Has this happened to anyone else?

Have you ever dreamed a phenomenal dungeon?

It's been a day of registering for classes and the like, but I'm still remembering parts of the dream that I had last night and how they would make a great D&D dungeon. The start of the adventure was fairly mundane: I can recall giving the signal to my sister and a couple of my friends on the edge of a baseball field, where we all got into black burglar clothes and started making our way towards something.

Here's where it got pretty crazy. Apparently, the heist that we were meant to pull off was in this crazy dungeonesque castle which was really just a massive manned tank around a gigantic octopus. Like the size of a skyscraper. A series of rope bridges connected different parts of the castle aquarium, including some that went directly over the octopus. I was trying to get into the structure through one of these bridges, but the weight of me and my gear made it sway in the high air, so I had to crawl the rest of the bridge's length on my belly until I reached a small portal where I could enter. Inside, the stone walls were damp and had algae growing on them like the inside of a fish tank.

I really want to expand on this whole idea for a dungeon and hopefully I've gotten enough written down to remember the inspirational aspects of the dream. The thing that really stayed with me was "what happens if that octopus gets mad? Utter chaos, that's what."

It's done!

It's done! Posting from a public library in the Adirondacks, here's the Red Lotus Caves of the Blind Minotaur, a One-Page dungeon (potentially?) suitable for 5-7th level characters! This is the first dungeon that I've ever made, in ANY game system, so I don't have a whole lot of experience with it, but I hope that my enthusiasm made up for it.

Enjoy!

Map done!

And here it is: The Lotus Caves of the Blind Minotaur, the first dungeon that I have ever mapped out. 12 rooms, with nearly half of them separated or disguised by illusory magic.

I hope this blows your socks off, Ben Laurence.

A strange revelation

I've been working on this weird dungeon/prison/asylum for Zak S's Secret Arneson Gift Exchange and it's much harder than I thought. I have the ideas for some encounters and rooms pieced together, but every time I get the graph paper in front of me, I suddenly freeze up and have no idea what the hell to do.

It took me until today to realize this, but I have never created a dungeon before.

The first RPG that I bought was Shadowrun 2nd edition. I know, I know, probably not the best game for a completely new player. Hell, I don't think I ever played it right. I just looked at the pretty pictures, read the fluff (which I became enamored of) and tried my best to figure out how much a 6L pistol shot really did. I'm not sure I ever figured it out. The first version of D&D that I ever ran/played was 3.5, which involved a group of pardoned prisoners fighting against a necromantic plague controlled by evil wizards; a sort of sword and sorcery Suicide Squad. In all the games I've played since then (which have been relatively few, compared to how many books and Mead notebooks I own, but more on that later) dungeons have never really been a priority.

I am super thankful for ChicagoWiz's One Page Dungeon template, precisely because it's giving me some constraints on how I want to build this sucker. Albeit, I may exceed some of these guidelines, with flavor text and similar wankery, but it feels good to have a goal. Now I just need to figure out how many rooms are a good amount and how to tie the concept of a dungeon meant to keep something in, rather than keep adventurers out together.