Why Jaquays?

Linear dungeons, where players see room 1, then room 2, all in order, can feel constraining.

Dungeon: any location in an RPG scenario with details of opportunity and danger.

Jaquaysing: to make a dungeon non-linear, so players must select which paths their characters take.

The ‘how’ falls directly out of the in-world ‘why?’. Why would anyone live in a series of meandering, looping, hallways? Answering that question shows you where to put loops in a dungeon.

Caves Meander

Natural caverns meander routinely. Check out the Mercer Caverns, and read the names!

The names aren’t relevant, I just think they’re cool.

• What’s in the “Crystal Chamber”?
• “Fat Man’s Misery” sounds like a party-killer. The more you think about those three words, the worse it gets.
• What the hell does the “Prince Albert Room” look like?

Pretty much every cave will have multiple entrances, because if a cave has only one, the air becomes too stagnant for anything to survive. Mushrooms don’t need Sunlight, but I’m pretty sure they still breathe. If mushrooms won’t enter a space, neither will player characters.

Living Room Loops

Someone putting loops in an above-ground home may seem strange to modern people, who live alone in stacks of concrete cubes, but any house which is ’large’ and ‘old’ will have loops.

Over the Yule, I visited family. One house is very old and large. These old houses aren’t really ‘houses’. ‘House’ does not sit well with it, but you can definitely think of it as a ‘dungeon’ quite easily.

Architects designed these big buildings for servants. As my cousin put it:

The paths, the layout, everything is waiting on the servants. So you become a servant, because you need to get cutlery from the side room through the butler’s door, or go out for firewood through the servant-hall. The whole place has a servant-shaped void which pulls you in.

So how many loops?

First, the butler’s door is a hidden entrance to the cutlery, booze, and other things that butlers deal with. It exits to the games room, which makes a loop.

Second, the kitchen and office have doors to each other, and a hallway. The hallway was probably intended mostly for staff, as it has a lot of storage space overhead.

Third, the ball room has two doors, simply because it’s very long.

Fourth, the smoking room has a second entrance, because if it did not, then you would have to take a long route to leave the building. Having only one entrance would also make this room a complete fire-hazard, despite everyone already insisting that I can’t smoke in the smoking room.

That’s all the loops on the ground floor, except for the windows. Once you see a building as a dungeon, every portal is an entrance.

Modern Loops

When I worked on the night shift in Glasgow’s homeless units, I was basically a zero-hour contract janitor. Modern buildings still have loops for the staff. If you don’t smoke, you might not think about the stairwells, but nearly every office in the UK has one, due to health and safety.

PC Gone Mad in Goblin Town

Returning to the caves, I think any warfare between cave-dwellers would involve smoke. I’ve played with the concept of air-quality-as-a-weapon in the Goblin Hole module. The idea is simply to light a fire where you know that the smoke will go towards the enemy. I’ve never personally gone to war against goblins, but I’m pretty sure the smoke tactic would be devastatingly effective.

Anyone with half an ounce of sense who lives underground would probably select their living space to ensure nobody can light a fire up their ass. The only solution is Jaquaysing.