DUNGEON CRAWL - Terrible Writing Advice

I think making a most horribly written out of pocket, no biome No structure dungeon with a evil wizard that’s running everything on magic would actually be kind of fascinating to explore the story of
just how much magical duct tape did he have to use what did he sacrifice to get all of this Janky ass thing holding up the way it does also, there’s steaks that if you don’t stop him now, he could be a threat to the entire world is through his own ignorance and power.

You keep nailing it, JP!

(May we please get subtitles back? It's hard to follow along without them)

I actually have done a dungeon that was alive before. The royalty of the game decided to use a pesky dungeon that had formed beneath a church(weird in lore reason for spontaneous dungeons). The beginning of the dungeon was the standard brick and basic puzzle nonsense, but the wizard noticed that mending the stone walls was getting progressively harder as they went, and pathways even seemed to shift a little bit. By the halfway mark the halls were fleshy and would react by excreting weird spider monsters if it was attacked. The dungeon eventually ended up with a huge boss fight with the root of the evil that basically summonsed humanoid white blood cells to fight them off. Definitely my favorite dungeon I’ve run.

HOLY SHIT, I just realized the into was a reference to the Darkest Dungeon

I'm really glad that you're at least considering Macguffins for a video topic. Personally, I don't think Macguffins themselves are generic to a story.

One of the best dungeons I've seen comes from a manga called Dungeon Meshi, and basically hits all the points talked about in the video. Its a vast ecosystem with lots of variety and rich hidden history, and the main premise is about them surviving off of eating the flora and fauna of the dungeon after a terribly failed dive. The art style is really unique for a manga and the characters and writing are top tier (imo). Its almost finished so its ripe for the binge reading and I think an anime is in production for it, would really reccomend it.

I don't know if these books are exemplars of the story but a litrpg ive been reading are "fifth era apocalypse: book one and book two."

One thing this video doesn't cover - but which is very useful to consider when designing a dungeon for a tabletop RPG - is the structure of the dungeon. A linear structure gives the game master tighter control of the narrative and pacing, since they can guarantee the player characters will progress through the rooms in a specific order. By contrast, a dungeon with multiple entrances and multiple criss-crossing paths tends to make environmental storytelling easier (since the function of the space can be more easily baked into its layout) and also helps encourage player engagement (since they actually have to make decisions about where to explore next, instead of just walking to "the next room" every time they finish with their current one).

(TWA is a series about storywriting first and foremost, so it's understandable that it wouldn't include something that's only relevant in interactive media; I mention this only because I personally think it's a useful thing for GMs to consider.)

Ecoystem? It is a wizard tower and the wizard needs a waste disposal system, hence the piranhas in a water cave system. Said tower is complete with teleporting "traps" to said water level. Moral of the story: the party is trash. How lovely.

LitRPGs are less often standalone from other genres. Oftentimes there's another genre (fantasy) layered overtop the rpg.

Impressively, anime has made an entire model out of layering LitRPG, Isekai, and Fantasy together to regurgitate the same plot and conventions, especially the chosen one convention of Isekia, over and over.

A particularly... prestigious... fuckup that established the foundation for this subgenre trope cycle is Sword Art Online. After that you see about 5 bad Kirito cosplayers, 5 Kirito look alikes, and 1 actual decent execution on the idea a year, for the past decade.

Anyway any anime with an excessively long name that mentions something vaguely fantasy is probably a LitRPG Fantasy Isekai. Konosuba is a particular genre piece that exists to mock the subgenre itself.

That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime is a boring but acceptable presentation.

I love my Mom and her two hit multitargeting attacks is a creative approach to the formula.

But what about forgotten bunkers, the original defenders are long dead (the human ones at least) and we don't know what function it served (if any), but the armory is still intact (and thr weapons are somehow in mint condition)

Ive got an idea of how the troll cave thing can be salvaged and made into a campaign! Keep finding strange ways to railroad the characters into the cave - have branches on the trees physically try to push them. Have skulls chatter at them and roll into the cave. Have the weather drastically change in seconds so it’s too dangerous to stay outside. Then when they’re in the cave, add more weird things to railroad them into performing certain actions, like wind that physically pushes them forward, or hidden pitfalls leading to the next area of the dungeon. Have arrows drawn on the walls that point them in a specific direction, and written things alongside them like “open this chest” or “through this door”. If a character ignores it, have the writing appear in front of them repeatedly. Or if they look back at the writing, have the words change to “DO IT”. Make sure early on to give them ways to escape the cave that shouldn’t exist, like an exit that somehow leads to a town that’s miles away, or an angel statue that teleports whoever touches it out of the cave. After that, make things seem normal for a bit, but then have ALL the NPCs talking about the troll cave, have every flier on the town billboard be for the cave, and have every npc refuse to offer the players work unless they go to the troll cave. If they linger for long enough have the troll cave suddenly reappear in the middle of town. It’s at this point the characters will realize that the world they’re in is ALIVE and has trapped them inside of it so it can force them to act out its own adventure! It’ll be up to the adventurers to find a way to outsmart the demiplane, completely derail its adventure, and escape back to the real world before the demiplane railroads them all the way to its perfect ending: killing all of them in an impossible final boss battle!

I've heard the troll cave issue called the "Quantum Ogre Problem."

Read Supermage by Arron Oster

I just had a dope idea your party is in a dungeon and before them is two doors, one marked “treasure room” and the other marked “monster room”, the party is now skeptical as to why the doors are marked this way. “Who would ever willingly enter the monster room when a supposed treasure room is right beside it? Or is that what the dungeon maker thought and swapped the rooms signs to catch greedy explorers?” This causes a conundrum of reverse psychology.

Upon opening the door to the treasure room, the party is met by a very mundane room, a few old chairs, some books in a bookshelf, and most suspiciously, a single chest in the centre of the room. The party sees this obvious trap a mile away, and so decide to take a peek into the other room, only to find an exact copy of the previous room.

Just skipping to the end. The treasure rooms is filled with secret treasure that a less observant party wouldn’t notice. Like the tiles actually being painted over gold, the books in the shelf containing powerful spells, and the chest being enchanted in some way that isn’t made apparent at first.
While the monster room is just full of mimics, the chest, the books, even the tiles and bookshelf are all mimics, it’s a monster room, as in a room made of monsters

yk, jp really cracked the code with having end of the video segments. not only does it make a viewer interested in completing a video, but also forces new viewers to watch his older videos in order to gain context for the end segments. kudos to you, jp

Darkest dungeon intro, Very nice.

It's always funny how the smallest things can make your brain itch with ideas.

The simple little phrase l, "Did you remember to clock in," incorporates an idea of a bureaucracy of dungeon crawling.

Litrpg rec: primal hunter

dungeon janitors sounds like a funny story.

You can save yourself a lot of trouble by using procedural generations. Who cares if dungeons could end up being unwinnable?

Bear Moth Owl

yeah, because the british empire was the only one to ever plunder anything

Can't wait for the Macguffin episode since I give my protagonist the macguffin at chapter one

Pretty good litrpg is dungeon crawler carl but it leans more on the adult side so be warned. But it is a fun comedy.

Dungeon idea:

The walls are soft, pliable to the touch, but tough to fracture. The inside is humid, winds blowing back and forth, back and forth. The entire terrain seems to rhythmically pulsate. And then, SLAM. The front door smashes shut, rows of blocks snapping shut. The floor shifts, moving almost organically before lifting the party deeper into the dungeon. As the party falls, they figure out why there’s a rhythmic pulsation. It’s a HEARTBEAT.

TLDR: The party enters something’s mouth. The dungeon is its innards.

You should look at one of the Grand daddies of gaming - the Greyhawk map. Try to make those nations/ecologies make sense I dare you :D

maybe a bit late but, would recommend: So I'm a Spider, So What? (Kumo Desu ga, Nanika?), the beginning is full on a dungeon crawl, really like it, does some nice stuff

dungeon crawled so dog could run

Looking forward to the deep dive on litrpg... good luck with that may your shovel dig yourself up as well

Apologies if this is a very long comment but LitRPG is my preferred genre and I’ve read a TON. LitRPG would technically include Isekai light novels but I won’t list those because they aren’t really the same IMO. Both often have cross over to the Xianxia (cultivation) genre so some familiarity with that would also help.

LitRPGs so good that I subscribe to them on Patreon to make sure I get updates. These are also considered some of the most popular. (They are in general order of how much I like them):
- Beneath the Dragoneye moons
- He who fights with monsters (lighter game presence but still counts IMO)
- Primal Hunter
- Beware of Chicken (not directly a LitRPG, more Xianxia, but is so absurdly good I included it)
- An outcast in another world
- Salvos
- Defiance of the fall
- The Calamitous Bob
- Jackal among snakes

good ones that I always read when new ones are released (often due to them not having a patreon to subscribe to):
- The Wandering Inn (often considered the exemplar of the genre)
- Apocalypse Redux
- Portal to Nova Roma
- Solo leveling
- Fates Anvil
- A not so simple fetch quest
- the devils foundry
- Beastborne
- Pyresolus apocalypse
- an unbound soul
- Virtuous sons
- the beginning after the end
- Artifical jelly (this is a fucking trip)

Weird/super generic/bad that I dropped after 2-3 books for various reasons (can elaborate on if asked):
- End of the World by Aaron oster (my most hated.)
- system reborn (near beat for beat sololeveling ripoff)
- Eternal dominion
- chrysalis
- battlefield reclaimer
- fragment of divinity
- red mage
- badges of dorkdom
- wrong divinity
- the ten realms
- a snakes life
- isekai monster (made it to book 9 before losing interest.)

Dungeon core books (a genre in of itself but are VERY HEAVY LitRPG even if they aren’t necessarily classified as such) weren’t included in this list. They can be kinda samey due to the nature of the premise, but some of the absolute best are:
- dinosaur dungeon
- the crafters dungeon
- factory of the gods
- the dungeon of stories
- dungeon born
- blue core

I can list another 30-50 different series if you want but these should be more than enough lol.

There is also a Ton of LitRPG smut that is actually good but I didn’t include those. HMU if you want those too 😏

I put together a dungeon crawl for a convention game once, where the puzzles were specifically designed as a kind of moral test to keep out anyone the fantasy fascists who built the place would consider unworthy. I also low-key designed the party with abilities that could easily bypass the tests.

This feels...super oddly passive aggressive

"IM BEING CANCELLED!!!" will have a similar tone to "Apology Video Template"

I want to read just one LitRPG that's good, every single one I read was a massive slog.

Idea: A dungeon that is the final boss. As in, the whole structure is made of organic matter. The tunnels are veins, the doors are mouths, etc. The final enemy is the dungeons beating heart, which our heroes must kill to stop this eldritch monstrosity from growing bigger and consuming more land.

Thoughts?

Alright hearing that ask for Litrpg in the good list i offer you dragon eye moons. Really good at showing the systems effects on the world, as well as Threadbare a thoroughly entertaining read.

For litrpgs I recommend Delve, A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World, Markets, Multiverses (A Serial Transmigration LitRPG) and a lot more really, all of these are on Royalroad

Arcane Acension by Andrew Rowe is really good game lit

Incidentally I want to see Shonen as a topic more than any other now that I see JP contemplating it.

Oh wow he's REALLY laying into the Final Fantasy references now.

If you're looking for a good literary RPG I heavily recommend FATAL.

Answer is easy. Don't play dnd, play blades on the dark. Level up beyond your average GM

On the troll cave. It could make more such things on the world, as the adventurers slowly realize theyre in a nighmare of an eldricht god

Terrible writing advice AND you start referencing darkest dungeon?
Nope i am out