Inspirations from Vornheim – 1

First in a series of unknown length.

I like Zak’s urbancrawl rules (from the Vornheim City Kit) very much, but I prefer to work on a PC rather than with pen and paper. So I thought about a modification to make that easier, and came up with this: The main streets of your city, or corridors of your dungeon, are letter shapes which spell out the words for number. (Zak draws the numbers themselves in a semi-random way.) They interconnect where words share a letter.

Here’s an example; the main corridor layout for a six level dungeon.

   S
  FIVE
  OX
  U
THREE
W
ONE

The first level (“ONE”) has three main areas, each with a corridor. The westernmost one is built around a 20’ wide circular corridor. Level two (“TWO”) starts with an identical main corridor, although it has a different room layout, then runs off northwards into two other main areas. And so on.

There’s no reason this couldn’t be done with other words, for example the names of the boss monsters on each level, or the main NPC or industry in a town ward.

My PCs almost never map, so they’d never know.