At The Edge of Bulb-Light
What if dungeons had actual hallways? Most dungeons I see are built like shotgun houses, where the only way you can get to the kitchen is though a bedroom. What if you could walk from one end of the dungeon all the way to the other without entering a single room? …and how can I make that interesting?
Now I’m not sure if what I came up with is a Dungeon Crawl, a Point Crawl, or something entirely new—but here’s my process:
Starting with a free maze generator and the idea of placing rooms at every dead end, I ran into the obvious problem… If the rooms are optional, why would anyone choose to go in there?
My first solution was to make travel dangerous with random encounters. Because I have a terminal case of board game brain, I had to design a mechanic for this. The maze is set up on a grid system, so I placed dots in every square. When a player travels the hallway, they trace their finger along the path from the room they begin at, to the room they are heading to. They count the dots along the way and then roll a D20. If they roll higher than the distance traveled, they are safe; but if they roll equal to or lower than the distance traveled, they trigger a random encounter!
Now, I don’t want destinations to simply be safe rooms. To spice things up, I decided to implement some sort of Zelda-style universal key breaking the large maze into six smaller mazes, joined together with locked doors.
Uh oh! New problem, locked doors violates my original goal of one long hallway from entrance to exit… How can we lock an area without blocking it off?
The only solution I was able to come up with for this problem was to introduce a setting. Look again at the dungeon map. Those aren’t foot prints… Those are Christmas lights!
Last year I chained together too many Christmas lights (the old glass bulb kind) and discovered that the each strand has its own fuse in the plug, which can blow. This dungeon is a Christmas tree, and each mini maze is a strand of lights. The bottom most strand “E” is lit, but all of the other strands are not.
Now I’m imagining this less as a Mausritter adventure, and more like a Nuckcracker fever dream. It doesn’t need to make sense. Each “room” is a powered ornament locked into place on the strand. Some rooms might be a ceramic Christmas village building (a barber shop that proportionally 75% too small, but filled with usable supplies), and some “rooms” might be living automatons (a kind-hearted ballerina who wants nothing more than to dance, or a belligerent polar bear drunk on bottled soda). Each “room” is powered by a fuse which, if stolen, can be used do power a new strand of the dungeon.
Warning: Stealing a fuse from an automaton is akin to ripping their soul from their body.
Players may choose to travel unlit strands, but they will trigger a random encounter at every single unlit bulb! Random encounters will likely be soulless (unpowered) ornaments wielding hooks.
When a random encounter is triggered, whip out this Battle Map:
Players each roll 1D6 to determine their starting location on the board, then take their first round before NPCs enter the scene. NPCs enter from the darkness outside of the Bulb-Light, rolling 1D12 to determine their starting location on the board. Any additional waves of NPCs will do so at the end of a round using the same method.
Positions on the board double as an initiative tracker:
And to cover all of the bases, here is how you determine distance:
Now, I imagine these bulbs like buoys in a pitch black ocean. Traveling between them is only safe when carefully following the line. Ignoring the zig-zagging path, and simply walking towards the nearest one, will cause you to fall through the branches to your death. Have you ever seen cruise ship videos at night? Imagine jumping off of the ship into the void, and falling all the way to the ocean floor without touching a drop of water (a personal anxiety nightmare of mine)
Want To Play This Dungeon?
As of right now, this dungeon is unfinished. I have the Dungeon Map and the Battle Map as printable pdfs here on my itch page. If you want to use these assets and write up your own Christmas tree dungeon, please reach out to me!