Knots (A Procedure For Elegant Jaquaysing)

This is an approach to automatically Jaquays your dungeons while building them. For those unfamiliar - Jaquaysing is a term popularized by Justin Alexander, named after the late Jennell Jaquays. It refers to a specific set of tricks you can use to make your dungeon (or any space, really) have a greater sense of interconnectivity and nonlinearity. Jaquaysing is important because to Jaquays your dungeon is to make it a more playable space that allows for player freedom.

Labyrinth II by Erik Desmazières

The principles of Jaquaysing are generally to:

• Add loops to your dungeon. Loops provide the players multiple options to tackle their problems, and the ability to approach problems from behind. For instance, rooms 14 through 17 in the imaginary Loathsome Frog Caverns form a loop (14 connects to 15, which connects to 16, which connects to 17, and 17 connects to 14). 17 has a Frog-Curse Blade in a glass display case, but the way between 14 and 17 is blocked by a punji pit. Meanwhile 15 is home to a Froghemoth. Here players who enter 14 are presented with two different problems - but because 15 leads to 16 leads to 17, players can still get the Frog-Curse Blade if they are feeling down to fight the Froghemoth instead of traverse the punji pit.
  
• Add multiple entrances/exits to your dungeon. Each entrance/exit can have its own difficulties and level of obviousness. For instance, the main entrance to the Loathsome Frog Caverns is well known but is frequented by bandit patrols looking to shake up adventurers for taxes. There is a secret tunnel a half mile away but it is only known by guides and slime harvesters, but it can also be discovered in a strange side-path within the dungeon.
  
• Add multiple ways to traverse the levels within your dungeon. Most dungeons of a considerable size to be Jaquaysed have multiple levels of increasing danger - and just the same way that multiple entrances helps players find easier (or just different) paths to approach new environments, so to does having multiple paths between levels. For instance, the most obvious way to Level 2 of the Loathsome Frog Caverns is by a grand stairwell guarded by a council of Croaking Ghosts who demand tribute. If players do not have appropriate tribute (or enchanted weapons), room 21 is host to a large snail-pit that descends to room 49 on Level 3.
  

Now that the basics are out of the way: among writers in the OSR space, this topic has been talked about a lot - although I always have a problem with the way it is talked about. Good tips, talk, and examples from other modules are often given, but I am a big fan of procedure, which these posts often lack. The ways to execute upon these ideas requires very active thought or renovating a dungeon you already have made - and sometimes I just want to spontaneously make a dungeon and have it work well in play.

Jaquaysing may sound easy to do in the moment - just add more exits to rooms. This pitfall leads to a few issues:

• The players get analysis paralysis and spend hard-scheduled game hours arguing in the 10-exit room you made about which door to go through rather than doing anything fun or exciting. Choice is great and integral to impactful play, but giving too many choices in a constricted environment (like the dungeon where Jaquaysing is most commonly applied) can be meaningless if it leads to  paralysis that makes players freeze or just pick a random door because they feel that they are all the same and they should keep the game moving.
• It confuses systems which are integral to dungeon travel. Things like torch usage and dungeon turns rely on the traversal of many rooms instead of just two rooms (the 10-exit monstrosity and one of its branches). By making your room 2 connect to rooms 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, you've pinched travel that could have happened if you instead had room 2 connect to rooms 3 and 4, and 3 connect to 5, and etc.
• It's harder to get players to care for where in the dungeon to go next. This may be my own personal preference, but I find that describing what may come in the next room via sounds, sights, and smells at a room's exit is just as important as the upcoming room itself because sensory information like this allows for players to make informed decisions about their travel. For instance, the way between rooms 2 and 3 is described as having "an overwhelmingly earthy scent, audible noise of squelching footsteps frolicking." Clues like this both reward players for immersing themselves and investigating the world while giving them some things to suspect about the upcoming room without giving the game away. If you have a 10-exit monstrosity and you're taking this sensory approach, you've both put much more work onto yourself and more information to process for the players, which they may get exhausted from.
  

Needless to say - we don't want these issues. We want to Jaquays elegantly. 

With this in mind, I've made a procedure that you can use in the process of creating your dungeon to ensure that it is Jaquaysed without running into the issues above. This procedure is purely for dungeon layout and composition, and assumes that you already have themes/trappings decided for your dungeon (as any good dungeon ought to have).

The procedure is a series of questions you should ask yourself with each room placed on the map. The questions are as follows:

1. Does this room connect to more than three other rooms? If so, remove exits until you have two or three. For the purposes of this procedure, entrances/exits to the dungeon itself count as a room as well, and will be the only valid dead-ends on the map.
   
2. Does this room only connect to one other room? If so, add another exit until you have two or three. If you cannot think of an exit to the room, you can always add an exit to the dungeon. Additionally, you can add a more obscure way of traversal (a secret door that loops back to another room, a pit that leads down a level, etc)
3. Does this room have more than one exit on any given wall? If so, rearrange exits until there is a maximum of one exit per wall. This is for the sake of clarity for both yourself and the players. Having three exits on the north wall can quickly get confusing if players return to the room (which they will often do at least once if the dungeon is Jaquaysed properly). 
4. Define each connection this room has as either obvious or obscure.
   Obvious connections are things players will immediately see as a simple, safe way to exit this room. For example, a wooden door, an archway, a stairwell, etc. These will likely be most exits in the dungeon. The only interaction they often offer is passing through them or forcing them open.
   Obscure connections are where you can get creative with travel and cater to different player styles. They can be exits that players don't immediately see and reward investigation (i.e., a secret door, a sliding bookshelf, etc.) They can be exits that are dangerous (i.e., a wall of fire, a trapped door, etc.) They can just be exits that are thematic to the dungeon (i.e. vents, sewers, chutes, a pit, etc) Whatever the obscure connection is, have fun with it and allow for interesting player interaction with it.
   

I typically make the map in this fashion before I define the contents of the rooms, because a critical advantage of this procedure is that it lets you know what rooms will be important to further exploration of the dungeon. Players are likely to return to rooms with three obvious connections if they want to explore the full dungeon. These junctions are ripe opportunities for you to place visually striking, or setting significant room contents - because the players will more likely than not return to this room to explore the other branch the dungeon has to offer at this point. This is not to say that all rooms should have three obvious connections - use your better judgement.

 I have been using this procedure for a while now and it has quite a few benefits:

• It guarantees a Jaquaysed dungeon. Because the only dead-ends on the map are entrances and exits to the dungeon complex itself, if you use this procedure to its full potential the connections between rooms form large loops and junctions that always present the players somewhere to go without having to rely on rooms with too many exits. Even if you get criminally lazy and make a dungeon that is a straight line with entrances at both ends, it still follows one principle of Jaquaysing.
• It's simple and allows for spontaneous creation that can lead to pleasant surprises. When using this procedure I've occasionally had to abandon obvious design conventions that first come to mind in favor of something more interesting. For instance, there's been a few times I've had to add exits to the dungeon complex near the center of the map because the only valid dead-ends are exits and the dungeon geometry won't allow for me to expand further in one direction or another
• When you break the rules, it heightens the significance or weirdness of a specific room.
  

La Tour De Babel by Erik Desmazières

With the notes about the procedure done, I can't lie, I got a bit carried away with the examples and made a table of obscure connections. I hope you enjoy them.

D12 Obscure Connections:

1. A sewer - a slimy cramped crawl into the next room.
2. An electrified metal gate - hums threateningly.
   
3. A mouth - if you taste too good it may close after you enter.
4. A metal door with a slot - requires appropriate offerings in the slot to be opened.
5. Cracked glass - easily broken and allows vision into the next room.
6. A hidden door behind torture implements - smells awful.
7. A trapped staircase that has already been activated - its stairs now a slope downward.
8. A sheer drop downward into darkness.
   
9. A well - bucket and rope still intact.
10. Wind tunnels - industrial fans still spin and threaten to bisect those who aren't careful.
11. A blabbering wall of flesh - must be bargained with for entry and exit.
12. A sheer ascent - with only overgrown vines and the occasional foothold to assist your way to the next room. 

Edit After Post:

I mention it only briefly, but knowing when to break the rules of the procedure deserves a little more talk. The procedure definitely makes dungeon layouts have a few quirks, most notably that there are no dead-ends outside of entrances/exits to the dungeon complex itself. This is not always a good thing, as this kind of layout can be at odds with the themes or setting of your dungeon. I like to use the procedure listed above as a way to sort of lay out a map before I know its specifics - with the layout and themes in mind then I find ways to break rules where it would benefit the dungeon. Use your best artistic judgement when breaking the rules, but I find that these are cases where you may want to ignore parts of the procedure:

• If the verisimilitude of the dungeon would not benefit from the procedure. For instance, a prison cell is not likely to have at least two ways to exit it, otherwise that would be a poorly crafted prison. A dead end in a room like this would benefit how believable the space in your dungeon is, and your players' immersion. The procedure is still good to use as a baseline to generate a map - but once you figure out the exact identity of an area in the dungeon (for instance, rooms 20-32 of the Loathsome Frog Caverns are a prison for the human sacrifices) remember that your first draft is not your final draft and you can always edit the layout to support these themes.
  
• If you want to keep your players on their toes. While on a zoomed out level the procedure generates organic structures, there's a certain order to the whole procedure. When you insert a carefully crafted room that has many exits or a complete dead end, it highlights the weirdness of that room and serves to throw off player navigation if they are getting used to the order of the dungeon's layout. Rooms like these should be done with a purpose, though - as too many rooms like these can threaten the Jaquaysing of the dungeon or mess with player navigation too much and run into the issues of analysis paralysis.
  
• If you feel like it deep down. At the end of the day, dungeons are an artform - from mapping to keying to the table. The procedure is here to serve as a nice default way to guarantee a well-Jaquaysed space, but don't let that get in the way of your own vision or satisfaction. While not true of real life, in art, rules like these are made to be broken.