Puzzle Dungeon Design: Themes & Gimmicks
Top (left to right): Zelda: Ocarina of Time eye switch (3d printed and then sculpted over and painted), Oatmeal box wizard’s tower that my son helped me make. Bottom (left to right): Ben Fox illustrations “Campfire” and “Key” from the adventure game The Door Locks Behind You, Cenza illustration “LoFi Link” also from TDLBY.
This post is part of a multi-part series on Puzzle Dungeon Design. You're starting in the right place! Part 2 is over here.
Copy & line edits for A Familiar Tower are done! I’ve been thinking a lot more about my process in creating puzzle dungeons since it’s been fresh on my mind.
I was trying to think of other designers who have made puzzle dungeons in recent years and I could only think of two besides myself: Brad Kerr, who wrote Fabian’s Atelier and deldon of the Legend of Zelda inspired, The Door Locks Behind You. I told deldon this and they responded, “Because it's hard”. I agree that it's hard to make a puzzle dungeon, but I think it can be made easier.
The world needs more puzzle dungeons. I hope that formalizing some of the steps in my own process will assist in making more. I don't think this is the only way to do things and I don't think this will fit every mold. If you're looking for more, TDLBY also has some solid advice and procedures in it on how to reason about and create puzzle dungeons.
Part 1: Themes and Gimmicks
Choose a theme
Image credit: Stu Spivack
The theme ties everything together. This is the thing the characters are going to be discovering, exploiting, and mastering.
The theme drives design and play. It helps narrow the scope of thought for your players. Not having a theme, or having too many themes, is going to dilute your dungeon into generic, hard to follow mush. Just like the perfect pizza1, less is more. Focusing on one or two themes will give you something more solid.
Pick whatever inspires you, steal concepts from your favorite video games, or roll a d20.
Example Themes:
- Mirrors
- Mud
- Time
- Night and day
- Shadows
- Parallel dimensions
- Sound
- Sight
- Teleportation
- Fire
- Water
- Air
- Gravity
- Light
- Moon
- Life
- Salt
- Size
- Metal
- Ooze
We're looking for stuff with potential for interactivity. It's stuff that can change form, modulate frequency, manipulation mass, and exploit cycles.
- Mud can be really thick and stodgy, it can be dried out and caked in basins, it can be fluid and fast moving, it can be swam through, it can be molded, it can be turned to stone.
- Shadows depend on light to survive. They can reveal as well as conceal. They can be long, short, dark, dim. They can dance! You can use your hands to make them look like other stuff.
- Fire needs fuel to live. Magic counts as fuel. It can be SO MANY cool verbs like "raging", "dying", and "smoldering". It can protect life or eradicate it. It can change things's state of matter. It can power forges.
- Ooze can squeeze into tight spaces. You can mold it. It's flammable. It eats stuff. It multiplies when you add electricity. IT'S NON-STICK.
These themes have high potential for interactivity. There's lots of different ways you can riff on these to make them feel fresh. There's some good common touchstones and tropes that GMs and players can latch on to. As Dwiz puts in on his write-up on Bullywugs:
Like, think about the sort of characteristics that an animal gets boiled down to in the mind of a child. Foxes = cunning, owls = smart, skunks = smelly, turtles = slow and has a shell. But frogs and toads? They jump, they have long sticky tongues, they eat flies, they croak, they ribbit and puff out their throat, they live in swamps, they metamorphosize, they give hives, they're poisonous, they climb trees, and they have weird eyes. These are all things that even a small child might know and think of when they hear "frog." That's a lot of good stuff to work with.
Here are some themes with low potential:
- Gravity can be made stronger or weaker. It can be reversed or it can be removed completely.
- Size can be made bigger or smaller.
- Sight. You could look at something or not look at something.
- Teleportation can be done.
You can still make a lot with a little to go on, It's just harder. You have some tighter creative constraints since the theme gives you a bit less to work with at the start. They look thin on paper, but sometimes you can stretch them in interesting ways. Take sight, for instance, the simplest trigger for interaction (looking at something) the players are assumed to be doing at all times in the dungeon. Because of this, the environment feels strange but with a hidden logic. You're no longer playing D&D, you're playing "what am I missing?" Modifications to the formula can be layered on so that when the gimmick is understood for the first time, you can near-guarantee that it'll be a satisfying, but incomplete understanding. Who counts for the trigger of 'looking or not looking?' Can scurrying rats trigger the interaction? Can insects? Portraits? Statues? Now you can build complexity on to the dungeon's base truth. The result is a slow unraveling from the inside out. All of this isn't to say you'll get this kind of extra mileage with every low potential theme. Sometimes you can't squeeze blood from a rock, or whatever.
Time is a theme that sits between low and high potential.
- Time can be slowed or sped up. It can be reversed. It can be skipped forward or back and even looped.
There's a lot of media to draw on for time, but it can still be a hard thing to realize in a tabletop adventure game. That's because time is inherently messy and movies and video games clean that stuff up with fading photographs and paradox police—although now that I think of it, the threat of paradox police in a TTRPG does sound fun.
Figure out all the ways you might manipulate your theme and dump everything into lists. You might pick a theme you're excited about only to realize once your start thinking more deeply on it that you can't make a whole dungeon out of it. That's okay. Play with it a bit in your head and mull it over some more. Just get something down. You can always tweak or change your mind later.
Create a gimmick
Zero-point Energy Field Manipulator
Gimmick (noun)
An innovative or unusual mechanical contrivance.
These are the themed tools that PCs may use to influence their environment.
How many ways can you mess with gravity and have it still feeling fresh in a tabletop adventure game?
We've already established that there are four ways to tweak gravity.
- Make it stronger.
- Make it weaker.
- Remove it.
- Reverse it.
So how does one change gravity? In Half-Life 2 you get a gun that you can use to grab heavy objects and toss them around like rag dolls. This is the gimmick that the players use to affect gravity to solve puzzles. It is a tool that can be built upon or used in different ways once you fully understand how it works. It is the "power" or the "means of manipulation" for interactivity and change in your puzzle dungeon.
BUT, it doesn't have to be an object like a gravity gun or an ocarina. It can simply be how things are. Your dungeon works a certain way. The characters explore and learn how they can use the mechanics of the world to their advantage. In The Seers Sanctum, a sight-themed puzzle dungeon, stuff is looked at or not looked at. The dungeon reacts accordingly. You could have different gravity in every dungeon room and solve puzzles by moving things and people from one room to another. Hell, you could make a capital F Five-room dungeon using every gravity manipulation we listed above AND fit in the room with normal gravity.
Gravity gimmick: gravity is different for every room in the dungeon.
Don't worry about nailing your gimmick yet. Just write it down. You'll be pruning soon.
What about all the video game gravity shenanigan puzzles? Well, video games can pan and zoom and beep and boop and show you exactly what the developers want you do see. When you flip the switch in Ocarina of Time, the camera moves to show waterfall that stopped flowing half-way across the map. Half-Life 2 showed off a revolutionary new physics engine which blew the young minds of 2005. Over here with adventure games our physics engine is—cue rainbow sparkles—collective imagination land. Our medium of information presentation is not nearly as precise. While it's still true that we have our own ways to beep and boop and pan the screen, it's just not as clear. Also video gamers need to follow the rules and thus have tighter solutions they are bound to. PCs, on the other hand, can choose instead to limbo underneath the rules. Challenges need to be flexible enough to accommodate many solutions.
Next up: challenges.
Neapolitan Style Pizza Margherita↩