Blurb: I listen to podcasts, some of which often throw out a game design ‘nugget’. If I find a nugget interesting, I think I’m going to put a pin in it and post it here. Consolidated List

#6 Dungeons & Dreamboats (what else is a Dungeon?)

Bastionland Podcast – Season 6, Episode 2 – Amanda Lee Franck

This episode threw up lots of game design nuggets, this is one of them. 

Chris McDowall briefly noted that Amanda Lee Franck had made three adventures on boats. 

The game design idea: anything can serve as a “dungeon” so long as it constrains the adventurers’ position to a fixed set of navigable locations. A boat is a ‘dungeon’, albeit a floating one. A cruise ship is just a floating/moving hotel that you can’t get off. In fact, a boat is more constrained than a dungeon as because, as a general rule the space outside the ‘boat dungeon’ is a sort of null space, a watery desert. Normally outside a dungeon is at least explorable terrain. 

With this in mind, let’s image what other constrained spaces could serve as “dungeons” – submarine, train, plane, that cool network of underwater tunnels in 1983 Jaws 3-D, (in fact this is a crazy dungeon where stone is replaced by seawater!), a strip mall, stadium, a cinema (1985 film Demons anyone?), jail, school, spaceship, subway, space station, Towering inferno, funfair, etc. 

PS – While we are at it, we should probably acknowledge that every adventure format in TTRPGs/D&D is a point crawl. Dungeons are point crawls if you consider the connective passages to also be ‘nodes’ in the point crawl. Hex Crawls are point crawls where every node has 6 exits that lead to another node (if you exclude any terminal edge hexes). So … everything is a ‘dungeon’ when navigation choice is (and/or encounters are) quantized. 

Summary, once you recognize that the classic and successful ‘dungeon’ format is just a constrained space with a finite number of linked locations, then other constrained spaces might occur to you to use as adventure locations.  

That’s it. 

#PodcastTaughtMeWhat

Blurb: I listen to podcasts, some of which often throw out a game design ‘nugget’. If I find a nugget interesting, I think I’m going to put a pin in it and post it here.  Consolidated List

#5 Make Drawings & Descriptions additive

Bastionland Podcast – Season 6, Episode 2 – Amanda Lee Franck

This episode threw up lots of game design nuggets, this is one of them. 

The game design idea: When possible, a drawing and description of the same things should contain different information. Try not to describe information about a thing if that information is already present in the drawing. Or, in reverse, when faced with text, what can you draw that adds to the text.

Red is less good than green because in the red example the text/ drawing substantially replicate each other 

Amanda Lee Franck discussed with Chris McDowall how Amanda tries wherever possible to make drawings/illustrations that add to the description text (that is provides new/more information), rather than simply trying to faithfully reflect the text as an image. In the example that Amanda gave on the podcast (I believe this was with reference to Zedeck Siew‘s work) an illustration of a boat gave size/scale of the boat, but that this size/scale was not contained in the descriptive text of the boat.  

I think this is a neat idea, as it goes to the point of what is the purpose of a drawing if it only seeks to re-render the text in a visual form. 

Summary, make drawings that add to the descriptive text, or write text that does not simply describe the drawing. 

That’s it. 

#PodcastTaughtMeWhat

Blurb: I listen to podcasts, some of which often throw out a game design ‘nugget’. If I find a nugget interesting, I think I’m going to put a pin in it and post it here. Consolidated List

#4 Taking the Pith (keep it short)

Between Two Cairns – Warped Beyond Recognition – 6 Nov 2025, S4 E10

The game design idea: There is power in a  concise, pithy description, or as Clayton Notestine said in the podcast:

“The more you say, the more you put on a page, the less important all those pieces become“

There’s no good reason, in fact it could be a burden, to tell the GM things that don’t really matter or that do not help to evoke a scene. As a general rule, “the walls are made of grey, hard, speckly stone” is not that overly interesting or helpful.

You might also wish to listen to Tod from As If Productions, who had something to say about overwriting and so overloading the GM:

On Overwriting, with apologies to Ms. Engle (3m 54s)*

I said more about this topic here, but wanted to capture this in this ‘Podcast Taught Me What’ series. 

Summary, help the GM out by carefully curating the information into things that matter or add flavor. 

That’s it. 

#PodcastTaughtMeWhat

Blurb: I listen to podcasts, some of which often throw out a game design ‘nugget’. If I find a nugget interesting, I think I’m going to put a pin in it and post it here. Consolidated List

#3 Narrative Abhors a Vacuum (~ missing link meets narrative vacuum)

Bastionland Podcast – Season 6, Episode 2 – Amanda Lee Franck

This episode threw up lots of game design nuggets, which I may cover in separate posts. But, for me this was the biggie: 

The game design idea: Missing link meets narrative vacuum. In essence, leave space (creative oxygen) in your adventures. Allow the GM to assemble their own ‘synaptogeneic jigsaw’ from the adventure scaffold you write. That is, the human brain strives to make sense of any situation, and given enough freedom will attempt to make sense of any set of disparate facts. In games of make-believe, the resultant links/connections can be unexpected and delightful.  

Amanda Lee Franck and Chris McDowall discuss the benefits of this approach. It invites the GM to make sense of the adventure from the parts the writer provides. In that way each GM makes their own unique missing links to the adventure scaffold provided by the writer, i.e. filling the information vacuum with narrative. Those links/connections will be those that make most sense to the GM, or provide the most fun or enjoyment. This invites the GM to be part of the creative process, and if nothing else allows them to better understand/assimilate/remember the adventure and to be able to run/communicate it effectively at the table. 

Of course, Amanda and Chris  go on to discuss that doing this is not necessary an easy thing to do. But for sure, not joining up all the ‘dots’ of the adventure is a good starting place. 

Summary, less is often more, don’t try to fix everything down, allow the adventure to have some narrative flex. Be brave, leave gaps. 

That’s it. 

#PodcastTaughtMeWhat

Blurb: I listen to podcasts, some of which often throw out a game design ‘nugget’. If I find a nugget interesting, I think I’m going to put a pin in it and post it here. Consolidated List

#2 Thoughtful Randomness (Random with Purpose)

Between Two Cairns – Beneath the Muckfort – 20 Nov S4 E12

The game design idea: Randomness is not in of itself a virtue. For example, an encounter location with ‘2D6  goblins’, without some reason/context*, would appear to be just extra GM workload without much ‘sauce’. Why not just go with 7 goblins at this location?

This differs from a ‘random encounter table’ where it make senses to have entries like ‘2D6 goblins’. Otherwise goblins when encountered randomly would always be encountered in groups of fixed size. Likewise randomness of this kind would seem appropriate in procedural adventures where all encounters are essentially random encounters. 

* = perhaps the thought/context/reason is that there are 12 minus 2D6 goblins at this location and the balance of the goblins are in another location? That could be fun/interesting. Or, there are 2 goblins at this location unless the goblins have been alerted to the PC’s presence, in which case there are nD6 goblins at the location where ‘n’ depends on how many turns it takes for the PCs to reach the location as it’s being actively re-enforced etc. 

To be clear I don’t think this a contradiction to Podcast Taught Me What? | #1 Fixed Random Encounters, where it could be interesting to randomly generate the type of encounter at a location.

Summary, randomness is fun when if freshens things up (especially for the GM), but thoughtless/mundane/reasonless randomness can be just extra administrative/cognitive load on the GM.  

That’s it. 

#PodcastTaughtMeWhat

Blurb: I listen to podcasts, some of which often throw out a game design ‘nugget’. If I find a nugget interesting, I think I’m going to put a pin in it and post it here. Consolidated List

#1 Fixed Random Encounter

Between Two Cairns – BSOLO Ghost of Lion Castle – 13 Nov S4 E11

The game design idea: Instead of populating an adventure location with a set encounter, consider having that ‘set encounter’ be generated/selected randomly in play at the table.

To be clear this is not the same thing as a ‘random encounter’, because those may or may not happen. This encounter is happening, but what is happening is determined during play. 

Of course, this is not an overt recommendation to go full 100% procedural (not that I’m against procedural adventures, quite the opposite). It’s just a pinch of spice. 

That’s it. 

Edit: My original post (reproduced below) suffered from a bit of ‘mission creep’ – so I decided to edit the post down to be a bit more pithy (above).

(the older longer post): 

The idea is to have an event/encounter happen, but where the nature of the event/encounter is random. So, not a normal random encounter (i.e. one that might or might not happen), but an event/encounter that will happen, but where the type of event/encounter that will happen is randomly generated.

So perhaps there is a room with a hole in the floor, and  … [[ roll on random event/encounter table ]].

e.g. D10
1. The hole emits an extremely strong magnetic field 
2. The fishing tentacle of a creature several rooms away waits to grope out
3. It’s a portable hole to exit the adventure 
4. It’s a mobile hole of devouring 
5. It’s a geyser, time it right and you can swim to  … 
6. It’s a meat chute packed with a near endless supply of unliving humanoids  
7. From it is a strong air draft capable of lifting a person off the ground 
8. It’s not a hole, it just looks like one – it’s a pressure plate for a trap 
9. It’s a drain, a big one … that can’t be good? 
10. Forget the orcs’ toilet, 6 orcs were gambling at a table drinking grog :O\

Ok, I got carried away there and not even in a particularly good way – the random table could just be your dungeon’s standard random encounter table, but where there is always a encounter at this location, perhaps because it the only source of reliable drinking water in the dungeon/forest etc.

I have little doubt this idea has been done elsewhere in published adventures, but I think there is something interesting in this idea and I just want to put a pin in it. I suppose it speaks to my ‘procedural’ sensibilities (to keep it fresh for the GM), but in this case without having to have the whole dungeon be procedural.   

#PodcastTaughtMeWhat