Crawlspace

At the moment I run a very dungeon-crawl-y type of "campaign", if you even want to call it that. The players see, they delve, they conquer (most of the time). It's simple, I love it and everybody has a fun time. Now, prepping full-blown dungeons in a more normal campaign is a bit harder if that isn't your specialty. What I've found especially hard is prepping a small, dungeon-like location when there are only 30 minutes until the session starts. I've recently found a fun little trick/take/whateveryouwanttocallit in making simple dungeons without needing maps, while still having a fun physical representation. Just keep in mind, without maps this is going to be a bit more subjective in description than objective.

Crawlspace Method
(Blackbeard Banners)

1. Grab your nearest D6. On the D6, choose a start and an end on the dice, if you're indecisive just choose 1 as the start and 6 as the end, or roll for both. Just keep in mind that the start and end must be different numbers on the die. The end isn't always necessarily an "end", it can also be just a dead end with the final content of the dungeon or the end to the next level in the dungeon, you choose.

2a. Start writing down room contents. Make sure that you have 6 rooms total. You probably see where this is going, the start and end you chose are where the players enter the dungeon and end the dungeon. (If you want, you can connect multiple D6s, with an end leading to another start. Using different colored dice can be nice if using this method.)

2b. Now, I'm not the boss of you, but I really like guidelines for dungeons and room-distribution in dungeons. I recommend that you take a tip about distribution from Small Tables and distribute rooms like this:
- 3 rooms should have some sort of hostile intent. Dungeons are dangerous places, make it feel like that. This may include traps, enemies, or whatever.
- 2 rooms should have some sort of neutral or maybe even good intent. This is most likely just going to be empty rooms, although not all empty rooms are empty. (Include minor curios!)
- 1 room should be weird in intent. This should either be some strange curio or an NPC.

3. Write down any travel exceptions. When players enter the dungeon, they are marked down as being on the start's face on the D6 (so if you chose 1 as the start, you start on 1 on the die). The players can travel to any face adjacent to this face (so, on my D6, when the 1 is face-up, the sides on the die that are face-sideways(?) are 2, 4, 3, and 5. The players can travel to any one of these). Travel exceptions are things like walls that block traveling from one place to another. An example of a travel exception is "There is a wall that blocks PCs from room 1 to 4".

So there it is, pretty simple if you can decode my terrible descriptions of basic geometry. I've run one session with this method, and it went pretty smoothly. Here's what I think:
- It's really fast and really nice not to have to worry about maps. Like, I love looking at Dyson Logos' stuff and sometimes modules have maps I would want to show my players if it didn't have confidential information in there. This is just simpler and faster, in my opinion.

- D6s are great for gimmicks, I don't know if it is just the size or what, but D6s just tend to be more fun to manipulate than other dice. For instance, let's say that you have a dungeon set in an arch-demon's stomach. Now, no DM with a pure heart would ever imagine doing something so metal, but, let's just say that we wanted to add some extra cruelty, and say that every hour a different room fills up with stomach acid. Simple, just roll 1D6 (rerolling 1's and 6's if you are concerned about your starts and end) to find out the room each hour and watch the players panic as they hear the squelching contraction of flesh in these horrible tunnels, accompanied by the agonizing feeling of their limbs being dissolved. This can also work for roaming monsters. For instance, every 10 minutes the GM rolls 1D6, if it matches up with the player's location, whatever horrible thing lurking within these tunnels reveals itself, or may be coming in a moment.

- But, if you're a dumbass like me, geometry can be kinda hard. I accidentally cock-blocked the players I had because I thought a wall was somewhere it shouldn't have been. I have a habit of using compass directions when noting down details about dungeon rooms, especially with starts and ends. I honestly don't really know how to help with this, but I'm sure you guys are more spatially minded than me and can figure something out? My solution to this has been to look at the side of the dice with 1 on it. Wherever the tip of the 1 is pointing is north. This obviously doesn't work with pipped dice, which is why it isn't an optimal solution.

- Some D6s are built differently than others for some odd reason. This can lead to some confusion.

Without further ado, have a short example dungeon, inspired by the grotesque demon stomach example above:

Gold In The Guts
(Andrew Mar)
(This lacks realistic anatomy, but it's a demon so who cares? It looks like the creature above, except gargantuan in scale.)

Take what is here, if you want. This is a bit more experimental in nature than I typically like my stuff to be, but I think it's a fun idea. I like the dungeon, and I think that it might be able to be expanded upon as a setting if you make the glutton demon a truly gargantuan thing. If you hate this idea, or are just dumb with geometry like me, then you might want to check out Diagram Dungeons. It's still drawing a map, but on a much simpler level (I personally have started using this a lot). I'm hoping to contribute something meaningful to the Pamphlet Dungeon Jam by the ever-inspiring Nate Treme. With school rearing its nasty head, I don't know if I'll be able to make the deadline, but I'll try my damnedest. See you later!