Here is the first of what I hope will be the first of many opportunities to share interesting roleplaying and occasional roleplaying adjacent products with you. Today we look at one of the entries in kickstarter’s 2020 Zinequest event: Dungeons & Dilemmas: The Dungeon as Narrative Framework and Encounters as Moral Puzzles by Jesse Burneko.

What is it?

Dungeons and Dilemmas is a 54 page stapled black and white booklet that explores how to create meaningful stories and decision points using the classic rpg concept of a dungeon as the framework. It explains how to create an interesting backstory for your dungeon, how to layout and populate your dungeon to fulfill a narrative purpose, and how to use a series of such dungeons to create a campaign. In the final section of the booklet it gives an example dungeon created using these principals.

What did I like?

I enjoyed reading this supplement. The author does an excellent job of breaking down what steps one needs to go through to distinguish a dungeon with a rich, engaging, narrative from just a jumbled mess of encounters and treasure using a multi layered approach. By looking at both general elements of the dungeon as well as how to design specific individual aspects, the booklet shows how to create a dungeon which presents a cohesive whole.

I also liked that the author didn’t make this specifically a D&D book. while D&D is the most obvious use of the concepts presented, nothing stops the reader from using the supplement as is for any other system that uses a dungeon, and even systems that don’t with a looser definition of “dungeon”.

What did I dislike?

While I like the example adventure in the back of the book, I would have appreciated some more explicit explanation of the concepts in the first half of the book were applied to create the adventure. I also found that while most of the black and white illustrations in the book added to the presentation and many could be used as inspiration the maps of the example adventure were difficult to view and of a distinctly lower quality than the rest of the pictures in the booklet.

In-conclusion

I thought that this was a well written supplement. I look forward to using this method to create more intriguing and thoughtful dungeons and adventures.

---

That is all for today folks