The 5 Room Dungeon
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The 5 Room Dungeon

The 5 Room Dungeon

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Basic Five Room Dungeon Adventure Planner

Score 220

06/14/22
Here are the 5 rooms:
 
  1. The Entrance that typically has a guardian of some type.
  2. The Puzzle or a roleplaying challenge.
  3. The Setback or a trick of some sort that impedes the heroes.
  4. The Boss Fight room that provides a climax to the delve.
  5. The Reward, which could be an antechamber that provides some loot or a potential revelation that ties the story together satisfactorily.
With modern day gaming trends shifting us away from classic dungeon crawls, many Dungeon Masters are unintentionally overlooking simple techniques like the 5 Room Dungeon, thinking instead that they need to spend hours upon hours designing complex and sophisticated crawls.
 
The problem is that most of these over-designed Rube Goldbergesque dungeons go unexplored, plus they often contain room after room full of fluff that doesn’t add anything to the story.
 
Really, 5 rooms are all you need. Run the above basic layout over and over until one of your players eventually starts to catch on that it was similar to last week’s.
 
Whereas “The Decision” and “The Wrong Way” provides a bit of mis-direction, “The Spiral” is simply “The Railroad” with some stairs. This makes it perfect for a wizard’s tower or some other such thing.
 
“The Rooster” is an example of how you can do something unexpected. What if the setback mis-directs heroes toward the Puzzle, then the Boss circles around and attacks them from behind? And what if the passage to the Reward is a secret passage that the heroes miss?
 
Citation:  nerdsonearth.com 
 
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