Fallin' Down, or: The Nine Floor Goodbye

Logo by Mechristopheles

Fallin' Down is a dungeon jam that I started on the Night at the Opera server, about a year ago. Users signed up to design floors of a dungeon, which would then be stacked atop one another to form one big map.

Submitters had to conform to some basic rules. All floors were 50 by 50 five foot squares, for a total size of 250 by 250 feet, or 62,500 feet squared. Entrances and exits were randomly rolled, with each downward passage corresponding to an upward passage on the floor below. They were also given an entry and exit point for a stream flowing through the dungeon. Each floor had one upward passage, one downward passage, a stream entrance and a stream exit, for a total of four predetermined points.

Beyond that, participants had broad latitude to design their dungeon how they pleased, as long as it was possible for the players to reach all four points by moving through the dungeon. Submitters were given basic directions on keying rooms, assigning treasure, and formatting their writeups.

Users were instructed to make their dungeons "system agnostic". Participants were likewise instructed to roughly "balance" their floor according the depth from the surface, with hazards and treasure appropriate to the depth.

We had nine participants, including myself. Eight participants eventually submitted their assigned floors (with considerable hectoring from me.) One participant had to drop out, requiring me to pinch-hit the fourth floor myself.

You can view all nine floors here, or go level by level. You can get the high resolution versions of the maps by looking in the respective folders.

Let's see how everyone did.

Surface: The Stone Town

By mellonbread

An abandoned town with an abandoned inn. A couple bandits live here, looking for low level adventurers to rob after they emerge from the dungeon with treasure. The river flows into town from a lake to the South.

• Can be inserted into almost any setting
• Disused tavern offers players a "home base" to return to after dungeon delves, bring friendly NPCs back to, etc
• Bandits present an interesting complication to low level players
• Accomplishes its purpose, but is also generic and boring

Floor 1: Broken Venus in Ooze

By Tormsen

An enormous Venus statue lies headless, armless and legless in a sea of slime. The stream flows across her body before disappearing into the unknown depths below.

• A wide variety of evocative and fun encounters, many of which could form whole floors in their own right if given more supporting detail, like the reveling wizards, the monks of modesty, and the minotaur rugby game.
• A bunch of random shit hastily thrown together with no unifying theme. Shopkeepers who "fly up and drop grenades if attacked", a river filled with "tentacles with handguns".
• Would be nice with a tighter focus and just a tiny bit more seriousness

Floor 2: Heresy of the Buried God

By Frahnk

A coven of Ghouls worshiping a dead God have colonized an ancient tomb. They mine Godflesh from an enormous severed arm on the floor below.

• Well-realized world, complete with an ecology, economy, and diverse NPCs with interesting motivations.
• Too much unnecessary detail. An entire page of backstory that could have been condensed into a paragraph.
• Dungeon is too densely populated, lacking empty rooms that offer the players alternate routes and tactical diversity. Too many NPCs that attack on sight. A single encounter rapidly becomes a tarpit as monsters from other rooms hear the sounds of battle and come running.
• Bursting with rich detail and life, but I wonder how much of it the players could actually discover and interact with

Floor 3: Maggotville

By Tophat

Ghoul cultists from the floor above have enslaved an ecology of giant maggots as unwilling excavators of a buried god's corpse.

• Really cool mini-ecology to go with the meat mining operation
• Fun NPCs
• Still too many goddamn ghouls, though not as many as the floor above
• Map needs clearer indications of where the entrances and exits are, for both the stairs and the water.
• A more condensed and less overloaded version of Floor 2.

Floor 4: The Rest Area

By mellonbread

A safe area with merchants and friendly monsters, who can be hired to help the players explore the dungeon below- or above.

• Hirelings can alter the dungeon structure by letting the players modify the layout and sequence break.
• "Merchants" are fun, but might not get a whole lot of use depending on how much the players value XP or cash
• Hotel could use more detail

Floors 5 and 6: Marooned!

By Kevin Ham and Jake Cook

A starfaring man-of-war and the illithid nautilus ship crash landed in this cavern after a malfunctioning warp-drive folded space around them. The surviving crews are stalemated in a cold-war, whose balance the players may be able to tip. The cavern's original inhabitants, a group of darkness-worshiping monks, are not happy about the intrusion, but go on with their business like nothing happened.

• Authors requested that their respective floors be combined, with a single 50 foot high cross section, rather than two 25 foot high floors.
• Fun concept, exciting NPC interactions, backstory that's actually possible for the players to discover if they talk to the monsters (who don't just attack on sight)
• Key is all over the place, presenting areas in the order the authors assume the players will visit them, rather than in numeric order.
• Interesting and novel entrances and exits, but I don't see the players ever making it past 12 mind flayers to get to the down staircase.
• I was expecting more creative use of vertical space, aside from the crow's nest entrance this could easily have been 25 feet instead of 50. But I think the players will appreciate it more actually playing it than I do reading it.

Floor 7: Caverns of the Lost

By Zomner

A cavern filled with creatures from Finnish legends, driven beneath the earth in ages long past. Trapped in a confined space for so long, they've begun fighting among themselves.

• Compact NPC and room descriptions make navigating the key a breeze for the DM. Entire document is easy to reference
• Descriptions are sometimes too economical. Most NPCs essentially do nothing unless the players attack them or try to take their stuff. It's nice that not everything attacks you on-sight, but some hooks beyond fight/ignore would have been nice. The conflict between the trolls, gnomes, elves etc isn't fully explored, and would have given the players and DM more to work with
• Layout is simple but effective, with alternate routes and an overall "looping" structure.
• Some key entrances unfinished, dropping off in mid-sentence
• Compact and easy to use, but also lacking in flavor details

Floor 8: The Vault of Cyriaca the Red

By mellonbread

An ancient red dragon lounges in a pool of molten gold, heated by a portal to the elemental plane of fire. She is served by a colony of duergar and a colony of deep trolls, who have made their homes in this ancient place. A couple other magical beings lurk in the periphery.

• Lively NPCs, interactive objects, a strong theme, and lots of treasure.
• The dungeon is too crowded, with too many monsters and too little space. The wandering monster table is almost unnecessary because every room already has monsters keyed to it, and any noise will probably bring monsters from other rooms. More empty chambers would have fixed this.
• Too much of the content only comes into play if the players start ill-advised fights, turning the entire floor into a huge brawl.
• I was too married to the theme, and didn't think enough about the gameplay experience.

Floor 9: Shrine of Garbagia, Cradle of Krudd

By Agent Obtuse

An underground landfill, where waste and treasure wash down from the dungeon above. A goblin trash cult picks through the cascade of filthy lucre, and leads sorties into the flooded sewer tunnels beyond.

• A rich tableau of interesting rooms, NPCs, monsters and traps, full of flavor but not overreliant on backstory or interactions the players will never discover.
• Absolutely beautiful map, making great use of the colored lighting effects in the dungeon mapper tool.
• Missing detail in odd places - the vault of actually valuable treasures just tells the DM to roll on the appropriate treasure table. I would have appreciated some fun magic items.
• The best floor in the whole contest, it's a shame the players will probably never reach it.

Overall Thoughts

The 50 by 50 square format seemed like a lot of space conceptually, but produced very cramped dungeons in practice. Key more than a few monsters, and the floor becomes a meatgrinder, where it's impossible to avoid encounters. Empty rooms are important.

Everyone did a good job offering alternatives to fighting everything on the floor. A mix of intelligent foes capable of negotiation, and non-intelligent animals that want things other than to kill the players.

Almost everyone (including me) put their exits to the next floor in the most densely populated parts of the dungeon. Getting to the next floor shouldn't exactly be easy, but I wish it was easier to "skip" a floor without completely clearing it.

Linking each floor to the next through fixed points on the map meant there was no way to link floors if someone dropped out. When the submitter for Floor 4 dropped out, Floor 3 couldn't lead directly into Floor 5 without one or both of the authors moving their entrances and exits. I didn't have a solution to this, other than creating the missing floor myself. I half expected more drop outs, but I only got the one.

Will I ever run this? Probably not. But if I did, it might be fun as a DCC funnel.

Thank you to all the submitters, and everyone who offered feedback on the dungeon floors.

Rejected logo by me