into their start up fund as well and the Beta is supposed to be available in October. Thanks again and keep up the great work!

I do love this idea and method, because, not only is it a good for a dungeon, but it can scale all the way up to a whole world... You could start building a world, rooms are swapped for cities and villages, passages are highways, generic monsters are swapped for races, named monsters and NPC's become the BBEG etc, items and treasure can be great mystical items, or the towns themselves. treasure can be the dungeons, a gold and gem mine, historical ruins, portals to other realms or places needed to open such a portal... Then you can just flesh out a village as needed, flesh out a dungeon or a forest or swamp in much the same way.

It's good to leave some empty areas for possible rest areas for the party, but also determine why these areas might be empty of monsters or why it is avoided by the denizens.

Great video Dungeon Dudes!

Oooh shit this should help me loads thank you! All the resources you give in these videos are incredibly helpful lol. The biggest thing for me has been simply creating the battle maps. I've taken some of your other advice in creating specific loot tables for those dungeons. However instead of just stopping at loot I've applied this to the rooms themselves to a degree. Some are fixed, being 3 of the rooms I designed around the players themselves. The other 6 are based on what number on the d6 they'll roll. Just to give them a little fun in feeling like they're actually exploring the place. So far I've just been searching on Google for map designs, as well as my FB groups. Now I gotta give dice & logos a try, thank you. I'll have to go relisten on where it is, but that tracing map editor will be EXACTLY what I've been missing. Dungeon fog is just frickin weird, for some reason I haven't figured out exactly how to use it very well lol. I bet I just need to watch a RU-vid video about it but hellll. So that resource will hopefully help a literal shit load. My players love maps and thinking outside the box in encounters, in being such amazing players trying to justify not using a map is getting harder and harder lol. Enjoyed the video as always!

Awwww... thanks for the shoutout, Dudes!

I do love your process though I love things like random generators (I am so old that I still love Donjon as a starting point) I love your process for working for a directed personal small dungeon.

Thanks for the content.

I tend to design my dungeons in reverse order of what they outline. I'll start with a concept of a conflict, figure out what creatures would be best used for that, and then design geography to fit what I want those creatures to do

My current dungeon in work is the citadel of the fallen legion, inhabited by a legion of paladins turned death knights. I am currently looking for a way to make it less railroady and add a bit more player urgency. In general the biggest hurdle for me usually is mapping out the locations, so yes. The vid definetly helped me a long way.

Awesome!

I like this method a lot. I actually created a town the same way. I started by just saying "I want this mountaintop town to have sky ships." Then, I came up with a reason that it is on the mountain, what the people there do, and how it functions. Now I have the city of Skyport, where aarakocra settlers worked together with the deep gnomes inside the mountain to make an industry out of mining, charging up, and distributing crystals that can hold elemental power.

That is a good template. Tha k you again. Enjoy Gen Con

This is great, I love your dm guides, just the simple tip to take maps from other creators and not create everything yourself opened up dm'ing for me and now I'm dm'ing a group!

One thing I’ve done with some success is mine some of my old Rolemaster and Middle Earth Role Playing modules and campaign books for their maps. They’re sufficiently obscure enough that no one I’m playing with has ever seen them before.

I like to start with the location and go off that, like you guys suggest. The best dungeon ive done so far was a pyriamid. As soon as i knew it was going to be a pyriamid things fell into place, puzle rooms, mummy monsters and a sphynx boss. Im now working on a research tower.

I found this one guide on Reddit where you roll a bunch of d6 and based on the numbers you determined room sizes, types, challenges, loot, etc. I don't know who to credit for it but it can be really helpful

Good stuff here!

Something I really like to do is use a non-dungeon as a "dungeon". So maybe a castle, or an abandoned church, a dense forest with small clearings acting as rooms, etc. Variety is the spice of life and it keeps things from becoming stale.

The tob of the steel makers look exactly like a map I posted online over 25 year ago. A bit more details has been added, but the general shape is identical. Weird, but okay it was bound to happen since I have been making my own maps for over 35 year, ever since I got the D&D Red box as a gift so many years ago and was released by TSR. Now this was the very early 80 ties or late 70ties, I'm not entirely sure. But I know that the red box at that time had been out for a few years so I suspect it was around 1982. Without access to any other source material I had to force my self to become a GM and that made me try my hand at creating adventures and maps. After years of this an mountains of things created 2nd ed came out, but by then our little group had grown to double and tripple size, so much so that I ran weekly games two nights a week for two seperate groups and every adventure they went of for years were all made by me. It became so easy for me that I could created multi session senarioes in as little as 20 minutes, other times I took the time do full maps and special addons, and sometimes I just had to wing it because I just didn't have the time. That's when I came up with the story adventures. It was basically a senario so huge in scope that the players could play it for months without gettting through it all and all it took was some local maps, key points added to each eare, a mysteri that had been splitt apart and a few other fun little ideas for my players. The cool part was that with the notes building as they played I easily kept a key location or several ahead of them as things the players did changed the story. Each key location then got an later upgrade with key lists of persons, important site, commerce and so on. All in all I made up about a single sheet of paper for each key site with the needed pieces and then I added stuff the locals in those site wanted help with. Before my players were really hocked and they got so hocked on the story that the bugged me to add a third game night. That adventure ran for nearly 5 years before the players even got close to the end and they loved it so much that they wanted to run it again from another angle a few years later. The key was the story and making them part of it. I'll admit it was hard to come up with a store that epic, so I drew bits and pieces from books I loved to make it all. I kicked it off with an adventure I called Halls of Dreams in which a mage they often went to for spells and enchantment needed something he just had discovered the location too a ruined mage college that seemingly vanished. Just that opening took them almost 5 months and they loved it, even though they all nearly died several times as they ran smack into a goblin war and found a dream object that was beyond anything they knew existed. I never before got that much positive feedback from my players because they really loved the story being told as the background. It didn't help that cities they came to later had people sleepwalking and speaking about something horrible coming, something the players though they had stopped down in that ruined place. The key I found later was the Story and how it change as they did things within each chapter. If you are building an adventure, build it into a story with a history and something disturbing happening and you'll most likely draw your players in like a piped piper.

I like Kelly's Shaun of the Dead t-shirt... oh, and the video was pretty interesting and useful too.

As far as location, I really like Dungeonographer. There's a free and a paid version but the free is completely sufficient. It gives you a block-style grid that you can fill with different colored blocks, specific dungeon items, doors, stairs, words or numbers, etc. So you can design a simple dungeon blueprint really quickly. But my favorite feature, is they'll generate a random dungeon for you instead if you want. You can choose small, medium, or large, and a few other preferences, and then it gives you a random blueprint and you can customize it to your liking.

Speaking of designing dungeons, since I don't remember if you guys covered this or not, but referencing free (and/or cheap) online map-making programs that exist will also be of benefit to DM's since that kind of content can come at a premium. That's the kind of stuff that can help newer DM's getting through the digital age, especially if they are using "theater of the mind" via a chat program like Discord.

A little bigger than you're talking about, but when I started playing D&D (don't take this wrong, but before either of you were born) a company called Judge's Guild had books of villages and castles. I once took one--they're available now as PDFs from the usual outlets--blew it up to scale and plugged it into the gimp and turned it into an underground dwarven hamlet. This would have made a world class dungeon, and now that I think about it may be about to become just that. How? Trace the buildings and the roads on a different layer from the map, and then draw narrow tunnels from the entrance to the nearest road/tunnel. Hatch it, and you're done--except for occupants and so on :D FYI I love Dyson Logos as well, mostly from their resemblance to the old-school line art maps from the old days.

Urag could also move around in the dungeon. For example in the steelmakers tome you could mark the rooms with the numbers 1 - 4 and whenever you as DM feel it is approbiate you roll a D4 and Urag will shift to the room you've rolled for him. If you're using this idea you could also come up with possible interactions Urag could have with other stuff in the dungeon. Maybe he'll fight Bofo as they actually are enemies. Or he might find the treasure room and try to snatch the treasure for himself or Urag could fall into a pit and require help or he is having dinner at the large table in that big room up north and would be distracted by that. It doesn't really matter what exactly you have him do, but haing some of the characters move around in the dungeon could make the dungeon feel more alive and the randomness of that can make playing the dungeon more interesting for yourself as now you also don#t really know what the inhabitants of the dungeon are about to do.

I just spent 7 hours designing a map for my party, and I designed it to be an ever changing and shrinking maze till them realize the walls following them are mimicz

How do you chose the position and size of load bearing walls and pillars?

What dungeon map making software do you guys use in your own campaigns?

Thanks.

I just had an idea, but it's gonna be a bit on the pricey side. Use Lego Mario sets to create dungeons! Eidt: to hopefully make it a bit cheaper, you could instead just get the manuals for the Lego Mario sets online and just buy the pieces you need

I was thinking of a "great tomb of nazarick" type of dungeon

Are the Dungeon Dudes a couple? I wish someone would look at me the way Kelly looks at Monty in each video.

While watching this my mind slowly built a highway bandit encounter that ends in a hideout dungeon. Traps, NPCs and what they have stolen.

this is useful for a bottom up design philosophy, but cant really be applied to top down nearly as well since the steps are sort of in reverse for thst approach. i suppose you could just follow the steps in reverse order (i.e. you already know the conflict, so work out the other items from there)

Personally i like to have at least one or two rooms, three if its a large dungeon, that don't really serve an obvious purpose. Maybe it was once a storage room or a closet. Having rooms that are mundane with no enemies or anything of interest is more realistic in my mind.

Could you guys add to the description or a pinned comment links to all the resources you mentioned by name in the video? I’m getting started my self and it would make work a lot easier to find everything I would want to check out without having to skim the video!

Another good video from The Dudes, but I find the process backwards to what I normally do. I have a world and setting. There is a problem with (aka the Conflict) as well as their motivation and back story if needed, then I figure out the NPCs/monsters (aka Inhabitants), then I figure out their base (Location and layout). Ii can't imagine sitting down "I need to make a base, then figure out who is there, then why are they a problem or what do they have going on?" But then again, I never have the discussed writer's block. I never even considered this as an issue before this video.

Would be awesome if you dungeon dudes did this while making an example!!

Kelly and Monty, thanks for once again letting us into your brains.

I have a question - How do you may an uneven floor? I had an idea of a temple that was swallowed by a sink hole - so it ended up semi-collapsed, under ground, at an angle, partially flooded But I have no idea how wo implement it on a VTT

That method is rather similar to a Python script I hacked together to get inspiration for Shadowrun games. It basically selects a location, two opposing parties, a point of conflict and a mission type off a few lists and prints them out. Then, I just make a dozen, drop or change the ones that don't make sense, and pick the one I like best. Usually, at that point the story is already forming in my mind. Then I grab a floor plan off google image search, maybe think about a few cool opponents and security measures, and I'm done. Later, I also added a random list for complications, and omissions/lies in the briefing to the tool (it's Shadowrun, after all - the question is not if Mr. Johnson is lying to you, it's about what he's lying this time).

Are you guys using a map for the dungeons of nox? It looks a lot more like a point crawl that a gridded out dungeon.

I have a campaign where the idea is the dungeon is ever growing. Basically each dungeon has 3 to four levels, each level has at least 40 rooms and after ever sessions 5 to 8 more rooms are add to each level. Also there’s like 25 different dungeons, there all interconnected and each one is deeper in the earth and filled with more terrors -So any ideas on how to make that idea run more smoothly

So I got a idea for a dungeon of a dwarf mining town that is a prison technically but also working mines so time to make several floors

As an improvisational DM, I've made entire dungeons out of nothing. It's writing the details down after the players have completed it that brought about Out of the Box Encounters. I still have one dungeon I've used two or three times that I have yet to made out and write down, but that's because of it's complex gravity rules. My steps are 1. purpose, 2. location, 3. inhabitants. The purpose defines the location and the inhabitants. The location fine tunes the inhabitants. The inhabitants flavour the purpose.

I have success running dungeons with random tables to determine what each part is going to be. I make the tables so I know what to expect, but the random cast nature means I seldom know how is going to end

Nice

Made it before the alert

This is super useful, thank you! Kelly's t-shit tho

Damn, I thought it was Dice&Logos until I actually read it :D

The few times it's fine to spend more time making a dungeon that'll be 1) extremely notable for the plot. If your bbeg lair is only as impressive as the kobold lair you stole from elsewhere then the players will be disappointed unless that was one hella good kobold lair 2) it's a beholder lair.

Make sure the dungeon can support the creatures that live there, and that the features of the dungeon are ones the creatures therein can build and maintain. Important rooms to include: defensible entryway, where creatures store food, cook food & eat food, where they get water, dispose of waste and rest, the boss lair. Optional rooms to include: garrison/armory, trap rooms/hallways, library/temple/workshop, where they keep their females, secret doors, treasury, jail/torture room. Add one more room that defines what the creatures are doing, a plot room. Then it's just a matter of connecting the rooms in such a way that the layout makes sense.