The further I go along with the snowflake method of writing a novel, the less it pertains to creating a dungeon. After six steps, the adventure is really as developed as it needs to be. At this point, it’s just bringing it all together and cleaning it up.

Thus, moving forward, I’m going to be completely diverging from that original snowflake method. Everything has worked really well so far and I do think I’d use this as a template to make future adventures.

In any case, this brings us to step 7. This is going to involve collecting all of my little room/ hex blurbs and hammering them into proper keying format. At the moment, they’re kinda the equivalent of scribblings on napkins. It was important when I was creating them to have freedom to just figure them out. Now it’s time to make them proper.

I started by divvying them up into their individual sections. Doing this has led to some practical concerns, but that’s a tomorrow problem. Though I’m not making a map yet, this step does have me thinking about what they can look like, and just how many there will be.

The tree major areas I have are Overland, the Monastery, and the Ruined Temple. The Ruined Temple is further divided into The Temple Proper, The Bell Tower, and the Below.

Now that I’ve divided them all up, I know how many locations will be in each area.

• Overland – 9*

• The Monastery – 6

• The Ruined Temple – 21

  • The Temple Proper – 10

  • The Bell Tower – 3

  • The Below – 8

I’m pretty satisfied with that spread (other than what I’ll talk about tomorrow). The dungeon is supposed to be the star of this adventure, so it should have more locations than anywhere else. Twenty one rooms seems decent enough for a few sessions of play, which is about the size I wanted from this.

Though they will all be connected, I do think each section in the ruined temple will have to have it’s own map. I’m thinking one spread will have an artistic representation of the whole Ruined Temple with it’s major area’s labeled. The individual maps will then label the connecting passages.

Layout wise (which you don’t have to think about if you’re not publishing it), it does leave me questions of how much info will end up fitting in a spread. I’ll have to present the maps as a whole somewhere – but do I include section maps on the spreads? Does each entry also just include the room and connecting passages? This I’m not sure on. I’ll try and keep rooms in close proximity on the map in close proximity in the layout as well.

I thought this step would require less thinking than it has. 🤣 But as I look forward to future steps, I’m trying not to shoot myself in the foot. Of importance to me right now is a good distribution of locations amongst the different areas, visualizing what the map will look like, and knowing how the players will interact with them (i.e. the overland is a hex crawl, the monastery is a dungeon crawl, etc.)

*The Overland is where I’m having my issue with both distribution and knowing how the players will interact with it. This will be the focus of tomorrow’s post.