Actually Making a Dungeon: The First Rat Bank

Many of you will have seen JB's Out of the Sewer! adventure contest. TL;DR, it was a contest for the month of November to write a rat-themed adventure, with a shortlist of the adventures repackaged as an anthology to be sold for charity. I was a busy bee in November, but kept it in the back of my mind, and when I finally had time to spare during Thanksgiving week, I poured myself into it. 

And it turns out... I was one of the two winners. I did not expect this, but am quite happy with it. The other big winner is Vance A. with 'Clearing the Warren,' go show him some love!

Since JB enjoyed it, I figured I'd put my process out for others to see, since it was a good learning experience. 

The adventure I made is The First Rat Bank, a dungeon-based adventure with 27 rooms in 3 pages, plus 2 pages of maps and a page for notable characters and treasures (mostly magic items). It's a pretty slapdash affair, very basic layout with no frills, no art, maps exported from mipui, and without real adventure hooks or wandering encounters, just rooms and keys. So it's by no means complex, but I think it's fairly competent for what it is.

The Concept

At the beginning of the month, I did a bit of brainstorming, and settled on writing an adventure set in a tavern, where everyone within had been shrunk down through a magic ritual conducted by a swarm of cranium rats, such that the party would have to face ordinarily trivial challenges at 1/12 their normal size. A neat idea, but tough to pull off, and by the time the last week rolled around, an entirely different, and more executable, idea came up.

JB hates rats. I'm not quite so down on the little things, though I've never lived in close proximity (that I know of). Besides their association in western countries with plague, I was more taken with their eastern associations with industry, generosity and wastefulness (according to wikipedia anyway). In Legend of the 5 Rings (which is actually one of my favorite systems to run or play, though I've written almost nothing about it on this blog) rats are the sacred animals of Daikoku, the fortune of prosperity. 

So when I thought of rats, I didn't think first of disease-ridden warrens and plague pits. My first image was of a statue of a rat holding a coin. That first image turned into the basic premise; a bank, whose icon is a rat, making use of the above associations, whose (more literally than usual) predatory practices lead a team of adventurers to break in and ???. Maybe discover some secret, destroy them, steal all their goodies, what have you, it's not very well defined in the end result either. I imagined were-rats using their control of ordinary rats to comb the city, not just for information, but stealing small valuables, a lost earring here, a coin from under the couch there, etc. This didn't really make it into the final cut either.

The Making

My first stop for making the adventure was figuring out the level and treasure, as well as the system. I settled on Swords and Wizardry, since it's the retro system I have the most familiarity with thanks to my CX campaign, and I settled on a dungeon for a party of level 6. Why? Well, because I wanted to be able to throw some neat stuff in there and the highest level I've ever run is 6, since that's where the CX campaign ended. Plus, if I ever got around to playtesting it, I could get the old gang back together, dust off the Groomsmen with all their insane magic items, and relive the glory days (the glory days were less than a year ago -Ed). If Sabatini, Dave, other Dave, or Justin are reading this, hey! Maybe don't read the dungeon if you're interested, or be prepared for a memory wipe.

So I went to my regular resource for this stuff... B/X Blackrazor. Seriously, JB's posts on Stocking per Moldvay (especially part 2) are my go-to. Level 6 party, I wanted a dungeon that could get such a party halfway to level 7 if they found and fought everything (JB pins the size for something like that around 30-ish rooms, I went for 30 to start) and last two or three sessions. 

I calculated the amount of XP to put in there (about 60k for a party of 5) and since I play with monster xp, went for a 3-1 ratio of treasure xp to monster xp, smack in the middle of S&W's recommended range. 

With that down, I got cracking. I always start these things with a basic concept, and then fill in with monsters. 15k of monsters is a fair bit, and I split these up into packets for encounters. 1800xp of monsters can cover lots of things, from a single big bruiser to a truly massive rat swarm. I like smaller numbers of monsters usually, the most I ever put in a single room here is eleven, so no room full of 50 skeletons here. 

I just flipped through the bestiary and picked stuff at random, some because it made sense (wererats? Obviously! And what kind of bank doesn't have a vampiric manager?) and others that really didn't make sense (a medusa? A treant? a flesh golem? how do these fit? Don't know, I'll find a place) and filled stuff into the slots, modifying the plan at my whim as I went. 

Soon enough I had a list of monsters, and got to wondering how they fit together. I also followed JB's advice in splitting the treasure according to a power-law distribution (I think it is anyway? Oh, for the days I could rattle off the difference between heavy and light-tailed distributions! [those days were also less than a year ago -Ed]) where half the treasure was in one spot, and a quarter in the next, and an eighth in the next, and so on. 

Then I took the Moldvay stocking distribution, 10 monsters, 10 empty rooms, 5 traps, 5 'special' rooms, assigned treasure to a few of these, and just started placing. Some monsters were pretty easy to place, obviously the treant was above ground, and the vampire below. I had settled by this point on two floors, ten rooms on the surface and 20 below. 

I had not, by this point, done very much on a map, so I made a very quick sketch to organize my thoughts. The bulk of the work in the next session was a matter of seeing what ideas came up, figuring if they fit or not, and putting them in rooms if they did. By far the most difficult bit for me is in making traps. Even with a copy of Grimtooth's at hand I am woeful with them, and find myself unable to do good sideways thinking to come up with good concepts. The best one here is a derivative of the 'Roman Amphitheatre' trap, which in a characteristic display of punnishness I labeled 'Ratlas Shrugged.' It's a good day when you can squash the party with a physical manifestation of their own greed. 

Once this phase was over, I had a whole bunch of rooms, some well defined and some not, and nowhere to put them. So I sketched up a map on mipui and just started placing. Some rooms, especially empty rooms, became quite clear once I had a space in front of me. 

The rest of the work was a mix of creativity with tedium. The best is when I've got an idea and am figuring out how to put it in words, the worst is when I've got to write a trap and nothing is coming to mind. The end result here was 27 rooms instead of 30, and it came mostly out of my trap budget. 

I noticed this when I was doing my Depravities of the Dinosorcerer dungeon last year (very much the same process as this, but more ambitious, less coherent, and unfinished), I really love the craft of taking an evocative idea and figuring out how to condense and compress it with minimal loss so it fits in a few lines. I also love taking a mediocre concept and spinning out something evocative from its bones, it's so gratifying. 

The monsters especially went through a few versions before I got something that felt right. In the end result, there are some parallels and what I will tentatively call 'themes,' n.b. Eve vs Emptiness-Seeks-Form. These were not part of any plan, but once I saw them arising I put in some effort to flesh them out. 

However, a week isn't very long even with a lot free time, and I'm new at this, so near the end I still had a bunch of rooms , especially the empty and special rooms, which needed something and had nothing, not even a concept. I wound up taking some really basic stuff (mess hall, kitchen, evil shrine) and trying to make them fun and fresh without requiring too much 'content' with varying results. 

I outright stole one room from the dinosaur dungeon mentioned above, since I increasingly despair of it ever being finished. It was probably my favorite of those rooms I've made. 

Formatting

It's worth noting that the layout/format for all this is effectively stolen from Melan's Castle Xyntillan, since it's very readable, dense and I'm comfortable with it. I've used it for so many of my projects that I largely no longer need to reference the original or my impromptu style guide. 

Playtesting

Didn't happen. I don't have an old-school group at the moment and getting one together for this is beyond my present circumstances. Fully testing, expanding and polishing this is a someday affair.

And on the pedestal these words appear,

'No playtesters are credited in this publication.'

Reflections

Writing an adventure is time-consuming. Much more so than just making the framework for one for my own table. That said, the games I've homebrewed haven't depended heavily on dungeons. 

Without a deadline like this, it likely would have never gotten done. Not sure how to implement this for the future. 

I have a not-inconsiderable talent for coming up with fun ideas and applying them. I like this. 

I seriously need to work out my block with traps. 

This is fun, and I am inspired to do more. 

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If you've enjoyed this rambling mess, there's more where that came from! Comment below, and be sure to follow the blog. Until next time, have an excellent week!