Not The Five Room Dungeon...

Shifting focus from "dungeon" to "adventure site"

Apr 01, 2026

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Introduction

Good day, dear reader!

One of those things that felt like a watershed moment for me in the way I like to design and run dungeons had to do with a most common piece of design advice out there for modern heroic fantasy games like D&D 5E - The five room dungeon.

It served me well for years, but in moving to an older-school version of the game, shifting focus from combat-centric to exploration-centric, it has become something I do not reach for anymore.

Here I will discuss how I used it, what I no longer like about it, and how I like to design adventure sites now.

What is it?

The three to five room dungeon is great advice when you are pumping out content every week and need to always have something to put in front of your players. There are myriad examples out there for how to do this, but the way I used it for years of running 5E was to come up with answers to the following points:

What’s the theme?
What’s the challenge?
What’s the story of this location?
How does the story of this location fit into the context of the larger game’s story?

Laying out the answers to these questions across the rooms in a way the players can discover them through play, is a very effective way to keep a 5E game going. The dungeon becomes a small suggested story.

This kind of thing can be put together the day of game, and I would keep one of these is my back pocket at all times that the players could discover and it was usually satisfying for everyone involved.

Why don’t you like it then?

My biggest problem with this is directly derived from what makes it work most of the time. When you’re playing a combat-focused heroic fantasy game where the player characters are basically super heroes, this gives the game master the ability to soak some resources form the players and setup a set piece climax battle simply. If done well, you can throw in all the elements of a short story and it really gets some zest.

The thing is, I have absolutely loved shifting the focus of the games I run from combat to exploration and this structure doesn’t scale up.

What’s I’ve noticed in shifting from a 3 to 5 room dungeon to an “adventure exploration site” is for about the same amount of effort, I can have larger and MORE interesting location for the players to interact with.

When random encounters are always on the table and not a drag on the game, when empty space builds suspense and allows for ebb to the flow, when there is some restriction on how much can be brought with and how much can be carried out, the location starts to feel more real immediately.

There’s nothing saying you can’t do these things in a 5E 5-room dungeon, they just aren’t baked in.

Older iterations of D&D had huge sprawling interconnected dungeons often with multiple floors and sections that effected other sections and focus on the resource management and encumbrance were once major parts of the game that are largely ignored today.

It was once, first and foremost, about exploring an interesting place. And figuring out how to get back to that has been a major contributor to my enjoyment running the game.

How are you designing adventure sites now?

As I like running in the Shadowdark system, I have been designing my dungeons for that system, but I like to distinguish between a “dungeon” and an “adventure site”. An adventure site is intended to always be dangerous and visited on multiple outing excursions to fully explore.

It may feel daunting to think of putting together a much larger space when it is already a lot to keep a 5E table fed for adventure every week, but I have found that with using the same answers to the questions I proposed in the beginning of this article and then adding some factional considerations, I can put together a location that sings through multiple excursions with little to no prep from me between dungeon creation and running the game.

So starting with two of the top questions sorted by importance:

What’s the story of this location?
- What was the originally built place used for? What could hint it?
- What is the new use of this place?
What’s the challenge?
- Are we here to find an important item? Hunt an important enemy? Why should the players care?
What’s 10 treasures that could be found here? (turn them into a roll table)
What are the factions that could be here? (Turn them into a roaming encounters table)
Draw the rooms, vary the sizes and shapes
- Have at least two entrances/exits, Any floor must have at least two ways to get up/down
- Draw in 1D4 secret rooms
- Populate faction power centers in rooms away from each other
- Leave 1/3 of rooms empty
- Populate 3 interesting encounters that may be interacted with by the PCs - short sentence for each.