Make a Burrow
CROSS SECTION VIEW. TRIANGLES. LIST OF VERBS. DECONSTRUCTING THE FIVE ROOM DUNGEON.
Draw the rest of the owl.
PRINCIPLES
Whenever populating a burrow, consider the following premises:
EVERY BURROW IS BOT1 HELL. Death, insanity, Abyssals. This may be your grave; entering a burrow is dread.
EVERY WAY IS DOWN. To the depths. And back up again.
ENTROPY. The one truth. Broken pipes, rusted cables, crumbled walls.
TELEGRAPH THEN LET GO. Expose only the problems to be solved, then let them find any solution.
ATTRITION. No easy rooms. Relentless dangers. Body Parts are to be used.
WEIRD. The Creators are unfathomable. Don't abide to logic.
REWARD BOLD BOTS. The depths hold the biggest dangers and the biggest rewards.
MAPPING YOUR BURROW
This is a step by step suggestion for quickly creating a blueprint on a burrow. Your burrow must go down, so instead of a top down view, use a vertical cross section.
ONE. Start by drawing your terrain up above in your paper. Consider if this is a duny terrain, or flat, or a steep incline.
This dungeon will be on a crater, so small incline.
TWO. Mark a point on the terrain, and draw a triangle starting from it. The weirder the better.
Let's do one corner all the way down and another to the side of it.
THREE. From one of the sides, make another triangle. The bigger the burrow, the more triangles you draw.
We will add three extra triangles for a relatively small burrow with six rooms.
FOUR. With this, you have your rooms (corners) and your connections between them (lines). Do their position give you any ideas?
Not all connections need to be corridors or long halls, nor all rooms isolated. We will make Room 3 into a Observation Room over above, and erase the path between 2 and 3 to segregate the different paths even more.
FIVE. Now you will need to populate these rooms. Use the Tables to help, but in general, consider burrows to work in five different levels, each of them with any number of rooms. Then, try to apply any of the directions below to the levels. Pick one or more verbs in each:
Tip: start by Level 2 and 3! They will define your burrow by setting its situation and why it is not a simple one.
Level 1 - The Entrance: Explain, Foreshadow, Contextualize, Collect a Toll, Telegraph, Teach, Show
Level 2 - The Problem: Turn on Power, Fix, Collect, Refuel, Reconnect, Unjam [a signal, a passage], Recover, Retrieve
Level 3 - The Complication: Save [a Bot or Resources], Fight [Bots, Dimmeds or an Abyssal], Stop [an Emergency, a Problem], Put an Obstacle, Break Down [a passage, a mechanism], Divide, Change, Reveal, Introduce, Recontextualize
Level 4 - The Climax: Solve, Confront, Choose, Accelerate, Explode, Charge Bigger Tolls, Consolidate, Converge, Sacrifice.
Level 5 - The Dreams: Rewards. But also Escape, Climb Back, Make Ignored Things Worse
Remember: relentless dangers, wear them down, present the problems, let them find the solutions. And at the end, gift them enough to be worth their troubles.
Now, let's separate these levels and choose some verbs. The Right-most triangle steep lines down reminded me of ceiling conveyors.
Room 6 can be buried down, opened by turning on the excavation. So L2 can be Turn On [the conveyor excavation]. In Room 2 or 5, the Bots can access Room 6 once the debris are cleared by the conveyor excavation claws.
3 is our observation room: you can see down at 4 and 5. So let's Divide on L3; Bots have to crank a valve on all three rooms at the same time to create the pressure to turn on the conveyor, otherwise the cranks release and slack. 3, 4 and 5 all have huge steam pressure valves doing a lot of noise.
Let's make 4 and 5 a big One Room (step 4!) but the two cranks far enough for them to be separate. We will put Confront on L4 so they have an Abyssal trying to hunt them. With this, we can use L1 to teach them the valve and foreshadow the burrow theme.
SIX. Now, take those Levels and blurry the lines.
Our Complication is already spilled into L4. Our Climax may be a ranged creature, aiming for any of the three valves and rooms.
Then let's drop some temptations in each room, with some challenges and other elements. Also the steam is cold and freezes metal instead of hot! A little weirdness.
SEVEN. The most important one: Revisit the principles and make changes!
The burrow has a cryo blast in some rooms (let's revisit and add it on all the valves), debris avalanche, dangerous climbs and an abyssal.
Adding the steam jets let to some cool and weird ideas.
They must go down, they have attrition based challenges, things are broken and not functioning, while every danger is well telegraphed ahead. The cold, Room 6 and the abyssal are all weird, and the reward is plentiful. Feels right!
Thanks, Disney.↩