B1 and Toyetic Dungeon Rooms

Over on Bluesky, I did a walkthrough of B1: In Search of the Unknown. I already wrote about how B1 tells the story of Rogahn and Zelligar, two adventurers motivated "by greed and vague evil" who in their retirement became dungeon sickos and built Quasqueton, a labyrinthine dungeon stronghold, as a monument to their own egos and sadism, and as a middle finger to the upstart adventurers who would one day surely come to plunder its riches.

But how, exactly, does the module tell that story? Well, it's largely through its room descriptions.

By default, most of the rooms in Quasqueton are empty. A few contain incidental or major treasures, tricks, or traps. But, being a teaching/introductory module, the intention is for the DM to manually stock each of the rooms (excepting a few) with monsters or treasure from a provided list.

When I stocked my version of B1, I treated a roll of 1 or 2 on d6 as a monster. If there was no monster, a roll of 1 on d6 would indicate a treasure should be placed. This is based on OSE's stocking procedure, minus special rooms because those are already written into the module:

That still leaves something like 56% of rooms empty. My version of B1 ended up with 33 empty rooms out of 56 total rooms - that's 59% (here I'm counting traps and special rooms already written into the module as "empty" in the sense that I'm not adding anything that isn't already there - these are not strictly-speaking empty rooms, so the numbers aren't wholly accurate).

That number is fairly consistent with AD&D, where 60% of dungeon rooms are empty:

Overall, I was impressed by the quality of B1's rooms. Even without monsters, tricks, traps, or treasure, few of them are ever actually truly empty. This is consistent with modern OSR design philosophies, wherein empty rooms can be actionable, containing mundane items to use, clues to or warnings about encounters elsewhere in the dungeon, environmental storytelling in the form of artwork and other set dressings, or dangers other than monsters, tricks, and traps, such as hazards or obstacles.

Interestingly, despite what the common wisdom may be regarding empty rooms, there is some evidence to suggest that Gygax (in the earliest days, at least) imagined empty rooms as being truly empty - or at least, not worth detailing. Even so, truly empty space in a dungeon can still serve a purpose by facilitating tension or mystery, or by helping with the pace of the game, providing breathing room between dungeon factions or a safe place for the party to rest or think.

For the most part, B1's rooms, when empty, are of the mundane items and environmental storytelling variety. As my previous post describes, many of the rooms tell the story - by way of carvings, tapestries, paintings, torture devices, and manacled skeletons - of Rogahn and Zelligar's egos, cruelty, and paranoia. Many others are filled with mundane equipment and barrels, bottles, and casks of various unremarkable substances.

One thing that struck me when reading B1 was that even those rooms without prewritten tricks, traps, and treasure, when my stocking method revealed them to have no additional monsters or treasure, still ignited my imagination. Specifically, they made me imagine how these rooms might play if there was some additional element like a monster or treasure. That is, the descriptions made me imagine the rooms' potential.

Take for example Area II, the kitchen. You could easily just describe this room as "An old kitchen. Y'know, there's moldy food and utensils and crap all over, but there's nothing else here." And that's basically what the room is. There are two big cooking pits, a very narrow chimney, moldy food on the tables (including a "particularly noxious" chunk of cheese), hanging utensils, pots and pans, and a large cast iron kettle hanging from the ceiling by a chain.

The room isn't empty. It's got stuff in it. At the same time, none of the stuff here is particularly useful to adventurers (unless they want to cook a monster they kill later), it doesn't provide any clues about the rest of the dungeon, there isn't much in the way of environmental storytelling (besides establishing that people used to eat here a long time ago), and there are no other dangers present.

But I can't help but imagine what if there was something here. What if a huge spider hid in one of the cooking pits? What if giant centipedes nested in the chimney? What if you got into a food fight with some hobgoblins? Is the "particularly noxious" cheese an especially potent weapon? Would it have the same effect if the enemies were instead stinking troglodytes? What if you stabbed a goblin with a fork or smashed it over the head with a cooking pan? Could you use the kettle on a chain as a wrecking ball against a band of kobolds?

Or take Area X, the storeroom. This one contains barrels of stale but still edible foodstuffs. This room falls into the "mundane but useful stuff" category, since the party can provision itself here (albeit with old, nasty food), but the room takes on a different aspect if, for example, giant rats are currently getting their way into the barrels. Or, if the party does plunder the room's contents but isn't careful to avoid spillage or to reseal the barrels, vermin and monsters will be attracted to the place on future delves.

Or Area XXXVII, the recreation room. This is basically Rogahn's gym, complete with archery targets, barbells, a pullup bar, a climbing rope, very heavy weapons, and battered shields. The party might make use of some arrows, lug around a notched sword, or replace a broken shield with one in less than pristine condition. 

But I can't help but imagine if there were orcs in here. Would they challenge the party to some sort of sporting competition? A single player character would get exhausted if they tried to defeat the orcs - who are probably universally quite strong - in every competition themselves, so the whole party would have to get involved. A thief could likely win an archery contest or climb a rope pretty quickly, but what will the magic-user do?

And you might say, "That's all well and good, but the rooms are still 'empty'. They may have potential as the scene of such an encounter, but in the absence of one they're just places for the party to poke around for a bit, maybe pick up one or two useful items, take a breather, and move on. The potential isn't used!"

But that isn't true, because empty rooms might only be empty when the party first encounters them. If you're checking for wandering monsters (which you should), any one of those rooms could suddenly not be empty at the roll of a die. This is doubly true if you're restocking the dungeon or having the monsters that remain in the dungeon react to the party's actions in between delves - both of these practices can result in originally empty rooms becoming occupied.

If a room's dressing is simply barren, there's little creative juice to squeeze when and if a monster ends up being encountered there. The gnolls are simply passing through, camping out, or maybe looking for secret doors - what else could they be doing in a barren environment? But in the kitchen they might be roasting some slain gnomes in the cooking pit, in the storage room they might be reprovisioning, and in the recreation room they might be pumping iron.

What I'm getting at is that empty rooms should be "toyetic" - that is, they should contain lots of little elements that the players can mess around with like knobs and levers. I'm cribbing this particular term from Prismatic Wasteland's Encounter Checklist. That post describes a goblin encounter wherein each of the goblins has a sort of prop that invites interaction or experimentation by the players. The encounter should be designed "like a child’s playset—something with elements the characters can interact with. These can come in many forms: ladders, rope swings, trap doors, greased floors, functional stove tops, round boulders begging to be pushed, things that can be opened or locked or launched, etc., etc." That sounds a lot like a well-designed dungeon room!

The Encounter Checklist is in turn derived from Goblin Punch's Dungeon Checklist, which includes "Something to Experiment With". In the Dungeon Checklist, this role is filled by what we might ordinarily call a trick or special room, but those are relatively rare (1-in-6 rooms in OSE and 1-in-10 rooms in AD&D). 

What I'm arguing for in this post is that every room in your dungeon should have something to play with. That might be something more or less mundane like a bunch of adventurer's corpses to examine, a potentially valuable object like a nude statue of a bodacious babe to leer at, or a magical oddity like a mica formation you can chip pieces off of and eat for various magical effects. 

That might be all that's in the room, but if there does happen to be a monster or a treasure, the set dressing gives you something to riff on. There are kobolds picking over the bodies, orcs leering at the statue, or gnolls sticking pieces of rock in their mouths. One of the adventurer's corpses still has treasure, there's a jeweled pendant hanging from the statue's neck, or one of the pieces of mica transmutes itself into a valuable gemstone when removed.

Because B1 is a teaching module and is intended to be manually stocked with monsters and treasure by the new DM, it's especially important that each and every room has such elements to work with. There are certainly truly empty rooms in B1 - the second level of the dungeon in particular is filled with empty caverns, many of which are barely described - but they are few and far between. 

And that should be the norm. Design all of your dungeon rooms under the assumption that, even if there's no monster, treasure, or whatever there now, there could be something there later. In that case, you'll want there to be some toys with which to play.