"Jaquays Your Dungeon" - Another OSR Maxim

Be Cautious of Maxims

As I've written before, the "OSR" loved its maxims, short phrases that try to describe shared principles and act as a way of mutual recognition among OSR folks. At the same time ... these are maxims, and they don't really capture what they might, they aren't sufficient alone. Often, without deeper understanding and outside of their original context OSR maxims become dogma, undermining the goals and principles they are trying to capture.

An OSR maxim that I think needs a bit of explanation these days is:

“Jaquays your dungeon”
The phrase “Jaquaysing” comes from a 2010 post on the Alexandrian post (since renamed for perhaps ill-considered reasons), but that post itself is the result of a series of discussions on various old school forums. The idea itself is a reference of course to Jennell Jaquays, the highly influential adventure, dungeon (and 3D video game level) designer and fantasy artist.  Jaquays is likely most famous for “Caverns of Thracia”, a revolutionary 1979 dungeon adventure that asks the then novel question of “What would a dungeon look like if it was a real, archaeological ruin?”  The full implications of Jaquays’ design work are huge, and undoubtedly influences the way we perceive fantasy spaces today and games as a whole, but it is likely most consistently evident in digital games - especially shooters and “soulslikes”*.

One of Jaquays' Paintings
Used for Spell Jammer

In the context of OSR maxims “Jaquaysing” is usually reduced to a map design principle (or set of map design principles), which might actually be traceable back to the 1974 edition of D&D - though Jaquays’ work fully explored them in a way that even Gygax, whose excellent adventure designs seems to have largely been concerned with setting up infiltration/commando raid type scenarios rather than exploration, did not.  The Alexandrian’s post, and its source material were concerned with dungeon map layout and design - and focused on these elements of Jaquays’ work. This means that more than some other OSR maxims “Jaquaysing” or “Jaquays your dungeon” has been reduced even more than its full meaning could imply.  Rather than an exhortation to read and take lessons from the work of Jenell Jaquays, maxim today largely means:
“Dungeon maps shouldn’t be linear, you need to design them so the rooms are looping”

“Looping” here is the idea that a map should consist of “loops”, likely several … each a series of keyed areas with a lot of paths that connect them to each other, and usually circular paths, allowing the party to find themselves back where they started exploring.  This is contrasted with “linear” map design, where keyed locations lead down a single (or even branching path) from an entrance to a final climactic conflict, usually with a “dungeon boss”. The contention is that through looping paths and locations that don’t have a linear path through them, exploration of the dungeon will be required. 

What the Maxim Gets Right

Exploration and navigation are the primary puzzle of a good dungeon adventure, or at least the core puzzle that the rest are built on.  Multiple paths are part of this because they allow characters to take different approaches to locations and circumvent obstacles, backtrack from random encounters or obstacles and generally make more decisions about how they will approach the adventure.  In this approach exploring the dungeon and knowing its routes, or even better sometimes its secret pathways, allows the players greater control over the dungeon’s risks.  The more of the dungeon they know and understand the more they can avoid its dangers and reach the places within where they want to go.

Looping paths are a great way to do this, they provide plenty of moments where the players start to understand the dungeon layout (whenever the complete a loop) and create a sense of constant forward movement even as they lead characters back towards a starting point.  They are even useful for tactics - fleeing rarely leads to a dead end and it becomes easy to double back on enemies. 

In its original version, which despite its good advice is still more limited than Jaquays’ overall set of design innovations, the concept of looping is just one of several map or layout solutions.  This is worth thinking about - especially for modern online games or others with sessions under four hours, where navigation concerns become even more essential. Good map design is key to old school style adventures or dungeon crawls.  This is especially true when it’s combined with the “expedition style” of play where each session ends outside of the dungeon, something that may or may not have been popular in early RPG games, but which has become part of the “OSR” style of play as it benefits open tables with changing casts of players. The difficulty with this style of play is that complex dungeons become harder to explore, with parties returning over several sessions.  Looping map design and its related tricks alleviate some of the difficulty and wasted time inherent in the expedition style and its need to cover the same parts of the dungeon multiple times. They make the dungeon map more easily accessible and comprehensible, as well as tending to return the party to its starting point after exploring several keyed locations.

Alone looping isn’t enough however, and for expedition style play, other tools are also necessary.  As described in the original Jaquaysing post these map design tools include: multiple entrances, secret paths that allow quick traversal of the dungeon, varied sublevel heights and a variety of pathways up and down to allow multi-level exploration and pathfinding. All are as important as looping when it comes to making dungeon navigation compelling, and they  imply a rarely used, or new, type of map design when expeditions are expected to happen in 3-4 hours … but looping is simple and easy to remember and useful.

Where the Maxim Goes Wrong

The point where looping falls apart, especially when one ignores the rest of the map designer’s tricks, is that too much looping is almost as bad as a linear dungeon.  A linear map produces a series of keyed environments or encounters (what I think of as “encounter based design) that allows a single way forward, through the adventure - much like a story. This is one of the goals of linear dungeon design, to allow a carefully constructed narrative and literary or filmic style climax within a dungeon adventure. To do that the designer has to sacrifice the complexity of navigation and usually the idea of expedition based exploration. Linearity in the service of this kind of design isn’t a problem, it’s a conscious choice to use a particular tool to create a specific type of adventure. It only becomes an issue when it, or other tools useful for making a good adventure path/narrative, are applied to designing an exploration focused dungeon crawl. The reverse is also true, and the complex, multi-path, multi-session dungeon of the old school “crawl” is very hard to adapt to contemporary encounter based design that seeks to make cinematic or narrative adventures.

This isn’t the issue with simplifying the ideas of Jaquaysing down to looping map design, or over indulging in it.  Excessive looping, where every room connects to 2 or three more and there are no branches or serial connections between multiple rooms does the opposite of linear design, but is equally limiting.  Overreliance on looping map design forces every keyed location to stand on its own.  Every location becomes its own distinct and granular scene in an excessively looped adventure, because they are all almost equally accessible and without significant connections to any particular location.  Take this little ten room map I drew up.  It has a huge number of looping connections and its rooms each connect with several of the others.

A Very Loopy Dungeon

I suspect a lot of designers looking at this would think it’s perfectly fine, it even offers some variations in room shape and some interesting spaces and dungeon dressing.  Room 2 is clearly a religious hall of some kind, there’s a well in room  5, room 10 has a statue, 7 some pillars, and rooms 8 and 9 even form a bit of a raised area.  All of these things do help make this dungeon potentially better, but looping gets in the way of making meaningful design choices about these rooms. 

Take the religious hall or shrine in room 2 for example.  While one could key it up and make sense of it - say as the “Chapel of the Ghoul Cult” it becomes awfully hard to make this into a nodal section of the dungeon overrun by ghoul cultists.  One might want to include only a couple more spaces, a “Feast Hall of the Dammed” (Room 4) and “Chancery of the Ghoul Pope” ( Room 3).  With this map however this small dungeon node, set of similarly themed rooms, or faction lair doesn’t really work, and it doesn’t allow for any structure within the lair.  Rooms 2,3 and 5 are all equally accessible from room 6, and easy entry from several other spaces.  Even the Ghoul Pope has no chance of privacy with direct access from rooms 2,4,6, and 7.  These Ghouls can’t really make much of a defensible lair, and there’s a pretty equal chance that the party will blunder into any one of their three locations.  Obviously on a small map this is less of a concern and perhaps harder to illustrate, but some structure here makes for a better node and a more interesting series of encounters … yes this means adding something like linearity back to the adventure!

Loops and Ghoul Church

 
With the removal of one connection (the secondary connection between rooms 3 and 4) and the introduction of a secret passage between rooms 3 and 7 the ghoul cult’s little sanctuary becomes far more interesting and defensible.  A party of explorers is likely to encounter either the “Chapel of the Ghoul Cult” (room 2) or the “Feast Hall of the Dammed” (room 4) and only then proceed to the “Chancery of the Ghoul Pope” in room 4.  This allows for a few tactical options - an alarm in room 2 might summon the cult from rooms 3 and 4 if the altar is disturbed, while the double doors to the Room 3 allow provide information that the room beyond them is potentially important (especially if they are big sculptural things inlaid with scenes of horrible feasting). Likewise having encountered the Ghoul Pope (or otherwise been informed of him by another dungeon faction) an assassination mission is now possible through the secret passage between rooms 7 and 3. Likewise if the struggle against the party goes badly, the Pope has a chance to flee through the secret passage.

Furthermore, with fewer connections some become more obvious passages, or take on meaning.  The space between rooms 2 and 4 offers one such spot, a crossroads that is clearly part of the Ghoul Cult’s territory, and potentially a spot for a lookout/guard post, or simply some sort of gruesome chapel that gives the party information about what’s nearby.  Likewise the “private” passage between the altar space in room 2 and the “Chancery of the Ghoul Pope” offers both a potential spot for a trap (the Ghoul Pope seems like he’d be paranoid) and a small personal shrine for the Pope - likely trap and shrine are the same thing.  The pair of doors between the “Feast Hall” and “Chancery” likewise make for a more interesting tactical decision - they are undoubtedly locked, and the space between them might be defended by the Pope’s special guards or at least provide him plenty of notice as intruders try to get through both of them after dealing with the cult in room 4.

Further loop removal makes for other interesting decisions, another faction (perhaps bandits, or even the honored dead of this now corrupted catacomb) might inhabit rooms 8 and 9, with room 8 being a sealed tomb, and the dead committed foes of the ghoul cult.  By breaking down even a small dungeon into these kinds of nodes, and limiting their connections, players can better understand the space, and the designer can better imagine it, creating rational connections between the keyed locations that allow for more complex play rather than a sort of directionless ramble.  With larger dungeons shortcuts and alternate entrances become more important, either as ways to quickly get to unexplored areas or to change the direction that the party approaches certain obstacles from. Faction territories can be logically delineated by choke points or defensible areas, disrupted by secret passages.  Secrets and knowledge about the dungeon become more valuable as there are longer or shorter, easier or harder ways to move through it for the party.

Here’s a final version of the 10 room map, one that while it uses plenty of looping is broken into discrete areas, and I think would be more inspiring to the designer and more interesting to explore for the players.



Note that we now have two potential faction territories - the ghoul church in rooms 2,3 and 4 and a tomb for the honored dead (or grave robbing bandits perhaps?) in 9 and maybe the secret tomb in room 10.  Likewise there’s a new entrance from a cave in or robber’s tunnel in room 7, while the sublevel of rooms 8-10 is more clearly delineated. There are still a large number of loops, but areas are somewhat more distinct allowing the designer to easily decide where types of dressing and flavor (say modern catacomb chapel in the North and an older set of tombs, perhaps with a different culture and construction method to the South on the sublevel. Room 6 is still a crossroads, but overall the paths through the dungeon are somewhat more limited and deciding how to traverse it (say if one were trying to avoid “ghoul country”) becomes something players can better deduce.

Jaquaysing For Real

The sorts of considerations I’ve described above, and the ways map design leads towards a naturalistic set of considerations: defensible faction lairs, secret rooms and pathways, alternate entrances, but also where mosaics and murals will be, what the past and present use of dungeon spaces might be … are the essence of Jaquaysian design. It is so much more then simple looping map layout, and goes quite a bit beyond map design. The principle of looping and interconnected spaces is useful, and it can help avoid excessive linearity, but the goal is never looping for the sake of looping, it’s a dungeon with spaces and fixtures that hint at the locations past and offer their own “archeological” narrative. This is likely one of larger contributions Jaquays made to games - one whose influence carried far beyond table top dungeon design, but one that designers can emulate easily enough if they are willing to go beyond thinking of Jaquays’ design as a set of simple cartographical rules.

This post is inspired partially by the 2026 Ennies, and specifically the success of my two game friends, Josh and Warren’s  “Dungeon Design Course” - available here.  I also had a small part to play in it (providing the initial template Josh and Warren adapted and making a few small contributions), but even if I hadn’t I think it’s one of the best resources for folks trying to design RPG adventures … specifically local based ones, aka “dungeons”.  Check it out and I hope you managed to vote for it. I find that these sorts of tools will take you a lot further as a dungeon designer than random generation tools (alone) or shopworn maxims.
Note:
*Jaquays was one of the level designers for the Quake series of groundbreaking shooters as well as a lifelong creator of table top RPG work and art.  She engaged in a lot of innovation in that space, and I see her influence (including looping, interconnected maps, verticality, layered history ,and environmental storytelling) every time I play a game like Dark Souls, Baldur’s Gate, Dark Tide, or Forever Winter.