Making a Dungeon Patch - Sausage Making

Per this post last week, I have issued a challenge to start writing smaller dungeons as a creative exercise. I'm calling the elemental nodal building block a dungeon patch. This post is a stream of consciousness description of how I'm going to start putting together my first patch. I'll clean it up for publication (on the blog) in a future post.To recap, I've argued that a dungeon patch should have five things:1. Something that advances your dungeon checklist2. 3-6 keyed rooms3. An intentionally blank room that can hold a key for a lock in another section of the Underworld. I should call these spaces connections.4. A gate that connects to a different section of the Underworld.5. An evocative nameBasic brainstormingMy patch will start with just the germ of an interesting idea: "An animate wooden golem ventriloquist dummy torturing a dressed up halfling."I want to write patches for His Majesty the Worm, so I'm going to ground my writing in one of the dungeon seeds that are included in…