Dungeon Architect: Location, Location, Location

Today, I’d like to talk about the key things to pay attention to when designing various locations. This is a part of a sequence of posts about designing dungeons, but because of how general my definition of a dungeon is, these key points should apply equally well to all locations.

As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary, and if you are looking for other posts, check out the blog map.

My thinking about these topics is not structured. This means that the design of a location, in my eyes, can begin with any element in this list, and proceed from there in any order. Furthermore, there is no reason to go through all of them every time. Often, it is perfectly reasonable to leave certain design elements in a “default” state, and simply not think of them. However, this list would seek to be as complete as possible, and so I will do my best to include all topics that may be relevant. If nothing else, you may find some ideas for making the location unique by going through this list.

I have split the list into several sections, grouping multiple related topics of interest together. Obviously, there may be multiple useful ways to make this split, but this is the one that makes the most sense to me. Without further ado, let’s begin:

1. Floorplan

This section deals with things you could see on a floorplan of the building: geometry, locations of various rooms, ventilation ducts and so on.

1. Size. Obviously, you would need to consider how large your location would have to be. This doesn’t have to be the first thing you consider either: you can simply grow the location until it serves your needs, and consider the resulting size satisfactory. There are many different properties that can be considered the relevant size: measurements of length/width/height, the largest distance between any two points, land area, number of rooms, hours needed to fully explore, and so on.

2. Topology of the space. Topology has to do with how things connect to one another. A very neat way to represent topology of locations comes from here: original idea has to do with, effectively, narrative structure of dungeons, but I think a very similar method can be generalized to represent geometry or other relevant properties. I think that just by looking at the pictures under the link, you should have many ideas for different locations.

3. Geometry of the space. Where topology deals with connections, geometry deals with shapes. This is the subject you deal with most when you draw a classical map: how are all the rooms shaped and broken up into parts.

4. Ingress & egress. This topic deals with movement of all sorts of things in, out, and throughout the building. For all of these, remember the equivalent to Kirchhoff’s Law, or the law of conservation of stuff: for any point, sum of the stuff flowing into the point plus sum of the stuff flowing out of the point is equal to the change of stuff at that point.

   1. People: what are the typical movement patterns of people into and out of the building? What are their speeds? Are there areas through which people pass quicker or slower than average? Where do people generally accumulate? If you “pushed” people away from some spot (by starting a fire or an explosion), where would they be pushed to? Do they have any movement procedures - in case of a fire, attack, sabotage? How is the movement of people accommodated? Are there any limitations on movement - locks, control points?

   2. Air: is the building ventilated? If so, how? Do the inhabitants simply crack open a window? Are there dedicated air ducts, and what is their size and distribution throughout the building? If the building is not ventilated at all, how do the inhabitants deal with natural increase in carbon dioxide and other stagnant gasses? Do they not deal with them, and simply let them accumulate in certain areas? Do note that gasses behave like liquids - sink and rise - until they get mixed up, at which point they don’t really separate.

   3. Water and sewage: does the building have any use for water? Are there toilets? Are there pipes, magic items that create or destroy water, or do people simply carry buckets around when they need to move things? Does water accumulate anywhere? Does water flow quickly or are there areas of stagnation? Are there separate circuits for water with specific purposes - for example, fire suppression?

   4. Heat & cold. Is heat energy supplied to the building in winter? How? Humans naturally produce heat, as do working electronics: how is this heat removed from the building? Are the walls insulated? Where are hot and cold spots?

   5. Magic & power. Does your setting require some kind of power supply for magical items? How does this supply work? Is there storage or generation? In modern settings, similar thinking can apply to electricity.

   6. Goods. Does your building require anything else (e.g. parts, materials, supplies) for it’s functioning or for the people inside, and if so, how does supply of this work? If your building is manufacturing something, how are the finished products leaving? Are there pipes piping anything not already on the list?

2. Architecture

Where the previous section dealt with how the building looks like on a floor plan, architecture is about the rest of the “structural” properties of the building.

1. Look of the building. This is what is traditionally called architecture: what does the building look like? Does it fit into the local architectural style?

2. Wall, foundation and roof materials. Some people would consider this to be mostly irrelevant: after all, walls are walls, they block your movement and sight but that’s about it. Others would say that walls are merely suggestions on how you should move through the place, and in fact are a valuable source of environmental control, weaponry, and traps.

   1. Can you break through? This is a very important question, because it determines how easy it would be for the players or NPCs to modify the space. How difficult would breaking through be? Is it possible with any weapon, or only specific ones - magical or otherwise? What amount of explosives would be required to make a human-sized hole in a wall? Would magical or regular attacks damage the environment?

   2. Are materials flammable? This goes for the core structural materials, any paneling and major furniture. Fire is a very classic and dynamic way of manipulating space: it is dangerous to life, items, and destructive to the environment itself. A villainous NPC holed up in a flammable room is simply begging for their own death: canny players wouldn’t bother engaging them on their favored ground, and would instead set fire to the building. NPC would either have to flee, abandoning their preparations and having to enter a space players have better control over, or suffer various damage from the fire. If materials are flammable, how quickly do they burn? Do they lose structural integrity in the flames - for example, steel beams lose a lot of their strength far before they actually melt, possibly making the structure suddenly collapse. What kind of smoke is produced during the burning? Refer to the section on ventilation to decide how that smoke will behave once produced.

   3. How repairable are the materials if the building is damaged? For example, repairing wooden paneling might require simply replacing a couple boards, but repairing damage to stonework might involve replacing a whole section of the wall. Would damage be obvious or not? Could it be covered up?

   4. Are materials local or imported? Are they expensive? What does this say about the construction and design of the building? How about owners and maintainers?

   5. Magic interactions. Are there any notable magical interactions with the materials - is some magic stronger or weaker in the building? Is it harder or easier to affect the walls with bypassing or destructive magic?

   6. Any other key properties?

3. Structural properties. This is about other purely structural properties of the building.

   1. Size of the passages. This is especially relevant for the height dimension, because the other size can be easily seen on the map. Would people have to duck to go through some areas? Can you ride on a horse inside? 

   2. Weight limits. Would some passages or areas collapse if too much weight was put on them? How much weight are we talking about? Modern residential buildings can handle weight on the order of 2 tons per square meter; a cubic meter of steel or iron would weigh 7.3. DnD has a spell called wall of iron, which, at 12th level, would create about 2 cubic meters of steel, overloading a reasonable floor weight limit by a factor of 7. This is not an especially unusual case - magic systems often let players pull a lot of matter out of thin air, and it’s important to keep in mind that this might lead to an instantaneous RUD of the building. Keep in mind that if an object impacts the floor at speed, it’s effective weight is higher; even if an object simply appears out of thin air at zero velocity and touching the floor, it’s effective weight immediately after appearance is higher than normal by a factor of about 2 because of the dynamic effects of the floor bending to accommodate the weight.

   3. Wheeled or hoofed access. This isn’t just a question of accessibility: this is a question of ability to bring a cart full of dynamite in, or needing to lug it in by hand over some stairs. Does access differ somehow between different groups of people?

3. Economic purpose

A lot of the locations in PNP RPGs are buildings, or collections of them. Making buildings is hard, and nobody is going to do it just on a lark. They had some purpose for the building in mind, some kind of goal that couldn’t be fulfilled by lack of a building. Maybe they needed to keep things protected from the elements, or keep stuff cold, or away from prying eyes, or perhaps they wanted to use the building as a manufacturing workshop. In any case, some person had put a lot of effort into the construction, and the reason for why they did this is what I broadly call “economic purpose of the building”. This applies equally well to any location that isn’t completely natural.

1. Location, Location, Location. Your building isn’t just hanging in a white featureless void: it’s somewhere, and there is a reason why it’s here and not somewhere else.

   1. Roads, rivers and railways: in much the same way that ingress and egress concerns work within the building, they also work outside of it. How do people and things get to and from this place? Easiest way to move goods and people is by road or by river, so consider how close this building is to them. Alternatively, consider other major ways to move goods or people from place to place.

   2. Production. Are there any local materials or circumstances that let people do or make something they can’t elsewhere? This can take the form of farming, mining, manufacture that requires local surroundings, or something else.

   3. Distance. Is the building located near or within some other key locations - towns, zones of interests or manufacture, and so on? Are there several locations that the building is trying to be close to? What are the nearby businesses or places of interest? Does the building contain things like sleeping accommodations, feeding areas, and general goods stores, and if no, how close is it to them?

   4. Limitations. Alternatively, are there any limitations on the location of the building - be it physical, societal or legal? Would the building have been located somewhere else if not for some key law or regulation? Is the building’s size limiting its location? How about what happens in the building - is it too dangerous or nasty to put it close to places where people live?

2. Building purpose. What is done in this building? Why did someone bother to put it up? Why couldn’t they have made do with a smaller, less effortful construction? This is related to the production question, but different: often there is no real connection between building’s location and what is done there (e.g. within a city, there is no real reason for why an office of a specific company is located in a specific building other than random chance), but it is still very important to think about.

3. Room purpose. Same as the building purpose, but for each individual room. What was the intended purpose of this room? What is it’s actual current usage? Is this room core to the purpose of the building, or performing a supporting role?

4. Key suppliers & clients. If when talking about the building’s location you might have been considering it’s distance to various suppliers and consumers of goods produced in the building, now it’s time to consider everything else about them. Who are they? Who needs stuff made in this building? What do they do with it?

4. Personnel

Because the buildings are hard to build, if you already have one, someone is bound to be using it. And because they are using it, they will inevitably interact with players going there. If it is unoccupied - you can largely skip this section.

1. Regulars. Whatever the purpose of the building, some people will be using it regularly. Maybe they travel to this place, or maybe they live there every day. Whatever the connection, there will be some daily routine they go through in this building, some rooms they visit, and some work they do in those rooms. Who are these people? Are they specialists? How tightly are they connected to the location?

2. Support - cleaning, guarding, building maintenance. Buildings require maintenance to stay in top shape. Someone has to clean them, someone has to guard them, and someone has to repair damages. Who are these people? How often do they come in? Are regulars in the building doing these roles? How good are they at their jobs? Do they have uniforms or important equipment?

3. Sporadic visitors. Some people will come into the building sporadically - not every week, but perhaps once every couple months. Are there any commonalities between these people? How do the guards identify them and let them in? Why do they visit the building, and which areas do they go to? Generally, who are these people?

4. Owner. If the building is occupied, and is being used for some reason, someone is getting something out of it. This might be direct monetary profit, or something more esoteric. Who is this person? How quickly could occupants of the building contact them? How quickly can they come in if something goes catastrophically wrong? Would they get punished by a person even higher in the hierarchy, or are they the top dog? Are there several people who would be responsible for different kinds of fuckups, and who might receive different percentages of the profit from the building?

5. State presence. If the building is located in even somewhat populated areas, some big guy will want to stick their fingers into the business. Here “state” can mean different things: it may be something as complex as a modern state, or something as simple as a local crime boss wanting to exert their influence. 

   1. Taxation. The simplest interaction any state can have with the owners or residents of a location is to get money from them. Are there taxes levied? If so, what kind? How do these taxes affect business conducted in the building, or even the shape of the building itself? On the other side of the coin - are there subsidies that help the occupants in some way?

   2. Police. The second basic purpose of any state is to exert control over violence. This also, helpfully, allows them to collect aforementioned taxes if someone doesn’t cooperate. This likewise uses a broad definition of police - it can be any kind of semi-regular force that goes through the area and deals with threats. What kind of police presence is there? What kind of things do they deal with - murder, assault, or something else? What are their capabilities? How quickly can they react to threats or requests? How quickly can occupants of the location contact them? How good are they at investigating crimes? How many of them are around? Can they call in someone else if the threat is above their pay grade? What is their escalation ladder - do they start with polite requests or open with fire right away?

   3. Fire department. Because of the danger fire presents, any complex society inevitably gets some equivalent of a fire department. If they don’t, their cities simply burn down until they do. What kind of fire protection measures are in place? Are there fire codes? Are there passive fire protection systems - sprinklers and alarms? How quickly can the fire department react to a fire being started? How big of a fire can they put out? Do they rescue people or items, or just let things burn down and contain the damage? How many of them there are - if someone were to (purely hypothetically) start multiple fires at once, could this attacker exhaust the fire department’s capacity to deal with problems?

   4. Ambulances & healing. Likewise, any complex society is going to have some kind of access to medicine. Does the location have a local doctor available? Do they have to go and fetch someone? If so, at what times? How good is this doctor? What kind of problems can they deal with? Are there ambulances - some kind of system for bringing people to the doctor - or none? How many people would need to break their legs at once to overwhelm this system?

   5. Code departments. If the building does something that would be regulated, there may be some part of the local government dedicated to checking that everything is up to code. This can be as simple as cleanliness regulations in food production, OSHA, or as complicated as various highly technical requirements in complex manufacture. Are there any such regulations? How does this department function, if any?

5. Ambiance

Previous sections dealt with everything happening within the building. This section deals with the environment surrounding the building, and how it changes over time.

1. Wind. A concern that doesn’t come up that often, but is nonetheless highly important - wind. How fast is it? What side of the building is downwind? Wind is going to blow smells, pollen and gasses in that direction, which will be relevant to any gas or smoke spells used outside. Is it steady or very sporadic? Does it change during the year?

2. Lighting. How well lit is the building? What is the daylight cycle? Are there any nearby features that affect the light, such as mountains or large trees? How about clouds?

3. Weather. Is it mostly sunny, or does it rain constantly? How does this affect lighting, visibility, and the ground?

4. Humidity & temperature. Hot? Cold? Humid? This isn’t often relevant - until it suddenly is.

5. Air. Is there anything special about the air? Is there none, because the location is underwater or in space? How does this affect everything else?

6. Seasonality. How do conditions change throughout the year? Does it snow in winter? Does it rain in summer?

7. Nearby terrain. Everything physical that is near or below our location.

   1. The ground. What is the ground made of? Is it diggable? Is it flammable? How much weight does it support per unit of area? What happens if it’s wet? Can carts drive over it? Can hooved transport? Do gusts of wind raise dust clouds?

   2. Scaleable features; Buildings, trees. Is there anything to climb? How close is it to the location? How high is it? How much weight can it support? Can you topple this thing - a tree, for example - onto the location? How difficult would that be?

   3. Sightlines. How far can someone see from different points on the location? Is there anything nearby blocking their view? What points on the structure serve as good observation posts? What directions aren’t as covered? How about the reverse - how well can people see the structure from the outside? How about from the air?

   4. Hiding places. Even if you can technically see the enemy, they might still be hidden - for example, they may be hiding in a bush. Are there any nearby places where someone could hide and observe the structure? Could they burrow into the ground without leaving a trace? How about on the location - what are good hiding places there? Are any of these hiding places trapped in advance?

   5. Hiding in plain sight. There are three primary types of invisibility - can’t see, don’t see and won’t see. Can’t see is what happens when you physically can’t see something, or can’t interpret what you see in any way. Don’t see is what happens when you do see something, but ignore it - your brain automatically filters out 99% of information that is in front of your eyes, after all. Won’t see is what happens when you see something, realize what it is, but also realize that it would be highly beneficial to you to pretend you never saw anything. This section is about the don’t see - are there any places nearby where someone could blend in with the environment? Are there any regular crowds passing by? Any natural sitting places? Car parks where someone can park a car on a stakeout?

8. Any other relevant ambient property. Everything else that might be relevant would go in this section - gravity, local magical effects, or something even more exotic.

6. Sensory Spectrum

I mentioned sensory issues when covering hiding and ambiance. This section deals with them more closely. Senses are one of the primary ways of engaging with the world - if you can’t sense something, you can hardly engage with it can you. As a corollary, anything that messes with your senses messes with all your abilities by proxy. Sadly, this entire spectrum of issues is somewhat ignored in PNP RPGs. There are often abilities that deal with these issues - various fog clouds, invisibility spells, and what not - but to me, it mostly feels like they are an afterthought, instead of being one of the most important aspects of combat and environmental puzzles.

1. Visual. Visual spectrum delivers most of the information we use in daily life. Is there anything about the location that screws with this? Is there not enough light, or too much? Are there dispersion effects - like fog - or absorption effects - like dust in the air? Is the ambient light lacking some primary colors, screwing with color perception? Do not forget that while this section is called “visual”, really it deals with all light, not just the one you can see with your puny human eyeballs. Consider how this affects interactions between species - are there any objects that are transparent to one spectrum and opaque to the other? Notable examples include infrared light, radio waves, and ultraviolet. Are there light sources for all relevant spectra or just some?

2. Audial. Noise and sound - probably second most important source of information. Are there ambient sources of noise? If there are ambient sources, what kind? How about noise dampening? Are there any interesting resonant frequencies among the objects nearby? Speed of sound is about 330 meters per second in normal air - could this lead to interesting delays in receiving information? Sound from around the middle of the human hearing spectrum has wavelengths on the scale of meters - this means potentially interesting interference effects. How far could sound carry from the location and still be heard? Is this different in different directions? How do natural, human-carried sources of sound (footsteps, clings of equipment, speech) carry throughout the structure?

3. Touch & Balance. Touch is a bit of an unconventional sense, but I think it’s important to keep in mind. How would vibrations spread through your structure? If I exploded something in one room, would people feel the structure shake across the house? How do the walls and floor of the structure feel? Does this carry extra information? Is there something extremely obvious to someone with a heightened form of this sense?

4. Smell. How do different parts of your location smell? How is smell carried throughout the structure (hint: refer to ventilation section)? Are there ambient sources of smell, and can they cover something players can create? What sorts of things could create new smells? (Blood, gunshots, fire are some easy possibilities - if you have a good ventilation system, and there is a fire or gunshots somewhere in the building, someone with a very good sense of smell near the outflow of the ventilation would very quickly know this!) How quickly do smells carry through the location (see ventilation again)? Are there any smell “sinks” - any kind of purification that removes molecules from the air?

5. Magic. It is pretty typical for settings to have some form of “mage sight” if magic is present. How does the location affect it? Is there anything that immediately pops out to someone using this sense? How is it affected by walls/distance/NPCs/players/items/spells?

6. Anything else?

7. Ecology

While people are one of the main active factors in any location, there are others. Two other main ones are flora and fauna. Here animal and plant can take fairly broad meanings, depending on the setting.

1. Generally, I would group things something like this: 

   1. People: Sapient agents. We’ve covered them in previous sections.

   2. Fauna: Non-sapient agents, move around the environment, (optionally) grow and reproduce.

   3. Flora: Non-sapient non-agents, mostly static, generally grow and reproduce.

   4. Objects: Everything that doesn’t grow on it’s own and isn’t an agent. Likewise, already covered.

2. So what should you think in regards to these parts of ecology? Let’s start with nearby flora. All of these considerations go about every plant.

   1. Energy source. Everything needs energy to survive and move around. What is the energy source? Is it sunlight, heat, or something more exotic? For plants without real equivalents the answer most likely will be “magic” because of how much energy your average magic vine has to be spending every second just to flail around and especially grow at ridiculous rates. However, “magic” in fantasy settings is nothing more than a curiosity/explanation stopper: for the purposes of design it is important to try to break down “magic” into something more reductionist. Does magic energy generation happen over time or instantaneously? Does it require some circumstances, like at least the presence of mundane light? Is there any way to slow down/speed it up? Where is energy stored inside the plant? How and how quickly is it distributed throughout it?

   2. Reproduction. Plants do not just get bigger: they also make other plants. How does this happen? Is the plant pollinated? If so, by what insects or animals? Does it use wind instead? Does it self-pollinate, or are there male and female plants? Male plants spread pollen, female plants make fruits; one of the reasons for widespread pollen allergies is that cities plant exclusively male plants due to not wanting to pay for costs for fruit cleanup, leading to a lot of pollen produced and none consumed. Does the plant make seeds or fruit? Where does that fruit typically go before settling down and making a new plant, and how does it get there?

   3. Parasites, fungi. Some plants prey on other plants, and this affects their life. What kind of parasites are there? How do they affect the plants?

   4. Herbivores. Plants typically have defenses against being eaten - be it harsh bark, poison, or barbs. What defenses do your plants have?

   5. Growth. A plant doesn’t just need energy to grow, it also needs materials - physical mass, and various minerals. For example, what a simple fertilizer like ammonia does is give plants more nitrogen, because plants can not process atmospheric nitrogen. This makes plants grow much faster and larger because nitrogen is one of the key bottlenecks in their growth. What materials do your plants need? Where do they come from? Can you affect this material transport in some way? Once again, remember Kirchhoff's laws.

      1. Specifically: how do plants interact with the walls and environment of your location, and the ground around it?

   6. Death. Do plants die? If they do, what happens to their remains? How often do they die? What is a sufficient amount of damage to make a plant die?

   7. Ambiance. How does plant behavior get affected by everything we discussed in the ambiance section? Lighting, humidity, the seasons?

3. And now fauna:

   1. Energy source. Same as plants, animals need energy to move around. This typically comes in two forms: either meat or plant matter, but maybe your animals use something else.

      1. Herbivores. Some animals eat plants - how do they bypass the protections plants develop? How much do they need to eat per day? How much does this affect the maximum sustainable number of herbivores that survive nearby?

      2. Carnivores. How many carnivores can your herbivores sustain? What kind of meat do they prefer?

      3. Omnivores. See above.

   2. Behavior. Do animals avoid humans, or are they aggressive? Do they defend specific places, or do they roam? Are they active at night or day? Do they move in packs or one by one?

   3. Nests. Where do animals sleep and accumulate, if anywhere at all? What would they do if you disturbed those places?

   4. Ability interplays. This is a fairly complicated subject, but basically try to think how specific abilities of your animals - be it magical or otherwise - interplay with the environment, design of your location, and other animals or people around. The principle is easy to describe, but hard to specify and do in practice because you basically have to simulate several generations of an “arms race” all in your head.

8. History

I put this subject last, despite it often being highly important in the design of a location. The reason for this is simple: to consider the history of a location, you simply think about all the previous subjects, and think how they would have changed over time. As such, it is hard to discuss history before discussing everything else first. But after everything else was discussed, there really isn’t much else to say: just go over all previous subjects and add time. There are some issues, however, that deserve special consideration.

1. Technology. Technology changes over time - usually advances, sometimes goes back. This affects all sorts of things - jobs people do, building materials, weapons, animals, patterns of people movement, amount and type of things that are moved, and so on.

2. Evolution. I think it’s pretty obvious that animal or plant species can get wiped out or be introduced from an external source, but they can also evolve to change their shape. This won’t be a relevant concern on short time scales, but when considering the long term history of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, it becomes important to keep in mind.

3. Large scale climate changes. Ice ages, global warming, all that goes here - both man made and natural. They have large impacts on everything, but all of them are indirect, and so there is no real need to consider them unless thinking of the history of some location.

4. Tectonic movement. Especially relevant for various locations built in the mountains. Did you know that Himalayas grow by around 5 cm per year? This won’t change much over a single adventure, but if adventure takes place in a 500 year old dwarven hold, then this becomes 5*500 centimetres, and that’s 25 meters - more than enough to massively rearrange corridors, rooms and especially any kind of precision equipment. For example, if a shear surface in the rock goes straight through a specific corridor, then the corridor might end in a solid wall, because the other end of the shear surface is now 25 meters up or down, somewhere in the rock. Obviously growth rate can change over time, and is largest in younger mountains, but that is a consideration you should make yourself.

5. Erosion. Another thing that is rarely relevant on short scales (unless you have a flood on your hands), but becomes important long-term. Rivers without human maintenance tend to “wander around” the landscape, changing their shape and direction. Mountains get cut through, and wind erodes the sharp edges. Consider that a thousand year old castle might have collapsed because it’s foundations were cut through by a river.

Phew, that sure was a wall of text, but hopefully a good reference for design. Meanwhile, if you enjoy what I write, you can subscribe to receive updates by email: