Enchanted Nimbus #24
Welcome back aboard the Enchanted Nimbus! This month’s newsletter has a blog on the importance of empty rooms in your dungeon. A round-up of latest OSR-style news, blogs articles and videos from other creators.
The Value of Nothing: Why Your Dungeon Needs Empty Rooms
For a long time, I looked at a dungeon map like it was something to be filled to the brim with action and adventure. I wanted my dungeons to be dense, like how I try to populate most of my hexes with one or more points of interest for the party to check out. But it took my a while to realize that was an oversight in my dungeon design. I felt that if a room didn’t contain a dangerous trap, an enigma to solve or a ravenous monster then I wasn’t being efficient in my dungeon design.
I thought that empty space was wasted space. I was wrong.
Over time, through running hex-crawls and megadungeons, I’ve realized that a dungeon where every door hides a “feature” isn’t a lived-in space; it’s a theme park ride. To create a truly immersive, living world, you need the negative space. You need the empty rooms.
The Tactical Respite
In the OSR tradition, resource management is the heart of the game. Torchlight is fading, the fighter is down to 4 HP, and the spells are spent. In a “high-octane” modern dungeon where every room is an encounter, the party has nowhere to breathe.
Empty rooms provide a place of brief respite. They are the staging grounds where players can finally spike a door shut, consult their map, and argue about whether to press on or retreat back to the nearby village for rest and recovery.
A Note on Danger: Empty does not mean “Safe.”
Just because a room lacks an inhabitant currently doesn’t mean the dungeon has stopped breathing. Wandering monsters are always a threat. However, there is a notable psychological difference between walking into an ambush and having a quiet room where you can at least hear the wandering monster coming down the hall.
Pacing in the Dungeon
If every room in your dungeon is a high on the intensity scale, then it tends to lose its effect quickly. The players eventually go numb because they are used to the chaos. Constant combat or high-stakes social interaction leads to burnout. By incorporating empty spaces, you create a change of pace.
These rooms act as the connective tissue of your dungeon. They allow the high danger points such as an intricate trap or a monster’s lair to stand out. Without the silence of an empty corridor, the roar of a dragon doesn’t sound nearly as loud. It provides the players with a cadence in the dungeon, not unlike how the waves of the ocean ebb and flow.
Architecture of Mystery
There is nothing more unsettling than a quiet room in a dangerous place. When a party spends three rooms fighting for their lives and then opens a door to find... nothing but dust and a cracked stone bench... the suspense increases.
Why is this room empty?
Did something clean it out?
Are we being watched?
Empty rooms allow the thematic elements of the dungeon to speak. You can describe the peeling frescoes, the smell of damp earth, or the way the wind whistles through a masonry crack. These details build an atmosphere of mystery and exploration that combat often obscures.
How Much Vacancy is Right?
So, how do we balance the action and the intrigue with the “empty”? We don’t have to guess. We can look to D&D and OSR game designers for benchmarks. Looking at Worlds Without Number, we see Kevin Crawford recommends 2 in 8 (25%) of your rooms be empty. Where as Basic/Expert Dungeons and Dragons suggests 2 in 6 (33%) be empty.
So, roughly 25-33% of your rooms. This might feel high if you are coming from a modern design background, but in a 30-room dungeon level, having 10 empty rooms provides the necessary “lung capacity” for the dungeon to function as a strategic environment rather than just a gauntlet of challenges.
Expanding the Definition of “Empty”
An empty room shouldn’t be a “dead” room. To make these spaces work for your dungeon design, consider these three types of “Active Emptiness”:
Environmental Storytelling: A room with no monsters but a shattered shield and a trail of dried blood tells a story.
Strategic Terrain: A room with a deep pit or a crumbling balcony is “empty,” but it changes how a later combat in that room might play out if the party is chased back into it or tries to lure a monster here.
Dungeon Dressing Room: A room that contains a mundane object: a heavy rug, an old desk, a pile of bones. This isn’t a treasure or a monster, but prompts the players to interact with the world. (Raging Swan Press has tons of resources on to offer Dungeon Dressing)
Articles
Knight at the Opera discusses How to Talk About Difficulty
d4Caltrops shares d100 Magic Bracers & Bracelets
WF Smith at Prismatic Wasteland: Play is Canon and Chain Stocking the Hex Map
Over on the Alexandrian, Justin discusses Small Hexcrawls
Some of my favorite maps from Dyson Logos this month are:
The Caves of Still Grotto makes for a fun sea cave adventure.
And of course, an earthmote map(s) gets a stamp of approval from Earthmote! (Doran’s Skyrealm, Doran’s Skyrealm - Keep, Doran’s Skyrealm - Understructures)
Videos
Daniel at Bandit’s Keep discusses alignment:
Ben at Questing Beast hosts a discussion on how Old-School D&D is changing modern campaigns:
BECMI Berserker discusses the Undead in BECMI D&D:
Over on the Earthmote, I’ve continued my series where I am working on a Minimum Viable Setting, such as this episode where I work on NPC design:
I like your idea of old items from prior adventuring parties. Empty really just means non-combat. And there are millions of non-combat options in RPGs.
Nice article.
This really resonates with how I’ve been thinking about dungeon design lately—especially the idea that what isn’t there can matter just as much as what is. I’ve been exploring how empty rooms create tension, shape expectations, and even tell a story through absence rather than content. I write more about this kind of approach to play and design over at https://tabletop-thoughts.com if you’re interested.