Recently in my homebrew 5e sandbox campaign, Alabamia, one of my players ended up like this:

Falling 60′, breaking all your bones, dragged off by goblins and eaten alive, alone in a pitch black hole in the ground . . .

That’s what it’s all about, people. 

That’s why we lace up the cleats every Friday night.

And I would like to think that this particular event was facilitated by a technique I’ve committed myself to using. Shall I give this technique a name? I shall.

Exploring by Torchlight

Low-light vision? No.

Darkvision? NO.

Mundane light sources that can project light outside a 30′ radius? Z E R O.

Light as a cantrip???

You’ve got torches and candles, and that’s what’s in your toolkit starting out.

Now then, we you present an area, you’re generally looking at a map. The map is usually gridded off. You will talk in terms of measurement: 20′, square, 10 more feet.

Instead, describe the area in terms of what you can see with the torch:

• Stuff toward the edge of your light is dim and indistinct
• You don’t know the measurements of rooms
• It’s hard to focus on several things at once

If you’re outside a corridor, in an area of any reasonable size, you have:

Three basic navigational choices:

• Follow the left hand wall
• Venture forward into the darkness
• Follow the right hand wall

Then, looking at your map, present objects as they come into the field of view.

For anything detailed . . .

You’ve got to bring that torch right up on it.

Want to read an inscription or figure out what’s going on in a mosaic? You need to be able to reach out and touch it.

I don’t really care if that’s realistic. It might or might not be. But underworld darkness can be, and is in my campaign, different. (That’s also the reason that each torch consumes an inventory slot in my game; darkness weighs down light-threats.)

Furthermore, implementing this idea means you can focus on one thing at a time. Everything else is too dim or indistinct to make out right now. If you’ve got a lot of players at your table, big bonus.

Players can miss “obvious” stuff now.

My players: I know you don’t read this, but go away anyway.

In my game last night, I was using the “map” hastily scribbled on the right page, which I’d done during lunchbreak that day.

If you were to draw out the map of the main dungeon area they were exploring, there is no way they would miss any content. It’s not a navigational challenge, on paper. But presenting it by torchlight changed the game.

Check out the bottom-right of that image. The boxes with “L”, “C”, and “R” represent what they’ll find if they hug the left hand wall, go into the central darkness, or hug the right hand wall.

Likely, the players don’t recall exactly what they did. And a week from now, they might get back out into this relatively small open area and have no idea which way to go.

But what if you want characters to notice something that’s not right in front of their faces?

Dungeon Highlighters

I had in mind when writing this dungeon that, from a certain vantage point, sneaky characters would be able to look down from above and see a couple crouching goblins. But the goblins don’t need light; they hang out in the dark; and the distance is too great for torchlight to illuminate.

I realized this as I was about to present the area; so I said there was some phosphorescent fungus down there that illuminated the outline of a some vaguely humanoid figures.

Videogames do “dungeon highlighting” pretty frequently. Like in Dark Souls:

Items you can pick up all have a glow that you can see from a great distance. It works as temptation, guidance, and puzzle.

In dungeons, of course, you can highlight stuff however you want: torches burning in sconces, eternal chthonic flames, lava windows, bioluminescent creatures, magical energy flows, underfireflies, whatever.