Disclaimer: I am not seriously suggesting that ANYONE do this.

But I’m gonna.

(Functional? Maybe. Fun? Probably.)

So many years ago, I came across this webpage detailing the snowflake method of writing a novel.

(Note, this is long before “snowflake” entered our current lexicon with all it’s absurd connotations. Culture is so incredibly annoying anymore…)

It’s really worth a read, but the short version is that you start with once sentence, then expand it to five, then expand each of them to five, etc, etc.

Trust me, the webpage describes it so much better.

I had a really silly idea today. What if I used it to prep for dungeon design??

I have no idea if this will work. I can’t say I’ll follow it through to the end, but I do think it’ll be fun to try it out.

Let’s look at step one. The idea is that you write a one sentence summary of your novel dungeon.

From the webpage –

Some hints on what makes a good sentence:

• Shorter is better. Try for fewer than 15 words.

• No character names, please! Better to say “a handicapped trapeze artist” than “Jane Doe”.

• Tie together the big picture and the personal picture. Which character has the most to lose in this story? Now tell me what he or she wants to win.

Some of this isn’t applicable, but I think a lot more of it is than I thought at second glance. No character names! “Bizziebald the Wicked” won’t fly, but “a brooding necromancer” does.

Tying the big picture to the personal picture is a little less straightforward. We’re not writing a novel so we won’t be be focusing on a “main character”. I do think there is something here, however.

We can take the big picture as “the dungeon” and the personal picture as “The PCs” in the sense of how or why they’ll interact with this dungeon. Why is it important to them?

In doing so, I have to be careful to not do any fortune telling for the PCs. I can’t say how they’ll end up. This has to be more of a hook than an outcome.

So let’s give this a try. I’m going to spit something out and then revise it.

“A cursed, immortal goblin’s dungeon dwelling followers terrorize a nearby town.”

Okay. We’re clocking in at 11 words, so we’re good there. There are no proper names. We have the big picture (a dungeon inhabited by a cursed, immortal goblin and her worshippers), and the personal (terrorize a nearby town, which the PCs will come across as their initial hook, of course.)

I’m pretty happy with this sentence, but let’s see if there are ways I can improve.

I’m imagining the goblin’s curse is that she can’t die, even if she wanted to. (Does she? That’s a future me problem to figure out.) So instead of “immortal”, let’s go with “undying”. I feel like there’s a different connotation there.

Next up, “dungeon dwelling”. That does what I need it to do, but it is somewhat generic. Where is this dungeon? I have four more words to play with before I hit max length, so how about “ruined temple dwelling” instead. I’m imagining these followers worship the goblin, so why not make it extra eerie and place it in a temple once meant for the good and holy?

OBVIOUSLY, we’re going to have to change followers to worshippers, but what if we fleshed that out more? What kind of worshippers? What if the goblin had a magical bite that when used mutates the creature who is bitten? It could be part of her curse.

These mutant freaks are terrorizing a nearby town, but terrorizing how? From what we’ve written so far, perhaps the goblin needs more subject to bite. This sounds like some kidnapping.

When I said town, I was just being generic. What could make it more interesting? Instead of a town, why not a religious commune? Like a monastery? Perhaps it had some ties to that temple at one time, but again, that’s a future me problem to worry about.

Let’s look at my revised sentence –

“A cursed, undying goblin’s ruined temple dwelling mutant worshippers kidnap monks from a nearby monastery.

Okay, it’s pretty dense and I wouldn’t put it in a book, but for my purposes, I think it works. Sure, I have to read it three times to parse it, but for the sake of this experiment, I’ll let it fly.

I look forward to playing with it more in step 2.