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The marketplace for ready-to-print dungeon-style floorplans is becoming increasingly crowded, and as that happens, it's growing harder for designers to make a strong impact with something sufficiently impressive and different. This first product from Nemo Works is a splendid example of what can be achieved still in this respect, to help it stand out from the crowd.
Since the early days of RPG dungeoneering, an important concept, not always remembered, has been to give dungeons MERIT - Make Empty Rooms Interesting Too. That's been excellently accomplished here in many ways, from the variant colouring and styles of the flagstones, often creating patterns or more specific floor designs, to the detailing of individual stones, where even the cracks across them have been drawn with different widths and intensities, to heighten the impression they have different depths and ages. There's a real eye for detail in aspects elsewhere too, including some beautifully crafted spider webs, scrubby moss, occasional bone and stone fragments, the odd blood splatter or smeared trail and water pool (or you hope it's only water!), old parchments, broken wood - even a snapped sword's fragments and a damaged segment of chain.
All the expected floor pieces are here - corridor sections in various shapes, rooms of different sizes (although 6x6 inch squares predominate, there are also two full page sheets of flagstone floors that can be cut to alternate forms), plain and spiral stairs, and some stand-up doorways, both closed and open (the blackened openings complete with glowing scarlet eyes!).
Half-a-dozen of the rooms are drafted as "specials", four 6x6 in area, two 6x8. The square quartet comprise: A water-filled - still filling - Sewer Room, with steps leading into the green liquid from one side, and more descending from a stone platform on the other; A room with three tombs on two levels, nicely-designed with just one corner higher; A pillared hall with a central dais supporting a large, round fire-bowl, whose style and floor-runes suggest strongly some magical or cultic purpose; and A heavily-cobwebbed Spider Queen's Lair, complete with bloodstains from a recent meal, bones, skulls and a lost sword (and sparking more ideas, what is that pale green liquid running between the stone flags in place? Are those giant uncut, sparkling rubies, balls of blood, or merely spider egg cases, in among the webs?).
The two largest set-piece chambers are another with three tombs on two levels, but here more formal, with lights, statuary and an altar, and a Throne Room, two of whose four pillars have collapsed, and whose blood-red carpet is frayed, worn and rumpled, yet the lit fires, clean book and sword by the throne show it remains in use. Even that doesn't end all the "special" places, because there's also a floor-set 6x3 lava river and a 3x3 cell room with one wall all of bars - which comes with its own narrow, barred, closed stand-up door on the doors page.
And there's still more, as each page is further filled with parts of a whole series of tokens, for rubble, trapdoors, open pits, a small pool, statues, chests, pillars (standing and fallen), locked and alarm markers, barred wells, corridor- or room-blocking crevices dropping away into darkness, bookcases, treasure and weapon piles, glowing magical symbols plus an elaborate magic circle, an altar, a table, fire-traps and a cluster of bones. While this might not be everything you could want for a dungeon, it covers a lot of territory in just fifteen printout pages!
Stylistically, the Endless Dungeons are drawn to a near-realistic level of painted clarity. Only the rooms are shown with walls, a thin veneer of stonework around all their edges, leaving the placement of doorways, and the true wall-thicknesses, in the hands of the GM, probably the better option for this aspect, if possibly not to everyone's taste.
As ever, it would be easy to think of things that might have been added, perhaps with extra variants included through the use of PDF layers, say, such as some open door archways without those red eyes, but this is simply the Basic Set after all. As more sets are promised, any such hopes could be fulfilled soon!
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