1. Choose a transformer
2. Choose a main prize 
3. Choose a guardian to guard it
4. Improvise area contents, peppering description with decor 
5. Place special areas
6. Guard treasure and prizes with locks, supply lore as keys, and don't forget monsters and traps and guardians
7. Add your own content

Transformers are features that change the way you navigate or interact with the dungeon. Manipulating them can open new areas and close off others. Think gravity reversal buttons, items that open special doors.

Prizes are the main treasures. They're relevant to your campaign, worthy of setting out to obtain specifically. Like the holy grail, the shards of Narsil. 

Guardians are big scary monsters that you shouldn't just be able to melee. Think cinematically. Think the huge boss fights from videogames. Just think of something awesome and don't worry about how to implement it.

Locks are anything that that bars the way to a reward and may be opened by a key, literal or not. If supplied an unsuitable key, a lock may present a risk: animating/releasing guardians, setting off a trap, destroying it's guarded treasure, or nothing may happen. Locks may reveal what they guard to tantalize players. 

Lore should be personalized for your campaign. Give entities named and reveal them, maybe use them as keys. Lore can be revealed in statues, texts, murals, ghostly reenactments, interrogations, etc. 

Lore (can be used as keys)

1. The ancients fed milk to the serpents and anointed their heads with it
2. The name of an entity 
3. Musical notation pictured next to a snake charmer. It is a famous hymn. 
4. The steps of a sacred dance 
5. The mudras for a sacred ritual
6. The components of a holy potion
7. The site of a holy shrine
8. The weapon of a holy warrior 
9. The face paint of a hated enemy
10. All the snakes in the world were almost killed in a fiery sacrificial pit by a god, but another god stopped it out of love for the serpent queen
11. The number of heads the serpent princess had at birth 
12. How many heads the lover of the serpent princess cut off
13. How long the serpent princess's lover digested in her stomach
14. The name of the plump white rat that ever escapes the prince's jaws
15. The process for rendering the contact poison of suspended animation stable 
16. The recipe for the contact poison of suspended animation 
17. The markings of the spear that slew the serpent prince
18. The musical notation of the dirge for the serpent prince 



The lyrics of the dirge for the serpent prince 
The words of the vow of vengeance for the serpent prince

Special Areas

1. Hatchery, incubated by giant horrible bloated thing, fed by blood tubes from sacrificial pit below obscured by its horrible encrusted bulk
   • Treasure room beyond 
   • Treasure from dead heroes on floor near burst eggs
2. Room with bowed out door straight up filled with snakes subsisting on brimstone vapors
3. Karzum, city of the vanquished: dead god statue, king, soldiers and people, men women children. In miniature except for people. Lots of places to climb. Palace has treasure taken from city. Try to take it without the key, and literally every being will animate and attack. 
4. Huge chasm, can be spanned by twisted cables that run along the ceiling, there may be snake holes in the ceiling or walls, some cables may be loose. 
5. Ziggurat with altar on top. Blood everywhere. Blood elementals commanded by a skeletal high priest. Breaking the altar reveals a chute to a treasure room. 
6. Beauty of the goddess. Vast room plated in bronze. At the end, a titanic naga statue. Viewing it transfixes you, and you see in your mind the life cycle of a serpent and the life cycle of a universe melded. You wake up hours later and cannot see a serpent without marveling at its beauty. You totally get snake worship now. If you begin to engage in acts of snake worship, gain d100% of the XP needed to level for each step you take toward the ultimate recapitulation of the full and ancient priesthood. So splashing milk on a snake grants d100% XP to level the first time you do it. Then if you sacrifice an animal to a snake, take that XP roll again, etc. 

Transformers

1. River of blood, dangerous, reroute, boats of scales
2. Hoods Ike cobra to glide around, air drafts and screw lifts 
3. Musical instruments to charm snakes or snake like structures, moving things around. Different instruments charm different snakes or structures
4. Floating rideable poison clouds 
5. Snake chains, shoot like grappling gun from anchor points, reload, repair, transport
6. Snake keys: particular species held or placed into lock for passage, must be living, pictures for clues
7. Poison as key in vials
8. Bones as keys, femurs, skulls, x#

Guardians

1. Ancient high priest Azathoth, reanimated, wants to take over cult from current leadership, will talk and cooperate if shown deference, will not tolerate disrespect
2. dragon
3. Monster king
4. Giant bone serpent 
5. commander of insane paladins
6. avatar of the dead god

1. Wavy motifs
2. Ouroboros 
3. Circles, twists 
4. Stone baths
5. Bloody altars
6. Braided hanging chains
7. Holes in surfaces, tons
8. Statues of kings, heroes, gods, priests (pro and anti cult)
9. Acrid smell
10. Bloodstains
11. Lab gear for body modification and poison milking
12. Snakeskin and human skin garb
13. Stone trees drapes with snakes or beds for humans 
14. Rivers of blood or poison
15. Tunnels, rifles and scaled
16. Scaled surfaces
17. Forking paths like tongues
18. Doors opening like jaws
19. Slight slope with blood grooves in floor or contained in glass on walls, leading to bad things 
20. Pens for humans and beasts, wavy bars
21. Storage on circular rooms like snake stomach
22. Bulging rooms like gorging snake stomach
23. Torture / medicine equipment: feeding tubes, clamps, straps
24. Serpentine columns, heads eating various things babies rabbits etc
25. Fangs everywhere, control mechanisms, inscribed
26. Mosaics of naturally colored or painted scales
27. Documents written on scales or snakeskin, bound with gut or ligament
28. Bones bones everywhere mixed
29. Things crushed from constriction
30. Eggs, man; death = bite; life = breaking though shells; shells and thin membranes everywhere

Traps:

1. Pits (snakes / spikes optional)
2. One way doors
3. Poison gas
4. Rotating floor
5. Guardian reanimation (drain the suspense-poison bath or pop off the poison IV when triggered)
6. snakes be everywhere 
7. Animated statues (snakes, followers, defeated gods, slain kings coated in statue poison-resin)
8. Sacrificial pit

1. Dragon mask
2. Magic gear of slain dragon slayers
3. Horrible spells
4. Treasure (coins, ancient, horrible stuff, shed skin)
5. Serpent magic items
6. Poison and delivery systems for it

1. Cultists
2. Mercenaries
3. Paladins driven insane
4. Priests/kings in suspended poison-animation, awaiting reawakening to dominate, possible faction interest
5. Yuan-ti 
6. Horrible experiments 
7. Tons of snakes (poison!)
8. Bone serpents
9. Dragons
10. Kobolds
11. Lizardfolk
12. Troglodytes 

Alternate title: Imperative Dungeon Stocking. 

THE TEMPLE OF THE CRAB

Area 1: (1) create mapping complexity. They enter a long staircase from a sinkhole, and the staircase spirals down along the edge of the hole. There's a door every fifty feet or so until it hits bottom in a pool (area 2). I'll also use (3) here and say that halfway down there's a landing with a relief carving showing this very place with jaws emerging from area 2, then retreating for years and years once sated by a human sacrifice. If the players sacrifice someone, they can bypass the monster. 

Area 2: (4) reward, guarded. The crab god monster will eat them if they enter the pool unless sated with sacrifice. He guards an underwater treasury accessed via moon pool (area 3). 

Area 3: reward, unguarded. The treasure guarded by the crab god is here. A staircase leads down to area 4. 

Area 4: (6) risk, plain. Here are priest skeletons, 60 of them. They will animate if their rest is disturbed and go about collecting sacrifices. 

Etc. 

I've got dungeons. I know exactly how to run them, as does practically everyone else. 

I've more recently acquired hexcrawl competence, and now I want to expand that to settlements (not that lacking that competence stopped me from muddling my way through a city campaign). 

So here is a first stab at a city procedure, together with a sketch of a city to be passed through in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. There's not enough there to use for a whole campaign, but cities in HDQ are just meant to be stopped in briefly. 

The elements of the city (look, encounters, taverns, etc) have generative procedures, but I'm not going into that now. What I'm trying to hammer out here is the procedure for actually linking up the elements of the city into a smooth, gameable thing. 

You know how it's no sweat to run a dungeon, and you're not fumbling for what to do next?

The idea is to reproduce that in the city. 

CITY PROCEDURE

1. Begin turn. 
2. Ask the players what they want to do, and tell them options if they don't have something in mind. 
   1. Tavern: here they can find rumors, bards, and rest. 
   2. Shop: shopping. 
   3. Contact: if they know of someone or a group (like a faction of which they're a member), let them know that they can get in touch with a bit of asking around
   4. Explore: if you have points of interest or random encounter tables, you can present this as an option. 
   5. Special: any special features of the district that are obvious, like if you've made a coliseum where they can participate in gladiatorial matches for cash. 
   6. Objective: anything else they want to do falls under this category. 
3. Once they've told you what they want to do, check for random encounters, if you're going to. 
4. Determine the turn length. This is how long it takes to get something done (like getting rumors from a tavern), and it's the schedule random encounters are checked on. 6 hours is fine, but scale up or down as feels right, from hours or minutes to months. 
5. If a random encounter is indicated, interrupt their action with it and resolve it. 
6. If they wish to change their action because of the encounter, accommodate it. 
7. If the action involves entering a new district (including the first time they enter a city), narrate a transition. 
   1. If it's a boring village or district, or a place you don't intend to be a play hub, then it's either "average village", or "unremarkable district"
   2. If it's not boring, take a moment to think about what makes it unique and describe one or two of those things (pink gulls, towering walls, skull-lined gates) and how the people look, if interesting (pirates, metal, bird costumes)
   3. If it's not boring, do an encounter as part of the transition from wilderness/district to district. This is part of its intro cutscene, so to speak. Examples: a rowdy duel between outlandish personalities, a market where all are masked and selling items hidden beneath velvet drapes, mounted bullfighting.


If they would encounter a special feature of the area (you've found the blue palace!), handle it as a random encounter. 
8. Cut to the interesting part of  their chosen action and resolve it. 
9. End of turn. 


Baldur's Gate
• People are aggressively insecure
• Cracked wood white sails, salt and trade, casual violence
• Pirate haven, founded by pirates, rum in everything, argh me mateys


The Sugar (rowdy market on harbor)
•  mostly sellers of sugar from all over, in all colors, for consumption and display
• +1% XP to next level if you become enthralled with a piece of sugar jewelry and simply must have and wear it (1d20 gp, random color and shape)
• Kurtz (desperate female Clint Eastwood, wants to buy a stilt-house and sell jewelry, ah, that's the life), sugar merchant (specialty: magenta, with chartreuse particles in the crystals, from an island called The Croaks where giant frogs grow legs on their backs and are essentially reversible), extorted by cult; you see two thugs demanding money and threatening her, then leaving. She'll tell you about them and will try to kill them if you don't. She'll succeed 50/50. She'll team up and join party if prospects for cash look better.
• Broadsides: buy a share in a cheaply made boat rigged with cannons. Make it a QTE game or push your luck game with death saves. Generate a captain; or, if you're trained, you can captain your own and get double the payout. 

Here is the (paraphrased) RP info from the starter set's dwarven cleric's background: 

Alignment: Neutral Good

Background: Soldier

Ideal: respect

Bond: three cousins

Flaw: doubt if the gods care about mortal affairs

The starter set elaborates on the background, saying that you disobeyed an immoral order and got suspended, and now you're out on the road wanting to dish out some violence to folks that ain't got no respect. 

I rolled some dice and ended up with Thoradin Dankil, middle aged male dwarf of average height/weight. 

After the first encounter (after 3 in-game hours, when I recovered from dropping to zero), I figured I needed to get some inspiration. I checked out my RP info above, and the flaw looked like easy pickings. 

It was. I said he went off to the woods to pray, but couldn't get the words out. Just assumed a bitter look and went back to the party. 

That's not bad. But, once that inspiration was gone and I was jonesing for another hit, I thought: how can I leverage that flaw again? Just doing the same thing would be lame; it needs to go somewhere. 

I could talk about it with another character, but, once you've done that, that's about as far as you can go, isn't it? For instance, I could ask if another player wanted to do a little scene: "How about you ask me to pray for you or a relative or something?" That would give me an opportunity to reveal my flaw. Or I could ask the GM for a scene where I see a leper or something who sees my holy symbol and asks if I can heal him. Both of those would work. Once. 

Hopefully the PHB or DMG will have some advice/techniques along these lines; but, until then, I present unto ye: 

In the first instance, show how you are dissatisfied, discontent, or unhappy with some state of affairs. 

Example: Thoradin tries to pray but can't. 

In the second instance, show the reason for that dissatisfaction. 

Example: "A stooped and slender woman approaches Thoradin with her infant son; the kid's barely breathing and is thin and wrinkled like a raisin. She asks me to pray for him. I say, if the gods really cared about what happened to him, they wouldn't have let him be born this way in the first place. She says just pray for him. I do."

In the third instance, you are going to assign yourself a goal. 

To do this, you first have to know what you want. What do you want to change? And what significant opposition or situation is stopping you from changing it? 

Then, once you know that, what single, concrete achievement do you think will make that possible? Write that down. 

Then show your work. 

Example: I think: how do I want this to go? What does Thoradin want to change about this situation? Does he want to believe that the gods actually do care? Or does he want to give up all pretense of devotion to the gods to attain some sort of personal authenticity? 

Let's say that I want to believe my god is not only powerful but good. Like Mulder, I want to believe. 

But I don't know right now how it will turn out; I'm only putting a pin in my destination; I'm not mapping the roads I'll take to get there, not yet anyway; and it's not a sure thing that I'll get there at all or that I'll even be satisfied when I get there. 

So now I know what I want to change: I want to believe that the (good) gods are actually good and do care about human affairs. The signficant opposition is: everything, all the suffering in the world, personal defeats, baddies making saving throws vs my spell DCs, etc. In other words, the opposition is internal; it's my judgments and emotions. It's a conflict essentially about changing my own beliefs. The world itself need not change for my character to overcome or surrender to this opposition. 

So what is the single, concrete achievement I think will make this change in my beliefs possible? You don't have to decide this on your own; if you don't know, the other players might have something cool in mind, or the GM might have something prepped that already fits. 

Example: I just start making stuff up. Thoradin grew up hearing stories of the Egil Sanguispire, a legendary warrior-ascetic who, because he longed to commune with the same deity that Thoradin worships, dug a pit just wide and tall enough to fully contain his body when kneeling, inscribed the walls with psalms, and filled it with the blood of the god's enemies. When it was full to the brim, he sat in it and breathed until the blood filled his lungs. After ten minutes, he emerged, vomited gallons of blood back into the pit, and the whole thing drained into the earth. He wasn't the same afterward, slew dragons, built empires, etc. They say for those ten minutes he entered the presence of the god and could speak with him as a friend speaks to a friend. That's what Thorin's going to do. He's going to get answers directly.   

Single, concrete achievement: build and drown in a pit of sanguispiration.

Now then, I've got to show my work. I'll have Thoradin start digging a pit somewhere and ask the players which one of them wants to come ask me what I'm doing. That will let the explanation enter the fiction. We'll do a montage or something.  

In the fourth instance, you've got to advance toward you goal in clearly identifiable steps, suffering setbacks, and really suffering. 

Example: digging the pit, killing the god's enemies, collecting and transporting and preserving their blood until I have enough to fill the pit.

In the fifth instance, you need pushback from the world. I'll recruit the GM and other players to pass judgment on what I'm doing and why, to change how I'm thinking. 

Example: one of the PCs brings my a drink while I'm in the pit, inscribing runic psalms into the walls. "You know you're just going to drown in there and die, right? It's just a story." How do I react? Another example: an NPC asks me "What are you hoping to learn? What could you gain from all this?" What do I say? Do I even know? 

In the sixth instance, I need to change my mind or hold steadfast. After suffering, questioning, exploring the issue through my relationships with the other characters in the game (as above), I need to make a decision: is Thoradin going to go through with his original plan, or has he been dissuaded. Then show your work. 

Example: I'm standing above the pit, having filled it to the brim with the big bad's blood, straight from his severed head. Looking very grim. Thoradin has made his decision. 

In the seventh instance, show the outcome of your decision. You reach a point of no return; your decision is tested, and you are vindicated or defeated. How you determine this can vary. There can be a whole subsystem implemented; you can ask the GM just to fiat what happens, you can roll for it, take a vote among the players. Whatever. 

Example: Thoradin walks away. He fastens the lid over the pit and walks away. However it is determined, it's determined that this will be a positive resolution for Thoradin. Maybe, as a result of everything he's experienced, he can believe in the goodness of the gods without possibly drowning to death in a pit of blood for no reason. Or maybe he ditches his holy symbol and retires or switches his cleric levels for fighter levels. 

Alternately, if he had gone through with the sanguispiration, and the resolution was negative, he could just have died, and the party finds him in the morning and holds a funeral, and it's sad. Or he has his vision, gets answers from his god, and they incense him. He emerges from the pit, sets his affairs in order, and kills himself. Or his god blows his mind, and everything is illuminated, even if he can't articulate it to his compadres, and he emerges with pep in his step and a smile on his face.

Sorry, you have a bad ending. Getting a good ending should be hard: you have to survive long enough to get it. If Thoradin dies before his moment of truth, then we probably have our judgment: the gods really don't care. See, Thoradin? You're dead. 

Part of the drama of the thing is striving after your character's goal, then suffering. The problem is that D&D doesn't model suffering very well right now. If you have hp, you're pretty much fine. If you don't, you're either about to be fine or dead. 

So you need (a) some things and people to care about that can be damaged or destroyed in the process to cause you mental/emotional suffering, and/or (b) you need to implement some sort of injury system to model physical suffering. Like every failed death save represents an injury or something. 

It could be as simple as: when you fail a death save and survive, you have an injury. GM says what it is, fictionally. Adjudicate any mechanical consequences on the spot.