Natural 7

Designing Citadel of the Seven-Eyed Saint

Wow, this project took a long time to finish. It's the longest anything I've ever worked on, taking about 6 months to write, layout, edit, re-write, re-layout, re-edit, and polish. Here's a tip I knew, ignored, and will probably ignore again: don't do anything in layout until the entire project is written and edited at least once.

I released the Citadel of the Seven-Eyed Saint at the beginning of October, it's PWYW on itch, you should check it out if you haven't seen it already!

Ideation & Teamwork

The original idea for this adventure came from boredom. I was sitting around, had nothing to do, and all of a sudden a spark came into my head: "The Seven-Eyed Saint". You know me and names calling me to make something (this happened with [[designing pale white crown|Pale White Crown]] and [[Designing Tongues of Verdant Fire|Tongues of Verdant Fire]]).

Maybe two hours later I had the first (of many) drafts for the Introduction. I knew that there were chaotic angels in an abbey-fortress in a mountain called Nightfinger. I knew that there would be seven floors to the abbey, and that I would try to use the number seven across other important features in the adventure.

I also knew that this would be a really big project. I wanted something to work on over multiple weeks, since the last project I worked on (Quest for the Vorpal Sword, yes, Citadel started way back then) had only taken a week to write. However, looking at the seven floors of the dungeon, I realized that I did not want to try to do this alone.

I reached out to my friend Shane a couple days after the original intro-drafting and sent him the google doc I was working on (we proceeded to write the entire adventure into that google doc instead of in markdown, which worked OK). Shane was interested in helping out with the project, so we got started right away. The initial plan was to each take a week to write a different floor, then swap floors for a second week and edit the other person's work.

After about one and a half to two months, we had all seven floors written out. Big accomplishment! Oh, but wait, did we actually remember to implement all the things this adventure promises? Eh, sort of, but we also introduced a bunch of other elements that needed to be addressed. Either way, this was a milestone in the development, and brought us to thinking more critically about the module as a usable thing.

Inspiration

A few folks have asked about the inspirations listed for the module. I'll repeat them here:

"Inspired by the works of Nikoline (Into the Many-Towered Twilight) and Joseph R. Lewis (Lovely Jade Necropolis), Heart: the City Beneath, Kobold Press’ The Scarlet Citadel, Smile 1 & 2, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Howl’s Moving Castle."

Nikoline's dungeon design inspired a lot of my personal choices when it came to enveloping the location in mystery and lore.

Joseph R Lewis' work inspired the layout.

If you've read Heart you'll know that this dungeon could seamlessly exist inside that world too.

The Scarlet Citadel was a megadungeon for 5e that stuck the idea in my head that I could make a megadungeon myself.

Smile inspired me to make a somewhat horror-themed module, with big scary creatures that can feel unbeatable (also it inspired the emotion and wish-granting aspects of the Red Goddess).

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has a weird spinning thing inside a meat dungeon. The FLDSMDFR is the Chaos Flux. Duh.

Howl's Moving Castle has like 5 minutes where Howl is a weird bird creature. That inspired the form of the chaos angels.

Dungeon Design

There were a few key principles we took into account when designing the overall structure of the dungeon, as well as individual rooms:

You'll notice that only a few rooms mention monsters other than chaos angels and zombies, and these were reserved for when normally inanimate objects needed stats. We really wanted the primary danger to be these weird monsters that will either kill you or ignore you (depending on your magical aptitude).

A lot of the room elements feature religious iconography and decorations that could feasibly exist within a fortress, abbey, or temple. And no, the structure of this dungeon does not make sense for a place that people lived within full time (there are no annotated bathrooms, the kitchen is too small, and only two annotated places for sleeping). I think there are ways to bring natural structure elements such as bathrooms and bedrooms into a dungeon in an interesting way, but I personally struggled with inspiration for creating those rooms for this adventure. Maybe lots of beds with strangling sheets would have been cooler than another altar room though.

Alongside the religious iconography, we wanted to hide lots of treasure inside those places that feature the Whispered Goddess most prominently. Putting treasure inside altars was important, hiding gemstones in the hair of her statues, and sometimes even just placing treasure at her feet was valuable. This reinforced some of the worldbuilding around who this deity is and what she wants her worshippers to do.

The room exits were an interesting design decision I made early on. I think it was because I had played through a dungeon crawl recently where every single room exit was a nondescript binary choice and that had sucked. So, we went a little overboard for the module and wrote exit descriptions for every single room.

In the end, I do actually like the exit descriptions, and I think they add value to the experience. Notably, they provided a way to mention room exits not depicted on Dyson Logos' wonderful commercially available maps. Side note: we should have just drawn our own maps, especially for a project of this size. That would have made the keying a lot clearer. Maybe a project for the future?

Speaking of room exits, we also tried to create all kinds of weird paths between floors so that there wasn't just a single way to traverse this space. You'll notice that on the first floor, there are five different ways to reach another floor. There are also two bonus entrances to the citadel itself, which my playtest group took advantage of right from the get-go. Teleporting between circles, climbing up and down pits, traversing tunnels and stairs, all of these contribute to a looping, maze-like interior to the dungeon.

Chaos and magic was similar important to make this place feel dynamic and consistently interesting. The Whispered Goddess is all about magic, so weird artifacts and rituals tied to her were important to include where we could, while reinforcing the chaotic energies flowing through this place like blood helped add to the corruptive ambiance.

I think my favorite room was one that Shane wrote: 2.4 The Duel. Two sentient weapons are caught in a battle and the PCs can help arbitrate. It's an entertaining scene, a way to get a magic weapon, and a great opportunity to reveal secrets about the citadel's history. When you're trying to design your own dungeon rooms, think about how you can mix two or three different goals into a single space like this.

Random Encounters

This part is experimental if I'm being honest. For the longest time we were working with a single list of d20 encounters, and you would roll a different sized die based on the floor you were on. The frequency of rolls was always dependent on floor too.

Near the tail end of editing, I realized that the d20 encounters were interesting but completely irrelevant to the location. I could have used them with any old dungeon and been happy. That's fine in general, but for this adventure I wanted the encounters to feel like they were specific and useful to the space they happened in.

Thus, I re-worked the d20 table into a d6 "evolution" table. Roll a d6 when you want an encounter, then read across the columns based on floor number. On less dangerous floors, you get lesser results (just a bit of goo, only a couple zombies, etc.). On more dangerous floors, you get more impressive results (the goo is also a gelatinous cube, the zombies have a leader, etc.). This creates two situations: evolving encounter results that change over time and can be re-used for interesting effects, and it presents encounters that feel connected to the space they happen in.

In addition to the d6 table, there is a secondary table given as bullet points to help you decide if you want to modify the pacing of faction threats. I liked making these optional, because placing abstract faction activity on an encounter table is usually a bad idea (it can eliminate player agency if over-used). This was kind of the motto for the entire module: here are some optional tools you can use to create the experience you are looking for.

Dramatic Personae

There are a lot of named entities in this adventure, and not all of them made it to the Dramatis Personae list (spacing, and importance). I enjoyed making this list for two reasons.

The first is obvious: it gives the reader an idea of how many entities are inside this dungeon to talk with or fight. With the accompanying room references, the reader can get a sneak peak of where these characters are and what they're doing.

The second is less obvious: it gave me a way to decide how similar all the names were. There is a quote that I first heard from George R. R. Martin about using different starting letters for every character in your story. Whelp, we ran out of (the good) letters. The only letters not represented in this list are X, E, I and Y. The letters we had to double up on include R, F, and G. That's not too bad, but I do think Reyner or Felyna could have had names beginning with E or Y. Something like Yasmin or Elion might have worked.

Do names actually matter in these adventures? Depends on your perspective. Clearly I think they matter, and the initial letters (plus any alliteration) also matter. I find that if you can like the starting letter to the character's vibe in some way, it can help create a subconscious link in my player's minds. This worked pretty well when I wrote a short story, The Rogue, and so I tried it again here.

It's also important that a name feels pronounceable. Low syllable counts for names you want folks to remember and say aloud. Simple word construction helps too ("filth" is a hard word to pronounce over and over again, whereas "rain" is pretty easy). There are times when making a name more challenging to pronounce is useful though, for example when you want to portray a naming convention based on another language or you want to show a character as really ancient and powerful. A name like "Gwaedraig" tells you that this entity is old and weird.

Factions & NPCs

All of the factions have a table in the back of the book with 20 true facts about them. You may wonder why we didn't just write those 20 facts in paragraph form. The reason is because I found that having a list of information can make it easier for a GM to provide that information to their players during the game.

Paragraphs can be fun to read between sessions, but trying to parse them at the table can lead to a stutter in the narrative. I prefer jumping right in with an actionable statement like "Oh, uhm, I think this duergar you met can also tell you that the Gloomborn came into the citadel through a tunnel on the bottom floor."

Because there are 20 facts, it makes a nice rollable table if you don't want to skim the list for something immediately relevant.

Actually writing the 20 facts wasn't as hard as you might think. The first 10 or 15 come pretty quick if you understand the faction already. For example, these tables were written after the entire adventure was written, so we had a solid idea of who everybody was. If you try to write up the facts beforehand, it might prove challenging to keep generating new information. On the other hand, I would encourage you to try, because you can develop some very cool insights about your factions this way.

"Hmm... what else would someone want to know about these guys? Maybe what their holy symbol looks like? Or, oh, what if they have a banner that they carry everywhere they go, and it's a sacred thing!"

Your facts can be as simple as a statement of what the faction is doing. "This character is playing checkers at all times." That's a true, and surprisingly informative, fact!

As a side note, writing the Caverns 'Neath Nightfinger page was a last-minute addition to fill an empty page. Crazily, it's become one of my favorite pages in the whole book because of the capacity for interesting adventures it presents. I think you could run an entire campaign with just that page as your starting inspiration, and I'm considering doing so in the distant future.

Layout

I did the layout early on, before our first round of edits. The final structure of the PDF matches the early version for the most part, but I added several flourishes when I polished it all up: read-aloud text boxes, a simple page border, slices of maps for easy reference, and some pop-out text that gives some insight into what's really going on. Oh, and I changed the fonts around for the room headers like 100 times. It was shockingly difficult to make a decision about what looked nice and felt readable. I'm not knowledgeable about typeface histories, and I don't yet care enough to learn. I pick based on vibes and readability alone.

I wish I was better at using a baseline grid, but I'm not, and so this project doesn't have one. It was really important to me to be able to tweak line spacing in order to fit everything in a tight space, and that meant smaller values than paragraph leading supplied. However, I endeavor to use a baseline grid from now on.

What else to say about layout? It sort of all fell into place as I went along. Again, I took Joseph R. Lewis' work as a basis for the structure, then modified things to fit my style. I tried to maintain white space where I could and carefully manage paragraph breaks for readability. Does the layout feel too densely packed? Probably yes in some places. Does it feel pretty readable in most places? Yes, definitely.

I guess it's relevant to say that we never really intended for this to be a printed module, so the layout is purely for digital enjoyment (lots of linked page references). However, if you were to print this at home or at a place like Staples, I recommend using ring binding to account for the inner margin and to let the book lay flat on your desk.

Final Thoughts

We took a look at how the ideas for the adventure came to fruition, what fiction inspired those ideas, what principles we kept in mind during dungeon design, what goes into an evolving random encounter table, why names might matter, and how layout drives me crazy.

I hope you get the chance to check out Citadel of the Seven-Eyed Saint. If you run some of the adventure, I invite you to send a message on the itch page to tell us how it went!

Hoping these design posts give you an idea of how you can design your own adventures for tabletop games.

As always, thanks for reading!

Things on my radar: