Building Dungeons

A dungeon file is one walkable interior: a floor, a derelict deck, a lair, a stretch of wilds — a set of rooms with doors between them, fully authored before play. The GM reads it, the players walk it, and the file remembers what they did to it. This chapter covers the intent; the step-by-step build script lives in the Dungeon Guide at /Dungeons/Dungeon Guide/, and the run-time rules the GM follows are the [ID: DUNG] instruction set in /Dungeons/GM Instructions/.

When to reach for it

A dungeon models a place that is delved — taken room by room, against something. If the place is merely visited, shopped in, or flown, use its own type instead (establishment, vessel, location). The siteKind field decides how the floor plays:

New kinds should extend this table, not fork the type. A hab the party owns and a shop are not dungeons even when their doors can be kicked — model them where they belong, and bring a dungeon in only for the fight.

One floor, one truth

The load-bearing idea: the floor was authored before play, and play never rewrites the rooms. The GM may not add rooms, invent doors, or restock cleared shelves. cleared is a promise — won fights stay won, emptied shelves stay empty. discovered and currentRoomId persist across sessions. Design rooms worth remembering, because nothing between them can be invented without breaking the contract.

Anatomy of a room

Each room carries:

• role — entrance, chamber, hall, corridor, dead-end, descent/ascent, exit, sanctum. This drives how the GM narrates arrival and departure.
• tile — a Map Tile file stamped into the room's cells. cellsWide/cellsTall must match the tile.
• exits — doors to other rooms (to), other floors (toFloor), or the outside world (toLocation). locked/hidden/requires live here.
• monsters, treasure, discovery — references to real files: creatures, equipment and consumables (or a loot table for big hauls), and lore. Never author monsters that do not exist as files; retarget or add files instead.
• gmNotes — what actually happens here, what it hides, what it costs. GM-facing; never read aloud.

Author teaching beats deliberately. Two that recur across the examples: a locked door whose key sits exactly one room away (teaches exploration reward), and a hidden vent or service tunnel that makes the main fight optional (teaches that the map itself is an asset).

Map tiles

Two example tile sets ship with the system, both in /Dungeons/Map Tiles/:

• The Underworks set — caverns, tunnels, fungus-lit shrines and flooded chambers. Natural interiors, sluice water, old Spire foundations.
• The station/derelict set — docking airlock, crew cabins, med bay, cargo hold, hot reactor room, hull breach, server sanctum, observation deck, plus east–west and north–south corridor doorway stamps. Steel, teal emergency light, frost and vacuum.

The conventions matter more than either set's art: room tiles are sealed rectangles — walls flush to all four frame edges, no doors, no margin — because they are stamped edge-to-edge into the floor grid. Doorway stamps are the exception: small passage pieces laid over shared walls, carrying the openings room tiles must not. Every new tile rethemes cleanly as long as those two rules hold. Art prompting, traceability, and the failure modes are covered in the Dungeon Guide's "Prompting the Map Art" chapter — follow it before generating a set, and set each tile's belongsTo to the dungeon it ships with.

Linking the floor into the world

• parentLocation — the place this floor is inside. A dungeon is always an interior of something on the world map.
• toLocation exits — the way out; the GM hands the party back to that location.
• toFloor exits — stairs to another dungeon file (another level of the same hulk, say). Build multi-level sites as separate dungeon files joined by stair exits, not as one oversized floor.

Where it stops

The Deep Delve System covers the deep sub-level chains beneath the city — escalating depth, delve percent, recovery runs. Do not double-model: a delve file drives the expedition structure, dungeon files are the walkable interiors encountered along the way. When a delve needs a room-by-room interior, give it a dungeon; when it needs a depth track, leave it a delve.

Checklist before you call it done

1. Every room's tile exists, matches the room's cell size, and its belongsTo points at this dungeon.
2. Every to exit lands on a real room id; every toFloor/toLocation points at a real file.
3. Monsters, treasure, and discoveries resolve to real files — no drafts.
4. Locked doors are answered one room away; hidden routes reward the curious.
5. Play state is fresh: entrance discovered, nothing cleared, currentRoomId at the entrance.
6. The two examples — <@lab-floor-scaffold-example.dungeon> and <@orbital-derelict-example.dungeon> — are the calibration point for scale, density, and voice.