I sit down and draw a bunch of rooms on graph paper.  Maybe I might have an idea for one area.

Then I put a bunch of fun shit in the rooms.

People are still playing my game after 42 years so I must be doing something right.

What I do NOT do is try to make it all "make sense."

Mileage, vary, yours.  Store in a cool dark place.

But it works for me.

Yeah, I think there are different ways to do it, and I myself like to vary. I can create and play fun house dungeons and have fun, dungeons that "make sense" and have fun, vanilla or non-vanilla dungeons, and anything in between, and still enjoy the experience very much. I just like the diversity, and wouldn't have it any other way.

By the way, the skill of the DM in running the thing, whatever it ends up being, is sometimes (usually?) downplayed by commercial offerings out there, but it is in fact critical to a good experience playing through a dungeon that keeps on going through play.

As for the writer's block, my solution for that is to just let my brain relax. Do something else. Read a book. Watch a movie. Go out and have some fun with the family. You know. Something that may have nothing to do with fantasy or RPGs whatsoever. You'll eventually come back to your dungeon project with fresh ideas, if you're passionate enough about it.

One way to add variety is to start adding in rooms with damage done to them - defaced temples, chambers with broken pillars, collapsed bridges, battle damage, broken machines (that could be repaired - one time my players repaired a mangonel in a ruined castle and started lobbing stones at monster-infested towers...), weakened floors, rotten roofs, rotten floorboards, fungi- and vermin-infested store-rooms, crumbling walkways, cave-ins, etc.  These are a good way of not only lending the dungeon a sense of age but also of making duplicate rooms a lot of flavour.

My cure-all has worked!  I just had to listen to Duran Duran Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Scorpions Love at First Sting, and Phil Collins' No Jacket Required.  Those albums are ones I listed to on my walkman over and over while reading and coloring the AD&D books.  Just hearing that music gives me flashbacks, and the creativity just started flowing immediately

where are the fucking TRAPS??

Man, I would come up with a bunch of push-button, stone-stepping, acid-pit-tight-rope-walking, poison-dartswarming, Otyugh-in-the-shit-pit-trap-door-chute-wreslting kinda traps in a ten-foot square.

Make the players figure it out. Wonder why the humans wore some scary looking necklace made of something likely to give them a disease? It keeps the TRAPS FROM KILLING THEM.

And wonder why there are different traps for different necklaces? Because the Dungeon Owners don't want certain help on/in certain floors/rooms!

That alone should make your empty space scary. And describe the empty areas with fittings that make PC's want to check them out - even if there's nothing there. Funny bas-reliefs with obvious fiddly things to press, poke, push/pull on. Columns out of place that seemingly should not need to be there (you can give it relevance as you see fit later). Fuck with the PC's heads! Make sure you crib notes about it later - AND reward them for it.

Make it unexpected - not just formulaic. (though you can certainly have fun with that too.)

You should get this incredibly useful (free) resource:  http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/on-tricks-empty-rooms-and-basic-trap.html

Quote from: AndrewSFTSN;736174You should get this incredibly useful (free) resource:  http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/on-tricks-empty-rooms-and-basic-trap.html

Haha, I actually do have something very close to that already.

I'm good now though.  just had to recharge my batteries.

One thing you can do, even after the fact, is layer different ages of the dungeon's history in.

Let's say your dungeon was originally a mine that was later overrun by aberrations when the mine broke through to their tunnels.

You fill in as many rooms as you can think of, but there are still a bunch left over. Leaving some empty or filled with junk/offal, you find that the dungeon is still too sparse.

You can decide that a cult that worshiped a god of aberrations moved in at some point, and set up a colony which may still have a few members left, even after the rest of the dungeon turned on them. They forced a roof collapse and are are holed up in areas G6-F4.

Next a band of Duegar decided that the mining was too good, and cleared out a section over there, where they hold off the other inhabitants of the dungeon and continue mining.

Etc.

In other words when you run out of gas with one idea, just add another. Keep the original idea as a theme throughout, but add history. Sure a dungeon might have temple architecture throughout, but there's a lot more going on now.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;734386My cure-all has worked!  I just had to listen to Duran Duran Seven and the Ragged Tiger, Scorpions Love at First Sting, and Phil Collins' No Jacket Required.  Those albums are ones I listed to on my walkman over and over while reading and coloring the AD&D books.  Just hearing that music gives me flashbacks, and the creativity just started flowing immediately

Missed this part. Awesome. For me it's Soundgarden and Metallica.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;736176Haha, I actually do have something very close to that already.

I'm good now though.  just had to recharge my batteries.

This may help in the future then.

I create factions and divide the dungeon up into compartments, or room clusters. I then decide who controls which clusters and which ones are contested. After this I go through and give each room a one or two sentence description.
What the room was used for at the time of its creation is secondary to what is going on in it now.

I let it cool until I have virtually forgotten almost everything I've done (which isn't hard because I work so fast in the initial stage I forgot most of it as I go). I then go through and expand every room description and decide roughly where all the critters are.
On the next draft I add traps- if I have not already.

I stat the monsters on my final trip through, because the mechanical aspect of dungeon stocking bores the shit out of me.