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.

Dungeon Shorthand Addendum

The previous post on dungeon shorthand left out a few things: a handful of symbols and methods of connecting rooms.

The exclamation mark and question mark are used for specific kinds of doors: barred doors and secret doors. You could roll for which side a door is barred on, but I would probably just make it barred on the side opposite to the entrance to the level, especially if you were using dungeon shorthand as a way to play a solo dungeon.

An apostrophe basically functions like a change in case combined with a quote. In other words, a word like "can't" is a 30-foot square room with a 10-foot square alcove to the north, but the exit from the room is in the eastern wall of the 30-foot section, not the 10-foot alcove. There is an implied "end-quote" at the end of a word with an apostrophe in it.

This leads into the whole question of how rooms are connected.  By default, the first room in a line has one exit in the east wall, the last room in the line has one exit in the west wall, and all the rooms in the middle of the line have exits in both the east and the west walls. These exits are doorways. The rooms in the second line are not connected to those in the first line, and so on, for each line. Directional letters change this:

- If the first letter of a word is a directional letter, there is no western exit, but an exit in the indicated direction.
- If the last letter of a word is a directional letter, there is no eastern exit, but an exit in the indicated direction.
- Directional letters in the middle of a word are extra exits.

How the rooms are connected depends on what rules you set up for the theme of the dungeon before you begin translating text into a dungeon. You could  make all rooms connect directly, without corridors unless indicated by hyphens or numerals, or you could assume each room occupies a square region 50 feet to each side, or a multiple of 50 feet, so that small rooms of 20 or 30 feet have buffer space and short connecting corridors between themselves.

Extra exits connect to the closest exit of another room. One way to do this: extra exits have corridors heading in the same direction. If this corridor would cross the wall of a room, and that wall has a free exit, connect the two exits. If that wall doesn't have an exit, the corridor turns away from any close walls. If the corridor has no where left to turn., it dead-ends. If a corridor would cross another corridor, the two connect.

An ampersand indicates that two words/rooms share a wall, even if you are otherwise using buffer space around rooms. It also indicates that there are no default connections between those two rooms. If the last letter of the first word or the first letter of the second word is a directional letter, then there is a doorway. Otherwise, the rooms are isolated.

A plus sign is a potential corridor intersection, but not necessarily a four-way intersection. It works a little like an apostrophe: if you have a phrase of the form "A + B C", Room A has a corridor at least 30 feet long heading east to Room C, with a side corridor heading north to Room B. This arrangement may change based on directional letters in any of the words. Longer expressions with multiple plus signs mean four-way, five-way, or other multi-way intersections.

Hyphens, as I said are corridors. I'd probably make the hyphens five-foot wide, rather than the standard ten feet.

I suggested that a hash mark (#) should be bars or a grate, and I typically use pipes (|) as lower-height walls, asterisks as boulders, underscores as trenches or pits, carets (^) as chimneys or chutes, equal signs as ledges. But each of these could be redefined to fit a particular theme before you begin your interpretation.

Dungeon Shorthand: A Quick Reprise

I had several blog posts in the back of my mind, but I waited far too long, forgot most of what I wanted to write, and felt the rest was no longer strongly relevant. So instead, I'll respond to a recent call-out on G+, where someone recalled I had been working on ways to turning text into dungeons.

There were actually a couple such projects, with different goals, but the main one was something I called dungeon shorthand. This was both a way to represent a dungeon as text and a way to take arbitrary text and turn it into a dungeon. It wasn't necessarily about a computer program to turn text into dungeons, although that was always in my mind as a possibility. It was mainly about using the huge volume of already existing text on the internet or in ebooks as a source for dungeon designs.

I made a couple different forays into this, each time trying to simplify things while simultaneously increasing the variety of dungeons possible. Here is a summary of my current thinking on how to do it.

1. Every word is one room. Spaces and punctuation separate one room from the next.
2. The length of a word is the width of the room west to east, ten feet per character.

(Rooms are square, by default. Word length = room size. The word "room" would be a 40-foot square room.)

3. Every line of text is one "line" of rooms, arranged west to east.

(So the first word of the next line is a room placed south of the first word/room of the previous line. Poetry or text with word wrap applied to limit the line length will fill up a dungeon level in a more or less traditional manner. What you do with long lines is up to you: Apply word wrap first? Just make a dungeon that is extremely long from west to east?)

4. Every paragraph is one dungeon level.

(Paragraphs, here, mean blocks of text separated by blank lines. Position of one level compared to the next is not strict; you can line up the first room in the upper left of each level, or you can line up based on any stairs or shafts indicated in the levels.)

5. Changes in case divide rooms into sections, making rectangular or irregular rooms.

(Each string of letters in all upper case or all lower case counts as one section. In other words, think of "BIGrig" as two words/two rooms with no wall between them. By default, the south wall of each section lines up. "BIGrig" is thus a rectangular room, 30 feet north/south, 60 feet east/west. "bigROOM" would be irregular, a 30-foot square merged with a 40-foot square to the east. I picked the south wall so that the word would visually resemble the shape of the room.)

6. Some letters change default directions of a feature. If no feature is specified, it's an exit.

Letters N, S, E, W are standard compass directions. A and U are Above/Up. B and D are Below/Down.

(The only feature I've mentioned so far has been the room sections of Rule 5. By default, the second section is west of the first section: "bigROOM" is a 30-foot square followed by a 40-foot square to the west, but "tinROOM" is a 30-foot square room merged with a 40-foot square region to the north, with the western wall of each area lined up. The last letter of each section indicates the direction of the next section.

Direction letters in the middle of a word or section indicate exits, which by default are doorways. "GIANT" is a 50-foot room with an exit in the north wall. Since each letter represents ten feet of wall, you can place doorways based on counting letters before/after the direction letter. Double letters, like NN, are double-wide doorways.

If a direction letter is followed by a symbol, then the letter indicates the direction of that feature. A hash symbol/number sign represents bars or a grate, for example, so "on#ly" is a 40-foot square room with a grate in the north wall.)

7. Commas, periods, colons, and semicolons are doors, hyphens are hallways.

(No distinction is made here between types of doors, but you could assign different descriptions to each symbol: a comma could be an ordinary wooden door, a period could be an iron door, semicolons and colons are twice as thick.)

8. Numerals are also hallways, but the value of the number is the length of the hallway, in feet.

(This assumes the number isn't preceded by another symbol. "-35" is still a 35-foot hallway, but "#35" is a 35-foot long line of bars.)

9. Quoted text is treated as a group, as is any text marked with a punctuation pair.

(Like a math operation, you return to where you left off before you started interpreting what's in parentheses. So, "thinking (maybe) not" would start with an 80-foot square room with two exits in the north, with a 50-foot square room connected to the first exit and a 30-foot room connected to the second exit of the first room. The eastern exit in the 50-foot room does not necessarily lead to the 30-foot room, or to any room that follows it.)

10. Slashes represent diagonals or  45-degree turns.

(The slash in the middle of a word is treated like a case change: "X/Y" is a 10-foot square region followed by another 10-foot square region cut in half diagonally SE to NW, so the total length of the north wall is 20 feet. "/XY\" is a triangular room with a 20-foot south wall.

Using slashes in pairs rotates a square room so that it is oriented diagonally compared to the rest of the dungeon.)

Text to Dungeon

I've been working on a crazy, complicated project recently. I wanted to try a different approach to generating dungeons from snatches of text; instead of using letters as leximorphs, I wanted to go back to an old idea of using text as a seed for self-similar structures. Basically, each word can generate one room, with the length of a word defining the width of the room; the first letter defines the vertical length of the room (using the Lewis Carroll mnemonic to translate letters into numbers: ABC -> 1, DEW -> 2, JIT -> 3, FOQ -> 4, LUV -> 5, SX -> 6, MP -> 7, HK -> 8, GN -> 9, RYX -> 0.) But that same text can also be used to define distances between rooms, or describe the rooms in other ways; the same text is applied multiple times to produce elaborate results. Punctuation (which I've barely started) defines structure instead, turning a simple chain of rooms connected by corridors into mazes with connections to secret areas.

I actually had this idea years ago, when I had illusions that I was going to teach myself C++ or Java and write my own roguelike. But I never got anywhere, even with the text interpretation. So, it's kind of funny that, over the last couple days, I've been able to write enough rules so that I can create rectangles, trapezoids, and irregular rooms connected by moderately zig-zagging passageways (they can even zig-zag up or down, via staircases.)

The document is kind of longish, so I'll be adding it to my Google Docs after I develop it some more. But I plan on posting small chunks here to the blog.