There is plenty of talk about mega dungeons, but how many people have had success running dungeons that are only two or three rooms. Hell, maybe even just one room.
Micro-Dungeons
Jose Powell
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Hudson Gonzalez
>orc with a pie in a 10x10 foot room
What if you don't like pie?
Easton Taylor
Single room dungeon would either be some shit where cages keep dropping down and letting out different monsters or a ridiculous Mousetrap-esque machine to disarm.
Owen Bailey
or just locations of shorter quests like the cellar under a building thats a vampires lair, or a cave with a dragon.
Bentley Barnes
In the latter scenario the "dungeon" consisted of the whole forest/mountain/whatever you trekked through to reach the cave.
Luke Smith
I think an effective single room dungeon would be a large elevator. There can be arrow traps in the walls, spikes, magical shenanigans like 10 feet of water followed by open air, pit traps on the floor of the elevator itself, places for monsters to ambush from, it goes on and on.
Jonathan Lee
The five room dungeon model is pretty much this, especially if you keep each node in the 5rd to a single room.
Owen Barnes
>Microdungeons
There's literally an entire site full of those things, going back several years
dungeoncontest.com
Joshua Garcia
New one started today if I recall my twitter timeline from the morning correctly.
Elijah Williams
My party once holed up in the vestibule of a dungeon in an undead-haunted desert during a sandstorm. They spent three days straight in that room.
I really expected them to actually do the dungeon, but the initial encounter with a few skeletons, intended mostly to just set the theme and trick them into spending some resources, resulted in one skeleton retreating deeper into the dungeon and alerting every other monster in the dungeon while they tried to take a short rest. So after getting worn down by ghosts, then ghasts, then mummies, they tried taking a long rest and repeatedly getting random encounters from outside, first some bandits seeking shelter, then the archdemon they were running from in the first place. After managing to banish it and defeat its demonic attendants, they were too scared to move and stayed put until the storm cleared.
Connor Mitchell
>What if you don't like pie?
Everyone likes pie.
Hunter Stewart
>tfw you own two of the miniatures in the OP pic and just passed up buying the third at the FLGS recently cause it was 5 bucks instead of the 3 you normally buy for.
I think I have too many minis.
Jacob Gonzalez
No such thing. There is nothing like dumping out your bag of orcs to give your players a proper Helm's Deep experience, or making them face a phalanx of identical $1.50 minis like Hammerers or Guards of Mithral Hall.
Nathan Rivera
One page dungeon isn't exactly the same as microdungeon. Some of the one page dungeons can be pretty fucking large. (LOTFP guy made a one page dungeon that was literally infinite in size.)
Christopher White
>LOTFP guy disregarded the premise and fucked up in the process
Color me shocked
Ayden Evans
Stab the pie, eat the orc.
Brandon Martinez
The premise of the contest is that the "DM kit" of the dungeon has to fit on one page. That's it. There's no size limit to the dungeon itself, only the map and content descriptions.
Bentley Morales
Blake Moore
Yes, I've done it. Ran a game for years which may as well only had two dungeons (generic monster lair caverns, and an evil necromancer temple with an entry chamber and a basement).
Hunter Anderson
mini-dungeons are really the only ones I run, big dungeons just lead to too much combat and they take too long. I never really go over 9 rooms per dungeon.
My formula is usually:
1. some kind of puzzle or challenge to gain entry to the dungeon
2. 2-3 combat encounters, some possibly avoidable with the correct strategy
3. 1-2 secret rooms
4. 1-2 traps
5. boss
with that in mind I only really need 5-6 rooms, with probably only 4 of them being mandatory.
Parker Sanders
He throws it at you
Roll to resist blindness
Oliver Ross
Shame they stopped publishing the winners as one convenient free PDF.
Elijah Nguyen
bump for micro dungeon ideas.
Christopher Bailey
This is the space that board games occupy. You can do it, but the question is, "Why?"
Now, a series of micro-dungeons - that, I can fuck with.
Jeremiah Diaz
Next year: Zak S runs with an arbitrarily large single webpage.
Daniel Jackson
I'm not gonna have sloppy secons, that's why. Just because the orc is some harlot who has just been used by the previous guy who entered the room doesn't mean I will. Since there's nothing else in the room I'll just move on to the next.
Kevin Bennett
Ran a short dungeon set in a wine cellar that was only six large rooms full of wine barrels/bottles.