Five-room Dungeons

The five-room dungeon framework was designed by Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips as a way to combine mythic story structure and quick/easy adventure design^[1]. The framework is simple and flexible; it works for any setting and system, and can be used for one-shot adventures or as part of a larger campaign.

The framework is popular because it "satisfies a dungeon crawling experience as well as an adventure's narrative"^[2] and "includes all the main ingredients of a fun, fantasy adventure... combat, exploration, and social interaction."^[3]

1. Room One: Entrance and Guardian: An early encounter that explains why the dungeon has remains unexplored and hooks the players into the adventure.
2. Room Two: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge: A different kind of challenge than room one that requires the players to use their brains or social skills.
3. Room Three: Trick or Setback: After victories in rooms one and two, this room builds tension by introducing an issue that puts success into doubt.
4. Room Four: Climax, Big Battle, or Conflict: The big showdown that tests the players' skills, resources, and problem-solving abilities.
5. Room Five: Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist: The final room provides the GM an opportunity to provide a reward, reveal a secret, or introduce a twist that sets up the next adventure.

Put another way, the rooms are an "Entrance, Puzzle, Setback, Battle, and Reward"^[2:1] though the exact order can be changed^[1:1][3:1]. Rooms one and two are popular choices for swapping^[1:2], but you could alternatively introduce passages or secret doors that allow the players to move freely between rooms^[3:2] or a non-linear layout that invites the players to explore and double back^[4].

It is important to note that the framework of a "five-room dungeon" can be used in settings other than dungeons^{[1:3][3:3][4:1]}. You can think of the rooms in the framework as scenes in a story, or narrative touch-points^[2:2], that could be set in a town, hideout, forest, ship, or any other location.

Justin Alexander, in his book So You Want To Be A Game Master, proposes a variation of the five-room dungeon that he calls "5+5 Dungeons".^[5] These contain five featured rooms and five scenic rooms, the former focused on action and the latter on setting and story.

Alexander's five featured rooms should comprise:

1. A challenge
2. A fight
3. A twist
4. A reward
5. A second challenge, fight, twist, or reward

The order of these featured rooms is less important, and the interspersed scenic rooms can be used to weave the rooms together into a cohesive and interesting adventure.

An alternative option is to link multiple sets of five rooms into a larger and more complex dungeon. This could be "mini dungeons" with distinct themes that are linked together or multiple levels of a larger dungeon. Let the five-room dungeon be the starting point and grow from there.

Baron de Ropp suggests improving the five-room dungeon by working the elements to a traditional three-act story structure and gives some examples of what that should look like^[2:3]. Map Crow suggests designing the dungeon in reverse, starting with the boss and then planning a secret, a gauntlet path, a "thinky room", and the entrance guard^[6].