Words of Willow

5 Room Dungeons are a prep framework from Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips. It’s extremely lightweight, honestly to the point where it can be hard to grasp, but it has a solid basis for an objective driven adventure.

First of all, Rooms are not just rooms. They can be anything, up to and including caverns, paths in a forest, floors, or well… rooms. The important part of a room is that it is an area where something takes place, and often has an obstacle of some kind. The rooms in the core template are as follows:

• Room 1: Entrance And Guardian
• Room 2: Puzzle Or Roleplaying Challenge
• Room 3: Trick or Setback
• Room 4: Climax, Big Battle Or Conflict
• Room 5: Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist

This is a very flexible template. You can move rooms around, have two of a type of room, whatever you’d like. Johnn Four’s articles cover many, many ways different ways you can implement these ideas too. But that can be a catch 22, as it makes them hard to define.

Rooms One and Two are simply challenges. They are an obstacle that can beaten through combat, roleplay, stealth, or some other character test. (I do not like puzzles the players solve rather than their characters, and I could write about that sometime too.)

Room 3 can be another challenge or a narrative reveal, but to quote Johnn, “the room should build tension”. If it’s a narrative reveal, make it stressful for the party. If it’s a challenge, make it harder so that it forces them to burn resources.

Room 4 is your boss room. I’m not over-explaining that.

Room 5 is the weird one, you don’t want just a treasure room. It serves a couple of purposes, it can be (yes, a treasure room,) a clue to the next dungeon, a twist related to this dungeon, or even reveal a secret about your overarching plot. Room 5 is funny because it can usually take place inside room 4 as well. Which serves as a reminder:

Rooms are not physical rooms! They’re best imagined as moments in the narrative, scenes of the show. You can imagine the camera cutting into your characters after commercial break in the middle of dealing with this room’s challenge.

So I rehashed 5RDs. Let’s put this to PMD, since dungeons are kinda important to those games. I’m going to type through my own train of thought in make an adventure with 5RDs.

I’ve asked the Pokerole Discord for two details about the adventure, as a bit of inspiration for me. These are the two details I got:

• The Party has to rescue a Pokemon from a Dungeon
• There is a super shady Magikarp

First thought to me is that this Magikarp has appeared in town crying out about it’s missing son. It shouts and yells from the pond in town about how it’s son was pulled into a nearby dungeon by a rogue current and he’s too weak to help him. He offers to lead the way, and promises to pay any price (this is a lie).

The Magikarp leads the way to the dungeon, which’ll make half above, half below the water level. (Don’t worry, we aren’t going to go Water Temple with this.) This creates an interesting challenge to getting the presumably land bound players inside: the entrance has sunk below. Let’s say there’s a section above water they can access with a feral Polywag or two guarding a switch. The switch will lower the water level some and allow the party to get further inside, but they’ll have to defeat Polywag first.

I promised no water temple here, and I will keep that promise. I’ll take a look at the skill list and Athletics stands out to me. Let’s have a trap, and the trap leads to water slides. The party can make Dexerity + Athletic rolls to avoid falling into them entirely, but the Magikarp falls either way. The water slides will snake and twist as they go deeper into the dungeon, so the party will need to make more Dexterity + Athletic checks to jump between water chutes to stay together. If they really fail, they may fall into a pool deep below that’s occupied by a Sharpedo.

Here is where I want Magikarp to betray the party. Lets have there be a sealed door in a large chamber, and the switch to open it is at the end of a small water pipe. Magikarp will volunteer to swim and press it. He insists, because this switch actually floods the chamber before opening the door! He needed the party to get him this far but he reveals he’s actually a treasure hunter and wants a rare orb said to be past this door. Now the players must deal with the room flooding and Magikarp getting ahead of them in the dungeon.

The easy solution would be to make a guardian pokemon here protecting the orb, but I don’t feel like doing that. Instead, deep in this dungeon is a village of Relicanth. They’ve been living here for centuries and the orb is important to them. Magikarp tells them that the party are thieves and it turns the village against the party. The players have to make their way through the village with stealth or combat to reach the temple that obviously houses something important, situated on the far side of the village.

Magikarp has taken a hold of the orb and now we know he wanted it, it helped him evolve! What’s worse, it appears to power the glowing lights of the village and Magikarp stealing it has plunged this village into darkness. Now the party has to fight a Gyarados for the orb, but Gyarados is also just fine with escaping. If he over powers them he’ll escape and condemn this village to eternal darkness. If the players beat him, it’s up to you if the orb will still work for the Relicanth. Your hook for next time in both cases can be getting these Relicanth to a safe new home.

There you have an adventure that fits the 5RD structure. You’ve even got a hook for your next one. For this adventure, you need to prep a Polywag sheet, a Sharpedo sheet, a Relicanth sheet, and a Gyarados sheet. You can make multiple Relicanth/Polywag if you want, to give move variety. So at this point, you’re all set right?

This is the part where your players decide instead of returning home to meet this Magikarp, they want to hang out in the mountain rescue team base instead. Okay, so you have to adjust. This is why I wrote down the key points to each room. All you need to do now is remap those key points to something that fits what the party is doing.

Lets adapt this mission to the mountain. First thing I’m going to change is Magikarp isn’t at the base asking for help, another pokemon is. The rescue team there sets up search patterns and recruits the PCs to help. The PCs are going to stumble upon the dungeon by accident this time. Perhaps a cliff face cracks open due to a storm, or they investigate a hole in the ground. Whatever the case may be the enter on their own.

Originally, room one’s key points were as follows:

I don’t like those. Instead, I’m going to move Room 2 here. Those key points were:

So we’re going right into water slide territory. Maybe these aren’t water slides all the time, and a storm going on is making them like this. Or there’s a waterfall nearby that also feeds into the mountain. Either way, these natural slides play out the same way as the ones back in the first 5RD. What about Sharpedo? We can include him as part of room 2, or drop him.

We’ve swapped Room 2 to Room 1, so lets trade that back.

There could be a dungeon here, but I’m going to go with something different. I was thinking a research installation but something more PMD might be a feral “watering hole” type area. These Polywag might not be guards now, they’re instead just visiting to clean up after a busy day of crime.

What about the switch? I could drop it, but let me see… Lets go with these ferals have a certain type of badge or other identification that’s keyed to a big stone door. The ferals set it up to defend their turf from other feral groups. (You may have to do something a little more PMD themed here, but I’m usually a trainer GM lol)

Oh wait, this room’s rework came to me in an instant. Magikarp is running a cult down here, either of ferals or retgone that. He sees you enter from his secret mountain pool and turns his nearby cultists on you. In this case, I’m going to swap the flooding room trap with the “Relicanth that have been lied to and are hostile because of it” from former room 4. That brings the Relicanth back in, and maybe grab Sharpedo if you didn’t include him earlier. This’ll be a pretty draining fight so it’ll be a good setback.

I probably should have included the orb as a key point but I didn’t, and that’s okay. I think Room 4 now is chasing down the Magikarp whose got the missing pokemon as a sacrifice or something. He uses a psychic type ally to drain the power from the lost pokemon, and evolves into Gyarados (stealing from room 5). Now the players have to defeat Gyarados or the psychic type to save the lost pokemon.

We only have a smattering of points left, namely:

These can be combined handily. So the PCs defeat Gyarados, he thrashes about and puts a hole in the ceiling. this secret cult cave starts flooding! The treasure has become the lost pokemon, the PCs must grab the unconscious mon and find a way out.

While that second example is a little less verbose, hopefully it goes to show how you can take the key points that make up your 5RD and shuffle them about to make an entirely new dungeon. Theoretically you need one new sheet for the new scenario (the psychic type) but you can get away with a bot generated sheet for that, have the psychic run when Gyarados evolves, or just make up some stats on the fly, depending on your comfort level. So, we’ve talked about

• What a 5 Room Dungeon is
• Made a 5 Room Dungeon
• Shown that we can rebuild a 5 Room Dungeon in an entirely different location, in a different order of rooms, or with swapped around key points to adapt to our players being players

Hopefully this gives you a leg up in writing adventures of your own! As always, find me on the discord as the Glaceon Moderator.