Thoughts on Reading Jesse Burneko's Dungeons & Dilemmas

 
Dungeons & Dilemmas was Kickstarted during 2020’s ZineQuest, and the physical copies were sent out a year later in March of 2021.  The stated purpose of the 56-page zine is this: “Dungeons and Dilemmas presents a process for building dungeon scenarios that are more emotionally engaging and morally complex while retaining a focus on exploration, action and adventure” (1).  Burneko makes it clear that this is not about making less combat-centric dungeons for your fantasy roleplaying, but about giving those combat scenes more meaning in play.  The booklet does an admirable job of achieving that end.
 
Drawing inspiration from the town creation rules in Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard, Burneko begins by laying out 6-step process for creating the backstory of a dungeon so that it can present layers of meaning and history for the exploring players to discover and delight in.  Then, once you are brimming with ideas for visual motifs, encounters, and other elements, Burneko outlines a quick way to create the dungeon layout as an abstract cluster of room in order to help you plan out where information about the dungeon’s storied past should go, and to help you decide where encounters and treasures are best laid to ensure the “narrative” of the dungeon unspools well without ever having to dictate where the adventuring party goes.  The third chapter is about using the tools of the dungeon to effectively communicate the layered past: room content, traps, items, monsters, and NPCs.  The fourth chapter helps you use these same ideas to build a single dungeon out into a longer campaign of adventure and discovery.
 
The writing is cogent and direct, saying exactly what it wants to say without wandering off on tangents or spilling on to fill pages with inessential information.  The book, while far from short, is compact and tightly packed with precision.  There’s a lot of useful information in these pages, and there is a lot for the imagination to chew on.  I personally don’t run dungeon adventures—or at least I haven’t for a long time—but I’m always interested by what’s going on in that area of design.  Burneko’s technique is a fun way to focus your thoughts and ideas into a taut bundle of excitement.  Anything that makes the solitary fun of adventure design gamelike in its approach is offering a lot to its readers.  It reminded me a lot of Vincent Baker’s The Seclusium of Orpheus of the Three Vissions, another guide that makes a kind of game out of creating a wizard’s tower to be explored by a party of fantasy adventurers, though in layout and presentation the two books are vastly different.
 
Dungeons & Dilemmas even comes with an adventure created using the techniques presented in the zine.  It’s a fun adventure, and it’s easy to read it and see how each of the prescribed steps make up the final adventure.  The one thing I would have liked to have seen was a great explanation in that example adventure about Burneko’s own thinking about the potential paths within his abstract room diagram.  That part of the discussion in the first half of the zine is by far the most complicated to parse, and I was hoping to see it clarified by way of example, especially since I found the concept so interesting.  It’s not a big loss, but it is a missed opportunity to make concrete his exciting ideas.
 
The PDF is available through DriveThru and Burneko’s itch.io page, and it’s worth the $8 he’s asking for it.