Dungeon Shorthand Sample

I was asked to come up with an example of the dungeon shorthand technique. It took awhile to find a good text sample to use. I wanted something short, an epigram, but with at least a little punctuation to make it interesting.

What I settled on was something from an old episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show:

A little song,
A little dance,
A little seltzer
down your pants.

Not really sure what the typography was meant to look like, since it was spoken in dialogue, but I went with what seemed reasonable and would create a reasonably compact dungeon. Creating a dungeon map on a tablet is still kind of problematic for me, but I think this image will be readable.

Features worthy of note:

1. One-letter words make good corridor markers.

2. Since the letter A represents an exit up, and three lines of the poem begin the same way, we have three stairs entering this level into three separate corridors.

3. To distinguish upstairs from downstairs, I used dotted lines around the latter.

4. Words that begin with D have staircases that lead up into the room. That made this dungeon have a split level, with the first two lines being a lower sublevel than the last two lines, and the word "dance" as the connection point.

(Correction: Actually, only two rooms are on a lower sublevel. But the third word on the second line is still the connection point between the two sections.)

5. Spare exits were connected to the closest spare exit on another room. This helped connect the rooms in each "line"..

6. There were a couple extra exits with no natural connection, so these were left open as possible connections to other levels or sublevels.