The Five Room Dungeon

in http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Five_Room_Dungeon

An idea by Johnn Four (the übernerd that writes for Strolen's), it's a pattern for making a quick
dungeon delve. Five simple steps, and you get enough for at least a session around the kitchen
table, maybe two, and the heroes feel like they really earned their experience points. The idea was
so good, Wizards of the Coast stole it for the example adventure Kobold Hall in one of their works
(DMG, 4th edition, pages 210-219).

Maps and stats aren't important, you can work those out after you have the sequence of the plot and
challenges down. You don't even need exactly five rooms, just five scenes in sequence.

The five rooms are:

1. Entrance with Guardian
2. Puzzle/Roleplaying Challenge
3. Trick or Setback
4. Big Climax
5. Reward/Revelation.

1. Entrance With Guardian

There has to be a reason why nobody else has come here before. It's difficult to get to, it's hidden,
there's a guard posted outside, or a foreign big nasty decided the entrance makes for a good lair,
something only heroic types could overcome. An antagonist right away gets the player's excitement
up, and gets the dice rolling. (Sometimes you can switch the first and second room, if a puzzle at
the entrance makes more sense.)

• The entrance is trapped.

• There's multiple entrances, but only one is correct (Tomb of Horrors)
• The entrance requires a special key or ceremony: "speak friend and enter," decker must hack
the entrance.
• A guardian was deliberately placed at the entrance: golem, guard dog, nightclub bouncer.
• A hidden ambush waits in the shadows.
• A portcullis that the kobold guards can pass through easily, but heroes must expose themselves
to lift.

2. Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge

For those whose characters aren't the fightin' types, the next area lets them show off the skill points
they spent in Diplomacy or Spot checks. This pleases the players who didn't pick Rangers and
Barbarians, and breaks up the pace a bit before getting back to the RAWWWWRR. Be sure to allow
for multiple solutions, because playing the "guess what I'm thinking" game is boring for players.
Once you figure out the puzzle here, go back to room 1 and put some clues.

• chessboard floor with special squares.

• a hallway of coloured portals with an old riddle telling them which way to go. (Tomb of Horrors).
• a corrupt city official can give the permits to enter the radiation sector.
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 • the apartment building has buzzers for tenants, but the quarry is using an assumed name.
• the chamber of the ark is covered in venomous snakes that will shy away from open fire.
• the floor is covered in pressure-plates for dart traps that kobolds are light enough to ignore.

3. Trick or Setback
This is where you raise the stakes. Something about the plan has gone wrong, something the
opposite of what they expected. Maybe the NPC they brought along gets kidnapped. Maybe they
fight the big bad, but it's actually a minion pretending. This room is good for giving your players a
second dose of fighting or puzzle, whichever they prefer. This is also a good opportunity to get
players to waste some resources that could be useful in the big fight in room four, such as using up
their flaming oil on a troll when a mummy is the BBEG.

• The hostages they rescued demand/plead to be taken back immediately, before the heroes can
find the villain.
• You've found the lich's lair, but he seems awfully weak, and isn't he a demi-lich? (Tomb of
Horrors)
• Contains a one way exit, dumping (some of?) the group back outside room 1.
• The heroes found the data they need to steal, but it's encrypted, and the password are further
inside.
• One of the NPCs that came along takes the magic dingus for himself and runs off.
• The heroes walk right into kobolds playing a sport with swinging boulders from high ledges.

4. Big Climax
Here's the ringleader, the goblin chieftain, the big kahuna -- Big O, it's show time. Spend more of
your effort on tactics, set pieces and showy effect on the fight in this room, because this is what the
adventure module is named after.

• make a detailed map, with interesting terrain and usable props for jumping/tripping over,
grabbing, swinging...
• start or end with some acting. Maybe the boss needs to stall to finish preparing, or to allow for
reinforcements. Maybe there's hapless minions to toy with when their leader falls.
• The big bad is going to have powers that is beyond the monsters & traps encountered up until
now.
• The lair is trapped, and only the BBEG knows how to get around the room safely.
• Previous rooms might have clues for the weaknesses of the main villain.
• The evil guy has the holy whatzit in his grasp, and threatens to destroy it.
• The kobold chief has a magic staff, a pet that steals player's gear, and a rolling boulder trap that
his followers can avoid by climbing ledges and using ranged attacks.

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5. Reward, Revelation
Here's where you sucker-punch the players. The big fight is over, time to pat each other on the back
for another great job... OR IS IT? It doesn't have to be an actual fifth room, it could be a plot-twist
that reveals itself after the big fight in room four. Maybe the players will find the plot hook to the
next adventure, or clues about a major plot-arc over the campaign, or maybe the REAL villain will
reveal himself and twirl his moustache.

• A trap is sprung, which re-animates the big guy from room four.
• Bonus treasure is uncovered which leads elsewhere, such as part of a treasure map, or deed to
some land.
• After being weakened by the fight in room four, the bad guy uncloaks from following the heroes
and snatches the whatzit.
• The captured princess wasn't kidnapped, but ran away from home to elope with the bad guy.
(Blackrock Depths)
• The true, gruesome meaning behind a national holiday is discovered.
• The alien's language is deciphered, revealing that the hostilities was all just a
misunderstanding.
• A prophecy comes true, but not they way the players expected.
• The kobold chief was pressured into raiding the human villages by a young white dragon who
demanded tribute.

The Nine Forms of the Five Room Dungeon

in http://www.gnomestew.com/tools-for-gms/the-nine-forms-of-the-five-room-dungeon/

The Five Room Dungeon has been around almost as long as RPGs themselves, and has been
enjoying a surge of popularity in the past few years as a quick and easy way to build a dungeon
crawl. Interestingly enough, it turns out there are only 9 base designs for the five room dungeon.
With so few, it’s very easy to simply grab one of the nine, populate it and run a crawl, but it’s also
easy to run the same basic layout multiple times until one of your players says: “Wait a minute! Isn’t
this the exact same dungeon layout we ran last week?”

In fact, the 5 room dungeon contest held by Roleplayingtips and Strolen back in 2007 resulted in
almost 100 5 room dungeons, all of which (to the best of my knowledge) make use of a layout I like
to call “The Railroad” ie: 5 rooms in a straight line.

This is the assumed layout (at least they don’t otherwise specify) used by most setups like those
proposed by Johnn Four and The stew’s own Troy Taylor. That makes a lot of sense because it’s
meant to be simple, straightforward, quick, and the players are meant to hit every room. As soon as
you introduce a fork in the path, there’s a chance that the PCs skip one or more of the five
encounters. Frankly though, these dungeons aren’t your magnum opus, so if a side passage is
missed, the biggest issue is that you may be short a little game time. And let’s be honest: Who’s
players don’t sweep the entire dungeon just in case they’ve missed something sparkly, especially if
they have a half-hour in the session left to kill? Worst case scenario, if you’re worried about it, just
quantum ogre the whole run or put the key to one path at the end of another and call it a day. This
effectively reduces one of the more complex layouts back to The Railroad, but no one is likely to
notice if you don’t abuse the tactic.
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Alternately, consider designing your encounters so that all of them must be dealt with to succeed:
destroying all traces of an evil group or collecting a series of McGuffins can require the exploration
of every room.

The major issue then is repetitiveness, since 5 room dungeons are a quick and easy fallback plan,
and there are only 9 possible layouts. Fortunately, there are several ways to keep the same nine
dungeons fresh use after use.

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The major issue then is repetitiveness, since 5 room dungeons are a quick and easy fallback plan,
and there are only 9 possible layouts. Fortunately, there are several ways to keep the same nine
dungeons fresh use after use.

They don’t have to be dungeons. It’s been said elsewhere, but these can be layouts for warehouses,
starships, haunted houses, or any other location, not just dungeons. But this concept can be taken
further. These can be used as investigation trees, social networks, or any number of other setups.

Rooms can be shifted. The reason the rooms are arranged in the the way they’re displayed is
because I thought they made cute, funny, or evocative pictures that way. Moving around the rooms
makes no difference to the actual layout though. If you want to move around rooms, change the
order or length of passages, or other merely cosmetic changes, that doesn’t actually change the
layout, but it does make it look distinct. For example, “Foglio’s Snail” can have it’s “eyes” rotated
around to make it look similar to “The Arrow”, with the entrance at the other end. This plays the
same as the snail normally would, but looks different.

Levels can be added. Any or all of the passages can be staircases, lava tubes, elevators or other
vertical transitions, creating a two-level dungeon. Again, this is merely a cosmetic change to the
layout, but it helps make this week’s dungeon look distinct from last week’s. Alternately, you can
prepare two five room dungeons and use one as level one, and the other as level two if you’re feeling
particularly ambitious. This doubles the amount of work you need to do, but creates roughly 405
different possible layouts.

Use different building blocks. All of the nine basic setups are constructed with only two types of
building blocks: The entryway and 4 hall + room pieces. There’s no reason this formula can’t be
changed up. Additional passages can be added. Rooms can be connected directly with no hallways
between. Secret passages can act as shortcuts or create secret rooms. Alternate passageways that
make use of different modes of travel can be created.

The sixth room. Nothing says that a sneaky GM can’t create a five room dungeon with six rooms. If
you want to be super-sneaky, the sixth room can be a secret room! An extra room adds
many more possibilities with only minimally more effort.

An example – The Cliffside Temple

Using “The Moose” as the base, here’s a sample five-room dungeon
layout. An ancient temple carved into the side of a cliff, our heroes come
in search of a holy relic. From the entry foyer they can either head to the
vaulted central chamber, or climb the stairs that lead to a rising set of
observation rooms that look down on the central chamber through small
windows. A relic is located in the main chamber, as are several others in
the observation rooms, but these are all fakes. The true relics are kept
safe in a secret chamber that can be accessed via a secret door in the
uppermost observation room. Alert PCs may be tipped off to the
existence of this secret room since it too overlooks the main chamber.

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Random Mega Dungeon Generation Via 5
Room Iterations
in http://www.gnomestew.com/tools-for-gms/random-mega-generation-via-5-room-iterations/

Mega dungeons are difficult to fully detail because of their sheer size. Here is a random dungeon
generation system that helps make the process easier in two ways. First, it creates chunks all at
once instead of single rooms, and second it’s modular so that you can design only as much as you
need and have rough notes on the rest of what you’ve made while still allowing you to tack on
additional content later and still have a coherent whole.

The basic building blocks of our dungeon are the 9 forms of the 5 room dungeon. So you don’t have
to click through, that article boils down the 5 room dungeon into 9 basic types (which clever
readers pointed out can actually be further abstracted to 3 types, but for the purposes of what we’re
doing here, the 9 actually work better). I’ve included them below and numbered them to make it
easy to choose one randomly using a d66 (like a d100, but uses d6s instead of d10s, generating
numbers in the following set: 11-16,21-26,31-36,41-46,51-56,61-66 chosen because it creates a
uniformly distributed set of numbers divisible by 9)

9 Forms of the 5 Room Dungeon

d66 Room

11-14 The Arrow

15 - 22 The Cross

23 - 26 The Evil Mule

31 - 34 The Fauchard Fork

35 - 42 Foglio’s Snail

43 - 46 The Moose

51 - 54 The Paw
55 - 62 The Railroad

63 - 66 The V for Vendetta

Realms
For our dungeon, we’re going to start by setting up some Realms: large areas that are thematically
similar throughout, but distinct from their neighbours. To make realms, we’re going to choose a
handful of 5 room dungeons and tack them together. 1d4 sounds about right, giving 5-20 realms.
This is of course dependent on your level of ambition. Don’t forget that you can always add more
later if you want or need to.

To start, roll a d66 and do a quick sketch of one of the 5 room dungeons. You can of course move
the rooms about and if you want to change passages, add or subtract rooms or anything else, go
right ahead. The templates are just to keep things quick and easy, not to constrain you. Continue to
roll d66s and add realms by choosing an existing room and connecting the entrance room of the
new section.

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Add as many sections as you want, just keep in mind that each single room may end up with
hundreds of rooms to detail. We’re going to have a random process for the whole thing, but no point
to making a ton more work than necessary.

Now that you have a rough map of your realms, write down the following details about each one:

• Name. Either what you call it, what it’s inhabitants call it, or what the major species in your
game call it. Whatever.
• Level. How dangerous a place is it? Is it OK for beginning adventurers or is it a meat grinder for
all but the most hard core delvers?
• Terrain. The main overarching terrain feature of the zone. Lava tubes, Dwarven Ruins, mud
pits, natural caves. Don’t go into more detail than that.
• 3 Monsters. These monsters inhabit almost every nook and cranny of the realm. Pick one big
nasty monster (for the level you want) one mid-level monster and one wimpy monster all based
around the realm’s theme. Later we’ll refer to these monsters as RL (Realm Large), RM (Realm
Medium), and RS (Realm Small). You can use hazards instead of monsters if that fits the realm.

Of course you don’t need to do this for all your realms just yet. Players aren’t going to get to the
deepest realms any time soon, if ever, so you don’t need to fill this out for any realm your players
aren’t likely to see soon. Finish up your realm map by adding a few passages where you want or any
other tweaks you want to add.

Zones
Next up, we want to further detail our realms. You know where the major paths to other realms are,
but what’s in between? More 5 room dungeons of course! In the same way that you randomly chose
and strung together 5 room dungeons to map your realms, use the same process to define the
zones within each realm. Start with a single realm and map it (probably on a new sheet of paper) by
choosing a random five room dungeon and then connecting the next one, etc… Again 1d4 of these is
probably enough, giving you 5-20 zones within the realm (so your mega dungeon has 25-400 zones
all together). Of course it also makes sense to simply choose how many 5 room chunks you want
given how large you want the realm to be. Again, you can always add more zones to a realm later as
long as the entire realm hasn’t been mapped in meticulous detail yet (or even if it has if you’re
willing to have a cave-in open a new area or some other sneaky GM trick).

Now write down the following details about each zone:

• Name. As before, formal, informal or in elvish, it doesn’t matter

• Type. We’re interested in 3 types. Controlled, Mixed, and Standard, described below.
• Level. Is this zone the same level as the rest of the realm? Higher? Lower?
• Terrain. What makes this zone different from the rest of the realm? Is it a gnoll warren? Is there
a leak from a water source that makes the whole thing flooded? Portals to hell?
• 3 Monsters. Just like before we need a Big monster: ZL, a medium monster: ZM, and a puny
monster: ZS, or hazards as before.

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Standard zones blend into the realm and have no defining feature or inhabitants of their own. The
more of these you have in a realm, the more strongly the realm theme comes through but the less
exciting stuff is in the realm. Mainly standard realms are to break up over-busy clusters of zones in
your realm or provide a “normal” path or center with points of interest around it. Standard zones
don’t actually need Terrain or monster entries. They just use the realm entries.

Controlled zones don’t have a heavy presence from the inhabitants of a realm. Either the zone is
patrolled and intruders kept out (a city for example) or it may be exceptionally dangerous (full of
toxic gas)

Mixed zones have their unique inhabitants that aren’t found elsewhere in the realm but they mix
freely with other realm inhabitants.

Again, tweak as you see fit and you’ve mapped the zones for the realm, and again keep in mind just
how far your PCs are going to get before you go nuts with the zone maps. After all, there’s still one
more step.

Maps
Finally we want to map the individual rooms and areas within each zone. Do so just like each larger
level. Start a new map and iterate some 5 room dungeons. If you again go with 1d4 dungeons per
zone, you end up with 5-20 rooms per zone, 125-400 rooms per realm and 625-8000 rooms in your
entire map. (I did start this article with the sentence “Mega dungeons are difficult to fully detail
because of their sheer size.”) However, unlike higher levels, these rooms aren’t abstractions, they’re
actual rooms and once you populate them, your zone map is finished.

To populate them you need to know two things: dressing and encounters. You could painstakingly
hem and haw over this, but instead roll once on the appropriate Dressing table and 3 to 4 times on
the appropriate Encounter Table for each 5 room chunk you place and arrange as desired or just
place what feels right.

Notation for tables. As mentioned earlier, RL, RM, and RS are your three realm monsters, ZL, ZM,
and ZS are your 3 zone monsters. Encounter tables have 3 columns. Squabblers don’t mix monster
types, Factions use either realm or zone monsters in an encounter and Allies freely mix the two
type.

#R and #Z are the number of rooms within realm and zone dressing respectively.

References to adjacent realms and zones work if one of your rooms is on the edge of your zone or
realm. If not, just count those as the current realm or zone.

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Standard Zone Dressing
d12 Dressing

1 - 10 5R

11 4R, 1 adjacent zone

12 4R, 1 adjacent realm

Mixed Zone Dressing

d12 Dressing

1-5 2R, 3Z

6 - 10 3R, 2Z

11 2R, 2Z, 1 adjacent zone

12 2R, 2Z, 1 adjacent realm

Controlled Zone Dressing

d12 Dressing

1-5 1R, 4Z

6 - 10 2R, 3Z

11 1R, 3Z, 1 adjacent zone

12 4Z, 1 adjacent realm

Standard Encounters
d12 Squabblers Factions

1 7RM or 14RS 2RL and 3RM

2-4 6RM or 12Rs 1RL and 2RM and 4RS

5-7 2RL or 4RM 1RL and 2RM

8 - 10 1RL or 4RS 2RM

11 1RM or 2RS 2RS

12 1L from adjacent area 1L from adjacent area

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Mixed Encounters
d12 Squabblers Factions Allies

1 7RM or 14ZS 2RL and 3RM or 5ZM and 4ZS 1RL and 1ZL and 3ZM

2-4 6ZM or 12RS 1RL and 2RM and 4RS or 1ZL and 1ZL and 2RM and 4ZS
3ZM and 2ZS

5-7 2RL or 4ZM 1RL and 2RM or 1ZL and 4ZS 1RL and 1ZL or 1ZL and 2RM

8 - 10 1ZL or 4RS 2RM or 1ZL 2ZM

11 1RM or 2ZS 2RS or 1ZM 2RS

12 1L from adjacent area 1L from adjacent area 1L from adjacent area

Controlled (Patrolled)
d12 Factions

1 2ZL and 3ZM

2-4 1ZL and 2ZM and 4ZS

5-7 1ZL and 2ZM

8 - 10 2ZM or 4RS

11 2ZS or 2RS

12 4S from adjacent area

Controlled (Dangerous)
d12 Squabblers Factions Allies

1 7ZM or 14ZS 2ZL and 3ZM 1RL and 1ZL and 3ZM

2-4 6ZM or 12ZS 1ZL and 2ZM and 4ZS 1ZL and 2ZM and 4ZS

5-7 2RL or 2ZL 2RL or 1ZL and 2ZM 1RL and 1ZL or 1RL and 2ZM

8 - 10 1ZL or 4ZS 2ZM 2ZM

11 1ZM or 2ZS 2ZS 2ZS

12 1L from adjacent area 1L from adjacent area 1L from adjacent area

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