On the Five Room Dungeon

Over the next two to three months, I’m going to start each week with a five-room dungeon every Monday. There are a variety of reasons for this, but let’s tackle the actual concept of the five-room dungeon first.

The traditional structure of the 5RD is as follows:

• Room 1: Entrance And Guardian
• Room 2: Puzzle Or Roleplaying Challenge
• Room 3: Red Herring
• Room 4: Climax, Big Battle Or Conflict
• Room 5: Plot Twist

And between the various locations we have connectors – halls, voyages, doorways, etc.

In most 5RD designs, the 5 “rooms” happen in sequence, you go from 1 to 2 to 3, etc.

These obviously don’t need to be rooms, and for this series, I’m not sticking to the methodology in question for the write-ups for these maps, but I’ve taken the challenge to draw a bunch of maps that have only five…