Somnambulism 101 // Dungeon Design 00110010

Dungeon Design 00110010 // A Series of Tubes

I'm a little late to this one. Didn't notice, did you? A dungeon can be a lot of things, but the grand majority of them have this one thing in common: they're one-note.

Think about it this way // dungeons are usually uniquely linear in most games. They often have only 1 goal // to reach the end, defeat the boss, save the princess, whatever. Some special dungeons might have 2. Even if a dungeon loops around itself and is rather nonlinear and skillful in its design, it might only have one way to "win". While there may be nothing wrong with this in conception, this practice, as well as a few others, often lead to dungeons that are shallow and dull.

How do we fix this? Subgoals. Bottlenecks and Subgoals.

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Some Things to Think About //

The use of "subgoals" should always be used to increase the complexity and depth of a dungeon.
Subgoals should always have congruency with the layout of the dungeon, and both should be considered at once
Use subgoals and "biomes" of a dungeon to create many unique kinds of challenges and add extra flavor to a map

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Subgoals & Bottlenecking Exploration //

Simply put, subgoals are mini-quests or objectives that a party must complete before being able to reach their final objective. "Finding the key that unlocks the door", for example. Now, this isn't the most revolutionary concept, but what matters here is the EXECUTION. Here's the defintions we'll be using in this post;

Subgoal: A goal within a dungeon that is necessarily not obvious or hidden, and that must be reached, accomplished, overcome or bypassed in some manner to find NEW CONTENT and PROGRESS within the same dungeon.
Bottleneck: A part within a dungeon that MUST be interacted with, completed, or overcome for the dungeon to be finished.

Look at this map here;

The goal of this example dungeon is to open the door at the beginning of the map that leads to the Exit, and they can only do this by going through several "bottlenecks", or by accomplishing several "subgoals".

For the players, the primary goal is of course to reach this exit, but they may not know this yet // really, they shouldn't. So, through exploration the party will eventually find their way to the intended area of the first subgoal. There may be many ways to reach this subgoal, but they MUST find this subgoal.

After the accomplishment of this subgoal // by defeating the maze and the traps in it, a new biome, or area unlocks. This allows them to enter the cave, far to the left of the map, and access the second subgoal. The second subgoal, and new area, follows a similar pattern and format. This loop repeats until the completion of the final subgoal, by which the exit will become available and the climax of the dungeon can take place.

This format allows for a wide amount of player expression and exploration, as they must travel through certain parts of the dungeon twice, and generally what would be an extremely simple [A -> B] process becomes something much more interesting. In terms of player psychology, this also means that the main goal will slowly slip from the player's minds. This inevitably creates a sort of dual narrative, where players are both engaging in the primary narrative of finding the subgoal while still entertaining the secondary narrative of finding the main goal. Consider this psychological multi-threading.

Subgoals and bottlenecks are rather important for adding both nonlinearity and structure to a dungeon, and to generally make it flow well for the players and the GM. In this example, while the map itself is rather simple, in a "real dungeon" with actual complexity, the players are likely to feel overwhelmed and paralyzed with choice.

This is why certain areas are locked before the completion of a subgoal, or some things can only be accessed from a specific location they simply can't reach yet. The goal of using these elements of design are to create a satisfying flow to the layout of a map and the contents within while still allowing players to maintain a stable head in larger maps. Effectively, we're designing maps so that they're complex and nonlinear without any of the negative baggage that comes with those.

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Player Psychology & The Nature of Goals //

Depending on the way that this framing and structure is used, you can drastically change the way that players think about the game they're playing. If your map design and challenge design are high quality they will already be thinking about the game in multiple dimensions, but including more layers to each dungeon will only make them more interesting.

If your players don't know about the main goal, or even the subgoals // only that they're "saving the princess", suddenly all of their goals and subgoals become mysteries and puzzles. Strange magical doors that can't be opened, unusual pits with something glittering at the bottom, towers with no entrances, etc. Their goal becomes to solve the mystery, and overcome the map challenge, rather than simply "exploring the dungeon". This helps them get engaged and forces them to pay attention, because the "solution to the mystery" could be around any corner.

Look at the example map again. Each area that a subgoal is in is distinct and unique // the "main area" is a large chamber with several smaller ones nearby, the first subgoal is a maze, the second subgoal is in some chambers after a large cave, and the exit is back in the main room. Each location is distinct and easily identifiable // if the party was teleported to a random part of the map, they would probably be able to tell vaguely where they were based on the map geometry and architecture alone. This is GOOD, and makes sure the environments stay interesting.

For example, let's say the party is trying to reach the top of a tower with no windows and no easily discoverable entrance. Unknown to them, the entrance is underground, behind a challenge they haven't found yet. In this context, The Tower is a new area that can only be unlocked by accomplishing the subgoal. However, the main goal is still to enter the Tower.

One potential and legal way to "solve this mystery" would be to take advantage of the explosives found in a previous area to climb the tower and blow a hole in it // perhaps not the "intended" way to solve the mystery, but indeed it still accomplishes the goal of the design.

In this PC interpretation, the subgoal was to enter the Tower, and they did so by using explosives. Now, instead of going underground and completing the challenge to reach the entrance to the tower, the party will be engaging with that part of the dungeon backwards.

A two new areas are still discovered in the solution to the subgoal // underground and the Tower, simply done in a reverse order. The dungeon was broken, but yet its structure was unaffected. This is the effect of subgoals, and the way that they interface with player psychology. To the player, the only question is how to reach their goal. How they do that is up to them, but necessarily ANY method of doing so will inevitably require some level of exploration, problem solving, skill, etc.

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Subgoals & Act Structures //

Although my blogpost about the "5 room story structure dungeon" thing has yet to be written, you'll get a taste of how I feel story structures should be done in this section here.

The use of Subgoals necessarily means that each area with a subgoal and each goal itself has a natural narrative structure. The structure is unified and contained almost entirely within the subgoal itself.

The first act is exploring the area fully, looking around, fighting monsters, collecting whatever's lying around, etc. The second act is the discovery of the "sub area" // a new location that ties deeply with the old one. The third act then is the climax and accomplishment of the subgoal, followed by progress into new goals or new areas.

Each of these acts usually engages in a specific set of mechanics in any game with a dungeon crawl // exploration, resource management, combat, whatever. It functionally guarantees some level of variety and keeps things from getting dull, as long as the designer and GM have their heads on straight. Naturally, engaging in these acts also must reveal new mysteries and bits and bobs from other subgoals as well, to make use of efficient space as well as to have a bit of that looping design that everybody likes.

Notice how, in the example map, each subgoal is connected with each other in some way. Maps that make use of subgoals should make use of intimate design conventions to keep things tight knit, and to ensure that the existence of things like landmarks and easily identifiable areas are immediately seen the players.

You can combine the consequence of this looping act structure and design it into the map itself. Keys of switches and puzzles and artifacts that interface between the segments. Side objectives and optional areas that feel flush with the map design because it's there, but it's not forcing you to be there, and it's never linear because you could just as easily walk past and ignore it. However, because the players should ideally be left in the dark about the details of the dungeon, the locations and the subgoals within, they will be "forced" to explore the dungeon to "find the bottleneck", which makes them feel more compelled to engage with all the little bits and bobs laying around.

This can help make the experience feel more deep, compelling, complex and real. Despite the fact that there are explicit bottlenecks, and content they are actually forced to play through, they will never FEEL that it's linear. The players will never notice // to them, finding the bottleneck is just a reward for exploration.

Of course, the "intended route" of a dungeon, that simply follows the lines between subgoals will typically be extremely short, shallow and boring. Lucky then, that that's NOT what the players are doing. These natural mystery created by their goals, the flow of unknowns will create an organic narrative and story structure within the map. Inevitably, the GM needs to do little more than describe the dungeon and its contents and the plot will write itself. It is emergent storytelling existent within "semi-linear content".

You can do this with everything, bottlenecking it. Environmental storytelling, foreshadowing, symbolism, countless other things that could simply exist in a space that provide value to the game world and experience. You can use this method to force players to at least see hints to the big mystery, find certain details, etc. And they will never ever notice that it was "forced". They'll even thank you for it too, because it makes the experience more fun for everybody.

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Recap & TL;DR //

When making a dungeon and ensuring that it nonlinearly loops and encourages proper exploration, use of bottlenecks and subgoals will be a strong tool in your arsenal. The simplest takeaways are these;

Unclear subgoals create mystery, which encourages exploration in optional areas.
Subgoals should be used as gateways to new content, locations, loot, information, and progress in a dungeon.
Combining subgoals and bottlenecks can force parties to engage with certain kinds of content without making it feel like they're being railroaded.
Thoughtful use of nonlinearity between subgoals can mask the linearity of subgoals even more.
Combining subgoals within each other can increase complexity, but also increase the depth.
It is important to remember that the inclusion of subgoals in a dungeon necessarily makes it significantly longer.
Use bottlenecks carefully, as overuse can make dungeons feel even more one-note than you'd want.
Experimentation is key here, as using the same formula or style of subgoals and bottlenecks will become predictable and boring.
The physical positions and layout of the map are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT when it comes to subgoals and bottlenecks.

In the future, I will write a post about Biomes, which are a major part of the subgoal and bottleneck format, however have little space in this post.

I have a game I'm designing that interacts with many of these design concepts and features.

To gain access to the current version of the rulebook, it is free to download on the game's Discord server;

https://discord.gg/cyqYQt7Cgr

Alternatively, contact me on Bluesky;

@calicovisions.bsky.social

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