Analysis of The Five Room Dungeon

When I was in school, English teachers preached the five-paragraph essay. It was a formulaic means to help students understand one potential layout that could be broadly applied across many writing formats. It was particularly taught to support students learning to write persuasive essays. The format was neither engaging, or original, but it provide a framework to help students get started. The five room dungeon is just that, a flexible framework to help people get started. In today’s crawl, we’ll be looking at the five room dungeon and ways you can use it and subvert it to improve your Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) adventures.

Fantasy map as imagined by Google Gemini.

What is the five room dungeon?

Before we get started, let’s look at what the five room dungeon actually is. I’ll be referring to this as the 5RD from here on to streamline writing and understanding.

1. Entrance and Guardian
2. Puzzle or Roleplaying Element
3. Trick, Setback, Red Herring
4. Climax (Big Battle or Conflict)
5. Reward or Plot Twist

We’ll dive into each of these elements, but it’s important to understand that the 5RD does not mean that there are literally only five rooms. or that characters need to encounter these sequentially. In fact, aside from rooms one and five, everything else can be experienced in any order!

Entrance and Guardian

Every good dungeon, or gaming session has to have some kind of hook for the players. The entrance is that starting point that sets the tone for the whole shebang. Creating immediate conflict of some sort is a cheap and easy method of building buy-in, teamwork, and investment in the theme over the overall dungeon or adventuring session.

Some excellent movie and book examples include:

• The Doors of Durin from The Fellowship of the Rings which has both a puzzle for the party and the watcher in the water there to keep an eye on things.
• The eyeball security system encountered by C-3PO and R2-D2 at Jabba’s Palace at the beginning of The Return of the Jedi.
• The spike trap that flies out of the wall at the start of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark with an impaled skeleton on it.

In each case, this sets the tone for the adventure ahead. In the case of Indiana Jones, it suggests a technological advancement, mortal danger, and ancient mysteries involved with the kinds of places he will go. For Return of the Jedi, the security systems of the Hutts are formidable and we quickly see the fortress he has created to protect himself on Tatooine replete with floor traps and ferocious beasts. For the fellowship, the doors suggest an ancient elven magic that the party believes must be solved by a wizards only to learn how clever a hobbit can be. In the moments following, the watcher attacks because of how unworldly and naive those same creatures can be. We are learning about the nature of the world and characters we will root for along the way.

Your entrance and guardian needs to set this same kind of tone for your adventure. What are you trying to sell? Are your players going to disrupt an ancient lizard cult? Maybe there is a rip in space and time itself that has brought the party to a wholly unfamiliar location with technological wonders beyond their comprehension. Or, maybe like Ravenloft, Barovia breeds a haunting paranoia with fog and untrustworthy superstitious people.

Puzzle or Roleplaying Element

One of the elements that characterizes adventures from the 1970s and 80s is the prevalence of dangerous traps and NPCs with their own agendas. Even clever players may still spring a trap. Think about our prior example of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy knows he must match the weight of the golden statue on the pedestal and makes a very close guess, but it’s not perfect and he must run from a boulder that crashes through the temple chasing him back toward the entrance.

A good puzzle should provide the players with an opportunity to explore both their own intellectual skills and to figure out something related to the theme of your dungeon or session. If it’s a cult, perhaps there is a wall of different masks that represent different dieties. Your players may need to rank those masks on pegs on another side of the room to open a door, or avoid the room from filling with a poisonous gas.

You can also have your players encounter a dungeon denizen. That may be an NPC, or a creature with whom the party can negotiate if they opt not to attack on sight. This kind of roleplaying interaction is essential to keep your non-combat and charismatic characters critical to plot you’re building. The victory of a roleplaying element may provide players with a key insight into one of the later rooms or about the overall adventure path.

The mix of combat and non-combat elements within your dungeon or gaming session will keep your players engaged in different kinds of problem-solving which creates a sleight-of-hand as we head to the next room.

Trick, Setback, or Red Herring

I’m on a roll with Raiders of the Lost Ark here, so let’s examine what happens after that boulder chases Indy to the pit. He has a setback because he falls and may drop the golden statue. His companion begs for the idol and promises to toss him the rope. Indy, recognizing his peril decides to trust a young Alfred Molina and tosses the idol only to be left behind. Indy, the intrepid archeologist that he is, manages to get across the chasm and finds Molina’s dead body not much further away.

Players must feel off balance in several ways to continue to take their peril seriously. Remember, that particularly in low-level DCC adventures your peasants at level 0 only emerge as fledgling adventurers who remain incredibly fragile. Hard won success then met with a trick or setback will continue to keep the tension in your dungeon or gaming session going long after the session is over!

In Return of the Jedi, we learn that Luke and his friends have plotted for a long time to infiltrate Jabba’s palace in order to free their friend Han Solo from his carbonite prison. Leia is able to free him, but the noise of the carbonite block’s ejection wakes the guards, alerts Jabba, and once they are satisfied that the conspirators have all revealed themselves, Jabba captures them both.

In the case of Indiana Jones, we get a trick from an NPC to separate a hard-won reward from it’s owner. In Jedi, we get a setback with the capture of Leia and Han during the failed escape attempt. What about a red herring though?

Anything that can throw your players and characters off the plot here is useful. It may cost them time, or create disadvantage at just the right time. Perhaps your dungeon will feature a creature they’ve never encountered before. They find references that it is susceptible to fire. When the big showdown comes, they pull out torches and begin swinging them at the creature who promptly eats the torches and becomes a fire-breathing version of itself. The clue they found mislead them!

Continuing our movie analogies, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, we spend most of the film believing that the threat to Harry and his friends is from escaped inmate Sirius Black. We only find out later that it was Peter Pettigrew who had been with them in plain sight all along as Scabbers.

Climax (Big Battle or Conflict)

Every good session and dungeon needs a climax to bring the central conflict to a head. In the case of our earlier example with a dungeon that is protected by a lizard worshiping cult, we should have some kind of showdown with the leader of the cult or maybe we have to fight a summoned lizard demon.

This does not always have to be a fight, though, I will admit that players are generally expecting their climax to utilize the combat skills and equipment they’ve accumulated as a part of their questing.

Let’s return to Raiders of the Lost Ark and see what we can learn from the opening scene there. In fact, Raiders gives use the 5RD several times throughout the movie. It’s part of the reason it is so memorable. As Indy emerges from temple he is greeted by his old nemesis Rene Belloq who steals the golden statue from Indy and then pursues him. In this case, we see our hero lose the climax.

This is a great lesson for subverting the 5RD. Players expect that we’ll provide them with challenges they can overcome and sometimes, it’s the failure that leads to the better story. For Indy, it leads him to Nepal to meet up with Marion, his love interest, and then to Cairo for his other lifelong sidekick Sallah. There is power in failure as well because it creates additional motivation.

You have to have the climax for your players and party to deal with though or it won’t feel like a complete session. What makes up a good climax?

• It should follow up on something the party learned earlier.
• It should present the largest and most time-consuming challenge.
• Every single player around the table should be actively engaged in its resolution.
• No other singular encounter should match the complexity and peril of the climax.

Reward or Plot Twist

Back to Indy we go… Indy is able to escape via a dramatic float plane rescue as he is pursued by both Nazis and natives through the jungle. Once back in the United States, he learns about the Nazi excavations at Tanis in Egypt with a mention of his mentor (and Marion’s father). He is recruited immediately because of his work to go recover the Ark.

In failure and escape, we learn some additional information that propels the story forward, adds depth to the narrative, and sets the goal for the rest of the adventure.

If you’re designing a Level 0 funnel for your players, the Raiders of the Lost Ark format is indispensable because you need to have strong ties to the setting and world to drive action forward with the rabble that will emerge from your funnel.

In our example of the Lizard cult, we may recover a lost text core to the cult’s beliefs that suggests where other religious sites may be so there’s something going on there.

I won’t give away the plot twist ending to one of Hollywood's best plot twist endings…but if you want one of the best executed versions of this — go and see The Usual Suspects. It’s a masterclass in how you can create a villain.

A less well executed version would be something like Iron Man 3 where we believe the Mandarin is pulling the strings behind the scenes only to find out that he was a paid actor meant to distract Tony Stark right from the start.

So, what does all of this end up looking like in practice?

A DCC Case Study — DCC #101 The Veiled Vaults of the Onyx Queen

DCC #101 The Veiled Vaults of the Onyx Queen (DCC101 hereafter) is a module created by Marzio Muscedere and published by Goodman Games. This adventure starts in media res, or in the middle of the action, with characters awakening in a opulent room when suddenly cultists in purple robes and silver masks. These are the death cultists of the corpse god.

Right off the bat we have satisfied Room 1 — Entrance and Guardian. In this case, we have no buildup at all. We’re thrown right into an unfamiliar setting with mysterious cultists bearing down on the players within the first few paragraphs of the opening text. Muscadere forces players to confront the myriad of questions that abound like where are we? Who are these cultists? What do they want? What are my escape options? Who are these other people with me?

Players are encouraged to explore this opulent, yet sorrowful, palace. At times a mysterious voice calls out to lawful aligned characters asking for help. There are several small puzzles for the party to encounter, but the first puzzle that would really meet the definition of what we’re looking for here with the Room 2 — Puzzle or Roleplaying Element is in the vault of the philosopher kings.

Players encounter a strange engraving (I am intentionally not spoiling anything in this overview, so the vagueness is intentional) that they will need to figure out in order to proceed to the next stage of their adventure. The puzzle is multifaceted and will require not only roleplay success, but also out of character and group dynamics amongst the players themselves. To me, this is one of the highlights of this particular adventure and Muscedere did a wonderful job recreating the mood of an H.P. Lovecraft short story with the setting and puzzles like this one.

Room 3 — Trick, Setback, or Red Herring comes in the Vault of the Virgin Queen. To this point, players have been hearing a voice, but it’s unclear from where it comes. It’s entirely plausible that the Virgin Queen entombed in a beautiful delicate glass sarcophagus is the source of this voice. Players attempting to open this case will face one of the largest setbacks in the dungeon if they should fail. It is enticing, and it is possible for success by the players, but the room is set up in such a way to lull players and characters into a sense of calm and respite and then creates a hazardous set of outcomes should anything go wrong in this room!

Throughout the adventure, players are given clues about who the cult worships. It is the corpse god and there is a dark ritual that is taking place. Players are rewarded throughout their exploration with opportunities to test themselves against various challenges in combat and non-combat ways. They are given some fairly powerful gear depending on how thorough their explorations are. This is all pretty standard DCC funnel practices, but we lead up to Room 4 — The Climax (Big Battle or Conflict) and the players will need to confront a massively complex engagement with the corpse god’s followers.

This is one of the meatier funnel climaxes I’ve read through, so a failure to do a solid job throughout the preceding exploration could leave players at a huge disadvantage here. Luckily, peasants are always available for restocks in DCC modules! This one is no different, so eventually the players will either give up or overcome the Room 4 conflict.

That leaves us with just one last thing Room 5 — The Reward or Plot Twist. In this case, the reward is a plot twist. A good one too! Players receive a direct and dire warning from the corpse god about their future. Like our initial discussion, this catapults the players into their campaign or the next adventure module however they wish, but they leave changed having confronted a formidable cult and a mysterious vault.

So, how many rooms are actually in this module? Well, there are 15 distinct locations to explore on just one of the levels of this module. Beyond that there are roughly another 13. So, all told this particular 5RD has roughly six times that size and scope.

You don’t need to build a session or dungeon around 5 rooms. That would be too intense, too short, and would create a strange artificiality to the adventure that your players would certainly recognize and be upset by. Instead, you want to create atmosphere, give your dungeon a sense that it exists as a real place, not just a vessel for your new knowledge of the 5RD. DCC101 is an excellent example of how to pull this off with some truly spectacular puzzle design, pacing, and atmosphere.

If you’re interested in this module, you can pick it up from the Goodman Games store!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this breakdown of the Five Room Dungeon and how it exists in both popular culture and in a DCC funnel. You now know how what elements make up the 5RD and how you can subvert it. You’re also aware of how a published module author approached this challenge putting the atmosphere and story ahead of the 5RD approach, while still effectively using it to underpin his work.