Dungeon Building: Creating the Citadel

 It's good to be back in the saddle, working on more episodes of Stories From The First Watch, after a short hiatus. I've been especially looking forward to the next few episodes, as they draw upon some real-life inspiration I received whilst on holiday in France last year. I visited an amazing citadel in the town of Entrevaux in the foothills of the Alps, about an hour's drive from Nice. 

It's a 17th century citadel, built on top of a steep hillside. It took twenty very breathless minutes to reach the main gatehouse, and even then I wasn't at the summit. It is a beautiful sight, and I tried to describe it as accurately as I could in the podcast. 

What really intrigued me was that there was an interpretative board that showed the floorplan of the site, which looked very, very similar to a D&D dungeon floorplan. That gave me an idea - why not use this as the basis for a dungeon crawl? The last one of these, the Halls of Kharamund, was created from scratch using Donjon.com and my own imagination (plus, I admit, some considerable lifting from existing fantasy tropes, not least the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings). It produced some interesting results. One random feature, generated by Donjon, was the grafitti mentioning the Cohort of Paha. From that I generated the whole plot line of Luken and the death cult.

This time, I wanted to create something more mysterious. I had previously mentioned a long lost race of beings who had lived in the Great Wilderness long ago - could this be one of their ancient fortresses?

So, using an adapted version of the floorplan, I created a dungeon for my PCs. I used Donjon and other tools to help populate it, but also took into account the previous history of the show, as well as stuff that felt 'right' for me. It's a nice mix of inspiration and randomness. Here are some photographs of the Citadel:

Here is the floorplan:

and here is my modified version of it (no spoilers visible!):

So sol game inspiration can come from almost anywhere. Be it random generation, books, movies, video games - or even holidays! I'd be intrigued to know where you have got your ideas from - drop me a message with some examples (I promised I won't steal them, unless you're happy for me to do so, with a credit!)