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

That right there is my one sentence dungeon.

The whole idea in one single statement.

See, I decided to use the Snowflake Method to try and create a dungeon. It’s usually used for writing a novel, but I wanted to see if I could tweak it a bit for the purposes of making a non-linear DnD adventure.

So far, I’ve completed one step. Today is step two.

What is step two? From the website:

Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel. This is the analog of the second stage of the snowflake. I like to structure a story as “three disasters plus an ending”. Each of the disasters takes a quarter of the book to develop and the ending takes the final quarter. I don’t know if this is the ideal structure, it’s just my personal taste.

This is where we need to take some creative license. Our goal isn’t to make a linear novel – it’s to make a dungeon. Those two things are quite different.

That means we can’t stack this as if these sentences will happen in order. Here’s what I think I’ll do instead:

• Sentence #1 is the intro. What does the outside world know about this dungeon?

• Sentence #2-4 will be different big problems in the dungeon. This might mean there are three factions or it might mean different areas of it. We’ll see.

• Since we don’t have a resolution, so to speak, sentence #5 will serve as either the antidote to the big bad or the treasure in the dungeon. Again, we’ll see.

Let’s give it a try. First, the intro. This has to do with the kidnappings, which they’ll learn about from the monastery or a nearby town.

Mutant fanatics, wearing religious vestments, have been kidnapping monks from a monastery.

Feeling good about that. It spells out our starting situation. Next up, the *first* problem in the dungeon. Gonna go for the obvious one here.

They are dragging them back to a nearby ruined temple and presenting them to an undying goblin for her bizarre rituals.

Great. That takes care of most of our currently known information. The next sentence invites me to come up with something new. Let’s introduce a faction here to make things interesting.

Until recently, the temple had solely been inhabited by ghouls, content to feed on the flesh of corpses from the graveyard outside of Riverbend Mills.

Fantastic. We have a second faction. How do they interrelate? That’s a future James problem. For now, it’s enough to know they’re there.

We also introduce Riverbend Mills. That’s gonna be a town. It could be the starting point for the PCs. All of these sentences so far could appear on a rumor table.

Unknown to them both, the temples original inhabitants live there still, serving the dark whims of a foul beast far beneath the surface.

Yessss. I’m not trying to D&D-ify this quite yet, so I don’t have to settle on what type of monster the old priests are or who they serve. I’m good knowING it’s some evil shit with undead overtones.

Now the last sentence, we need some sort of “resolution”. This could be the way to deal with the thing under the temple or the goblin. It could be treasure. Maybe it could even be a combination of these things. Let’s see here…

The dark priests and their master will not rest until the Forever Stone is back in their hands – but it is the very thing that is lodged in the chest of the Undying Goblin, keeping her alive!

Yeah, it’s a bulky last sentence, but it was trying to do a lot of work. Let’s jam them all together and see what we got.

Mutant fanatics, wearing religious vestments, have been kidnapping monks from a monastery. They are dragging them back to a nearby ruined temple and presenting them to an undying goblin for her bizarre rituals. Until recently, the temple had solely been inhabited by ghouls, content to feed on the flesh of corpses from the graveyard outside of Riverbend Mills. Unknown to them both, the temples original inhabitants live there still, serving the dark whims of a foul beast far beneath the surface. The dark priests and their master will not rest until the Forever Stone is back in their hands – but it is the very thing that is lodged in the chest of the Undying Goblin, keeping her alive!

Would I write this paragraph in a novel? No. It’s messy. But it suits my purposes just fine. We have factions, we have conflict, we have a place for the PCs to rest and get info… this is the making of a decent dungeon, I do believe!

I’d love to know your thoughts on this. It’s been a fun thought experiment for me. Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

I’ll get back to this in a few days, I’m sure.

Talk soon,

-James