 Welcome to Map Crow. I'm Kyle, and this video is brought to you by the Old Road Zine. Check the description below for details on how to get your hands on some beautiful maps. Today we're talking about how to come up with ideas for dungeons, and how to plan them out by looking at the five-room dungeon technique. Staring at a blank sheet of paper can be very intimidating, and one of the common questions that I see out there for artists is, where do you get your ideas? And another question is, what do you do about Artist Block? And essentially, Artist Block is anytime you don't really know what to do, but you want to do something, and to be honest, it's unavoidable. I have Artist Block all the time, every day, but I have some strategies and some ways of digging myself out of Artist Block that you might find helpful. As a point of clarification, I think Artist Block is very different than Burnout. Burnout is a sign that you've been treating yourself poorly or expected to do things in an unhealthy and unsustainable way. That is distinct from not having ideas but wanting to have ideas. If you are feeling burnout, you don't need to art your way out of Burnout. You need to rest your way out of Burnout. But you do need to art your way out of Art Block. There's a wedding tradition where the bride acquires four things, something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. I use this as a mnemonic device to help me generate ideas when I'm feeling stuck. This works really well for dungeons. For something old, we will refer to the history of this adventure location or dungeon. So first, answer the question, where is this dungeon and what was it used for? It was probably like an old wizard's tower or a crypt or some place with some other kind of meaning besides being this kind of arbitrary obstacle course for player characters. For something new, we will talk about what is happening here now. What fresh calamity can our heroes solve in this dungeon? Try to give the current situation some kind of connection to the history, some kind of causal relationship. For something borrowed, this is where you steal like an artist. You open up the Monster Manual, you think of your favorite movies or video games, and you just start putting things that you like that kind of go along with the old and the new, and you just borrow liberally from all of your favorite stuff. The fantasy role-playing hobby is already kind of a pastiche, so a lot of your dungeons are going to paste together. They're going to be a pastiche of a lot of your favorite things. And for something blue, just make something that's kind of sad. Make something that gives you the blues. Make something that makes you feel something. I think Tolkien was particularly good at this. There was always something sad or haunting or pitiable about the people and situations in his books. For this map, my something old is going to be a dragon monastery. Something new that's happening to it is a dragoon. A dragon knight has come in and kind of absconded with the dragon that this monastery has kind of set up to protect or worship. For my borrowed things, I'm going to be stealing the dragoons from Final Fantasy. I'm going to kind of be taking some of the design from the game Sekiro, the idea of this dragon kind of on top of a tree coiled around a tree. And I really want to have kind of a sword fight up some staircases, like in all those Errol Flynn movies. So these are kind of the big borrowed moments that I'm going to have for this. And for my something blue, I'm going to have a cracked egg in front of the dragon's nest. And I'm going to show the dragon kind of saddled and bridled. This majestic wild creature is going to be kind of brought low and dominated. And I think that's kind of sad. I have the basics of my concept in place. I have some key imagery and set pieces that I'm going to put into it. But now I need to figure out like the structure of this and how to actually plan out the physical space. So to do that, we're going to take a look at the five room dungeon technique. I first heard about this technique from John Ford's website, roleplayingtips.com. And I will have a link in the description below so you can check out the article for yourself. This technique has you plan out five rooms for a dungeon. And each of these five rooms kind of correspond to a specific story beat from the hero's journey outlined by Joseph Campbell. I think it's a wonderful and accessible tool and everybody should be familiar with it if they're running games that use adventure locations and dungeons. My issue with this technique is that my brain doesn't work in chronological order. My brain wants to start off with these core set pieces and imagery and build out from there. So what I would suggest to you is that you build in reverse. You start with the boss and then you work your way down to the entrance from there. Also the technique as written is designed to emulate a linear story. And I like to build a linear adventure spaces where the focus is more on emergent storytelling than it is on embedded storytelling. So our first room that we're actually going to draw and plan everything around is where the boss fight happens. There is going to be an arena and a set piece and all this possibility for action and that's where we're going to start. To make sure that we are following the jacquaying the dungeon techniques and building in a linearity we are going to make a secret or alternate entrance to the boss fight. I have done a video on jacquaying the dungeon already so check the description for that too. The third room we're going to design is the main entrance to the boss fight which is going to be sort of a more hazardous gauntlet run through a difficult challenge. We have several big fights so now it's time for some skill challenges in what I call the thinky room. It's not necessarily a puzzle but it is kind of a challenge without a clear solution. It's a place for players to solve problems creatively. Now for the fifth room we are actually going to design the first room the players are likely to come into contact with. The entrance guardian. Now that we have been thinking about this space and what people are doing here and what challenges are here we can kind of introduce and foreshadow all of the other dangers that are coming. By planning in reverse and coming up with your big boss fight first you're kind of digging into the stake and then finishing your vegetables afterwards and I find it really adds a lot of momentum to the planning process. I would also encourage you to think of this as building a jungle gym or a swing set and not building a puzzle that has only one proper solution to it. The reverse five room dungeon isn't meant to be a critique or commentary on the existing structure I just have different design goals and idiosyncrasies as a creator. So let's start off by looking at the entrance guardian on the map that I made. The first thing that the players are going to see are these prayer cabinets and that's going to deliver our something old. Where is this? This is a place of worship. The next thing they're going to see are some dead monks and a makeshift barricade made out of the broken gate of the monastery. This is going to deliver what our new thing is what is happening to this place now and also something blue because you know this is kind of a bummer. Maybe there are some minions or thugs kind of stationed outside that are like whizzing over the side of the mountain or swigging a flag in a brandy or something. Our next room is the thinky room. Archers have staked out this courtyard area so your choice is to sneak across the pond in the middle of the garden or climb up the side into the balcony on the second story. It's kind of up to you. Anything you want to do is fine. I don't have a solution. That's your job. Next up is the gauntlet room. You will have to fight your way up this tower. There's these winding staircases where you will have to fight off the foot soldiers and elite guards that are buying some time for the head dragoon to break this dragon under his domination spell or whatever. For the secret path I have kind of this exposed catwalk that leads up to a prayer cell. I imagine there's some weird old monk that's in this prayer cell that writes out his prayers on paper and then nails it to the the rock face or something like that. It kind of looks like this open mouth and all the prayer scrolls look like teeth and it looks weird and unsettling and I like it so we're going with it. And at the very top of this mountain we have our boss fight with the guy riding the dragon so maybe he's got some kind of mind whammy on the dragon and that's the whole thing so it's up to you whether you're going to you know use the ballista at the top of the tower to kill the dragon this poor innocent dragon and what I wanted to do was give this dragon a kind of a really majestic and beautiful look and instead of making it kind of this dinosaur looking thing make it like this cross between an eagle and a deer and just make it look like this beautiful thing that has been brought low something that you want to fight for but are forced to fight against now that's interesting and that is again something blue if you want to take a closer look at this map I left a link to it in the description below where you can download it and zoom in and use it to run games with or whatever it's just the pencils I didn't have time to make inks with this this is just for demonstration purposes but I think you should still be able to have quite a bit of fun with it that's it for this video if you found something in this video helpful please give me a like if you would like to see more of these videos go ahead and hit that bell and hit the subscribe button if you have any questions by all means leave a comment if you have any tips that you would like me to do a video on or or share with people please leave a comment below and maybe one day we'll see you on the old roads farewell