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Tome of Adventure Design Chapter 3, Part 2: Mapping the Dungeon

In part 1 of chapter 3, I rolled up everything a dungeon needs before you draw it: the deadline, the backstory, the clues, the magical symbols. Part 2 is where the dungeon finally gets a shape. The Tome of Adventure Design has tables for how many areas there are, how big they are, what shape they take, and how they connect, and I use them to build a map live in Dungeon Scrawl.

This is part 4 of 5 in my Tome of Adventure Design series.

Start with the overview

Before rolling individual rooms, the mapping section has you think about the dungeon as a whole. How many areas does it have, and roughly how is it laid out? This keeps you from drawing a dungeon room by room and ending up with a hallway of closets.

Arranging areas

The arrangement tables decide how the areas sit relative to each other. This is the book’s answer to the problem it warned about in part 1: the linear dungeon, where the party walks from room A to room B to room C with no choices. Branches, loops, and dead ends give players real decisions about where to go next, and that’s where a lot of the fun comes from.

Transitions between areas

How you get from one area to the next matters as much as the areas themselves. A plain door, a narrow crawlspace, a collapsed tunnel, and a rope bridge all tell the party something different and play differently in a fight. The transition tables make sure every connection isn’t just another wooden door.

Area details

Then you roll the size and shape of each area. Random shapes are great for breaking habits. If you’re like me and default to rectangles, a roll that hands you a circular chamber or an odd-shaped cave pushes the map somewhere you wouldn’t have taken it.

Drawing it in Dungeon Scrawl

The middle chunk of the video is me building the map in Dungeon Scrawl, a free mapping tool that runs in your browser. It’s fast and clean, which makes it a good fit for this kind of sketching. You roll a result, you draw it, you roll the next one. If you want to see how random tables turn into an actual map, jump to the 11:43 mark.

Filling the rooms

Once the layout exists, the rest of the section gives the dungeon personality:

  • Area names. A table of name ideas, so rooms become places like a gallery or a shrine instead of “room 7.”
  • Landmarks. Things players will remember and navigate by. “Go left at the broken statue” beats “go left at the second intersection.”
  • Level changes. Stairs, ramps, shafts, and pits that connect one level to another.
  • Strange things. The odd details that make players stop and poke at something.
  • Special rooms. Areas with a specific purpose or trick to them.
  • Dungeon dressing. The small stuff that makes a room feel lived in, or long abandoned.

The chapter closes with a batch of miscellaneous tables that are useful well beyond this one dungeon.

Tips for mapping with random tables

  • Map in pencil, or in a tool that’s easy to change. Random rolls will paint you into corners, and that’s fine.
  • Tie rooms back to your earlier results. The capsule backstories and room conversions from part 1 already tell you what some of these rooms should be.
  • Use landmarks to hide clues. The architecture clue from part 1 fits naturally inside a landmark.
  • Don’t fill every room. Empty or quiet rooms make the dangerous ones hit harder.

Video chapters

Get the book

Tome of Adventure Design (Revised) by Matt Finch is available as a PDF on DriveThruRPG, or in hardcover and PDF straight from Mythmere Games.

The DriveThruRPG link is an affiliate link. If you buy through it, I get a small reward at no extra cost to you.

The rest of the series

Until next time, roll well, my friends.