Dungeon Room Descriptions

I don't know whether it's just me but I generally find room descriptions in scenarios pretty poor. This thought was highlighted when I read through the "Tower of Zenophus" scenario in the back of the Holmes D&D Ruleset. It's a decent dungeon crawl scenario which I think still holds up today (as long as you can suspend your disbelief about why and how certain rooms are populated) and which I enjoyed running a few weeks at local games shop, Distinct Gaming, over in Belper. My beef with room description is more in the format than the content. They just generally seem to be written in a fairly haphazard way that requires reading the entire description before they can be summarised for the players.

I put some real thought into the actual format I think is the best after listening to Goblin Henchman's podcast episode, 12 - Audio Dungeon | not that one, which puts forward an idea of creating a dungeon based on audio messages of dungeon dressing sent into his podcast. (His blog also has a post dedicated to the idea - Collaborative Audio Dungeon). My initial room description was around two and a half minutes so I spent quite a bit of time refining it down to a minute. And this process of refining lead me to rethink the format.

Currently I working along the following lines for my ideal room description format.

Initial Description

I want a brief description of that the characters will initially see, hear and smell on entering the room. Variations between what characters with Infravision or with a light source see need to be noted.

Detailed Description

Each objection/area within the room should be described in turn, separated by paragraphs so depending on the order the party examines the room it is easy to access descriptions of what they find.

Events likely to occur should then be detailed.


Undoubtedly I'll refine this format as I get back into writing room descriptions but I think it's a good starting point.