Thursday, April 8, 2010

How to draw dungeons, density and linearity

Taking a look at the very intriguing post by Lord Kilgore at his blog, I was thinking on my latest attempts at drawing dungeons.

I have been drawing while planning, meticulously thinking of how things fit, designing choke points and god knows what. Surprisingly often I feel dissatisfied with the result and never finish them. Very often I draw like crazy and suddenly realize I have made one long corridor with rooms or twists along the line, i.e. a very linear adventure.

So, how much space does people actually have in their dungeons? I have found that if I start by drawing rooms and then try to connect them with corridors, or if I just tries to cram oddities in every open space on the paper I get very different dungeons. I still haven't found a good balance of spontaneity and planning yet. Lord Kilgore's post made me think of that again.

What works? What effect does the "dense" dungeon have in play, and how easy is it to "make sense" of a dungeon like that? Imagine a dungeon like, say, Stonehell, where different dungeon levels have different creatures which live in different sections. Can you make that work in a "dense" dungeon? I find some people draw like that naturally, and I wonder why. Maybe I have something to learn. It looks interesting.

The thing with dense dungeons is that I wonder if it's really that fun to play in such a twisted environment. Mapping it must be quite a challenge, and I wonder how many players are that into mapping.

One of these days I have to just try it out, I guess.
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