Rand0m Bl0gwagon - Erm, That Just Happened
I jumped the gun and posted an entry to Prismatic Wasteland's Random Blogwagon about four months early, before he had even set rules and a topic for it. I very much enjoyed talking about reliability and fatigue as random processes, but now having actually followed the prompts at hand I want to make a new post. I drew a King of Hearts for a blogger to reference and link, so for the first time I'm going to talk about the insanely prolific blogger GROGNARDIA!
I haven't spent much time with James's blog, but I realized after some clicking around that I have at least listened to him on Enter the Megadungeon, a very fun podcast. I was intimidated to jump into his back catalog so I picked one of the topics on his sidebar that I felt most comfortable with: Megadungeons! I came across General Rules for Dungeon Designers, a post from 2021 where he comments on a design guideline from the first edition of Tunnels and Trolls (1975).
The third general rule is:
Use as much humor as you can, but don’t be silly or juvenile.
This rule really tickles me. It's fitting for Tunnels and Trolls, but it summons to mind three thoughts for me.
First, I believe players will bring humor to the table regardless of what is presented to them. This could be because my tabletop experience has mostly been with friends for whom games are an experience to get together and have fun, so the mood is generally light. This could also be from a discomfort with full-throated sincerity! It's a lot more comfortable to break a tense moment with a joke than it is to sit with it if the entire table is not bought into a serious or dramatic tone. The rule of thumb that I use is that the game in motion will be one "notch" sillier than the content at play.
Second, outside of "funhouse" dungeons, my default genre expectation for dungeon play is horror. You can make a lot of hay that, structurally, horror and comedy are really only separated by the specific emotion that you're trying to elicit - see Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger's tremendous success as horror directors. Comic relief is even helpful with pacing out something like a horror film! It can give you a foil that heightens the dread...or it can undercut the dread entirely. Maybe that's what Ken St Andre means by "as much humor as you can"? It makes for an interesting optimization problem - maximize humor with the constraints of the genre and tone at which you're aiming.
Third, to my great shame, I am a man from the United States in my 30s. This means that about a decade of my life was captured by quoting Judd Apatow movies at my friends, and when that trial subsided I had another five years of quoting Rick and Morty at my friends. Much of this coincided with "Sp0rk of D0om", epic penguin style "random" internet humor.
This is all faillennial cringe now, but please understand...back then this killed. The problem is that people came to understand at a high level that humor is derived from subversion of expectation, hence the classic structure of "setup" and "punchline", but for a while we got by on something being so random that it was its own subversion of expectation, it was the setup and punchline. Thankfully we have moved past this as a culture, but in exchange we don't get to have mid-budget comedy movies anymore so it all came out in the wash.
Thus, let's tie this all back to WF's RANDOM BLOGWAGON by seeing if we can make a supplementary Dungeon Stocking Table to provide guidance on what type of humor to inject into a room.
Humor Me
Let's try to somewhat mirror the structure of the old dungeon stocking table. If our categories for dungeon room are "Empty", "Monster", "Special", and "Trap", what are the types of joke we can add to our dungeon design? The Wikipedia article for Comedic Devices has eleven entries that we can noodle on and interpret as ways to inject humor into our dungeon, and "Empty" is sort of a given - I think when you're checking this you probably need to be reminded to let a scene breathe and not add a joke in. Let's make this a d20 table so that we can fiddle with our odds.
| d20 | Device | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Repetition | Make a callback, or otherwise repeat a feature that the players have seen before |
| 2 | Let it Breathe | No need for a joke or keyed humorous element here |
| 3 | Let it Breathe | No need for a joke or keyed humorous element here |
| 4 | Let it Breathe | No need for a joke or keyed humorous element here |
| 5 | Let it Breathe | No need for a joke or keyed humorous element here |
| 6 | Repetition | Make a callback, or otherwise repeat a feature that the players have seen before |
| 7 | Mistaken Identity | Either include some sort of doppelganger creature, a sapient creature who mistakes the players for someone she knows, or introduce a mirror dimension gag |
| 8 | Taboo | Just go comically gross or inappropriate with something in this room or encounter. Think something from Sandy Pug Games, (laudatory) |
| 9 | Pun | Lowest form of humor, but Tabletop RPGs are fundamentally word games and talking games so they always get a hit. Include some sort of pun based on a monster that the party may not have encountered yet. If it's a courtyard, a scorched and gouged sign above the entrance that says "The Manticourtyard" will get you a weak, nervous chuckle. |
| 10 | Slapstick | Introduce something with cartoonish violence, or paint a door onto a flat wall. A skeleton in armor with a comically bonked helm. Classic looney tunes. |
| 11 | Repetition | Make a callback, or otherwise repeat a feature that the players have seen before |
| 12 | Hyperbole | This room has 10,000 rats or 100,000 bugs in it. Go outlandish for this one. |
| 13 | Understatement | This room is where monsters quietly contemplate or meditate. If there is an encounter in it, the monster is doing some form of yoga or relaxation. |
| 14 | Juxtaposition | The comedic version of Writing Rooms in Pairs - Failure Tolerated. When you roll Juxtaposition, the elements in the two rooms should contrast one another in a way that heightens both. A tree with thorny branches at eye level and a blind woodcutter. |
| 15 | Comic Timing | Add a real-time element to this room. If it's a trap, visibly start a timer or start counting down after you describe the obvious features of the room. If it's a monster, it clumsily falls from the ceiling after 30 seconds of real time. |
| 16 | Misdirection | Have an obvious element in the room that draws the attention of the players but has limited information while the actual threat/trap/joke is associated with a separate understated feature in the room. Don't be a dickhead about this though. |
| 17 | Repetition | Make a callback, or otherwise repeat a feature that the players have seen before |
| 18 | Double Entendre | Include something ironic or risque in the room. Like a pun, but hornier. |
| 19 | Double Entendre | Include something ironic or risque in the room, again. |
| 20 | Something Truly Random | Something so out of place that people can't help but laugh, like the "Dog" ending of Silent Hill 2. Do not abuse this entry and use it too frequently or your dungeon will be neither random nor fun. |