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Totally Guy
2009-02-13, 05:10 AM
I like dungeons and I'd like to use more of them but I'm having trouble thinking of a way to introduce them into a narrative again.

So far I've used:
Old dungeon under the city holds a secret as to how the city was founded.
Castle was magic air-tightness sealed and sunk into the bottom of a lake to stop people getting the macguffin.
And Over-large fast flowing sewer system, accessible by a party on a raft only this dungeon held a Aboleth and it's servants.

They've all worked quite well, but what I'd also like to try is having a dungeon as an ongoing obstacle. I don't mean that it should take 5 sessions to solve, I mean it should be a reoccurring element of the overall adventure. However once the party start to think "this session we're doing the dungeon" they probably won't find a reason to leave on their own before the dungeon is done.

Share the dungeon concepts you've seen or done and tell me anything special about the role the dungeon played in the story.

arguskos
2009-02-13, 05:45 AM
Well, I have a unique anti-magic dungeon that a key NPC lich is trapped in... though, it's really only there to be anti-magical and a prison for this lich guy.

I've used the "dungeon as a prison" idea a lot actually. One time, I had a dungeon that was a series of nothing but trapped chambers linked by portals that only activated when you defeated the traps/puzzles in the room. The final portal took you to a room with a chained god in it, who defended a world-killing artifact from ever being released. The party was hired to clear out this dungeon, not knowing that they A). couldn't leave once they entered, and B). the dungeon held this artifact of world-slaying.

That campaign sadly ended before they reached the god. I was so looking forward to it too, since the god was a sad, sad fellow. He didn't have any friends, and was there since before mankind existed.

bosssmiley
2009-02-13, 05:49 AM
Dungeon. By the Gods, Why? (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Dungeonomicon_(DnD_Other)/Constructanomicon#Dungeons:_By_the_gods.2C_why.3F) from "The Dungeonomicon"
Temples, Sites, Ruins, and Empires (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=36201&start=25&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=) - A Gaming Den thread trying to rationalise megadungeons as monster generators and power foci. It is very good.

Some fun dungeons I've been following recently::
Stonehell (http://poleandrope.blogspot.com/2009/01/brief-history-of-hell.html) - a giant behavioural experiment
Dwimmermount (http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-megadungeon-dwimmermount.html) - a dungeon designed to channel and tap magical power
The Dim Expanse (http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2008/04/dim-expanse.html) - an arcane prison

charl
2009-02-13, 05:55 AM
I once had a dungeon modelled after that underwater city from Star Wars episode 1 (yuck!). The idea was that the PCs were acting diplomats for a local city state (of which one player was the elected mayor, it's complicated), and the underwater bubble city was constructed by extra-planar gnomes and then sent through a portal to the prime material some few hundred years ago. When the players arrived large parts of it had been left uninhabited by the dwindling population. Those parts made for great dungeons, with corridors linking magical bubble rooms with hostile aquatic monsters and old artefacts.

Oracle_Hunter
2009-02-13, 06:08 AM
Ancient ruins do a lot of work for me. People built these buildings to live in, and after they all died, monsters & other scavengers moved in. Of course, all of my worlds have some manner of "lost civilization" buried in them, so that's not too hard.

Another fine way is your "city built on a dungeon" route, but more so. People have always built on the ruins of older buildings; they're often in handy places and, if the construction was good enough to last 100 years, it's good enough for you. Maybe the initial owner bought up the shell of an old building, and discovered an honest-to-god dungeon below. Being a sensible man, he sealed up the entrance and forgot about it. Now that building has changed hands a half-dozen times and the current owner just discovered a bricked-up doorway in his basement.

Heck, sometimes people will take the core of an old dungeon (like a really well-made vault) and build up their own dungeon around it - as an organizational base or somesuch. These "dungeon cores" can include catacombs, natural caves, shrines, and the like.

Oh, and kobolds. Those suckers just love building dungeons! :smalltongue:

Harperfan7
2009-02-13, 06:26 AM
The adventure I'm currently DMing has a dungeon that was a shrine to an illegal religion during the last empire to rule the area (long since vanished). It lies under an abandoned stone village on the plains, which is currently occupied by a war party of hobgoblins who are in a war with gnolls and grugach. The only entrance to the dungeon is inside a large barn in the center of town, in which there is an old dried up well that the hobgoblins are using as a makeshift shrine to their own god. The bottom of the well is missing part of its wall, but this is barely visible from the top. The hole leads to the shrine. They need to get into the shrine, find something on the altar, and get out as quickly as possible. There was an intelligent portal door inside the dungeon that would only let the pcs use it if they convinced it to.

Another dungeon I DMed was a series of caves inside the walls of a river canyon with a hidden entrance. Halfling river pirates operated from it, but they only pirated because the tribe of kobolds that had their wives and children held captive forced them to. The difficulty of the adventure wasn't the dungeon or the enemies, but the delicacy of the situation. The caves had sandy floors, differing elevations, and wide pits only crossable by planks the halflings retracted when they came back. The halflings used cargo barrels and overturned rowboats for cover. A pixie native to the area learned about the situation and supplied the halflings with memory loss and sleep arrows, so they didn't have to kill anybody, and anybody they stole from didn't remember what happened.

Hal
2009-02-13, 07:43 AM
Dungeons don't have to be caves/ancient ruins, either. I did one dungeon where a wizard made his home in the basement of a burned out church. He had to make a lot of modifications to make it dungeon-like, so that really had to show in the environment.

Another one I did may not be considered a "dungeon" at all, more of an outdoor maze. It was a series of hills in a region which were very tall, with thick foliage between the hills. Walking between the hills left open the possibility of ambush, but walking over the hills made you an easy target to the goblins who infested the foliage.

Totally Guy
2009-02-13, 08:01 AM
Well, I have a unique anti-magic dungeon that a key NPC lich is trapped in... though, it's really only there to be anti-magical and a prison for this lich guy.

I used a Lich prison dungeon too. Inside was the evil Melech-Kal.

Originally the dungeon was made for the defence of his Phylactery. He placed his treasures down there and he put magic circles in the rooms so that his minions could summon monsters from the phylacteery room. An adjacent room contained a summoning circle too and he occassionally used it to hoard gold there when he was away pillaging.

On one such away mission he was defeated by a Paladin called Voltus and a Rogue/Wizard called Tom. Voltus was trying to redeem an evildoer in mentoring Tom. After defeating Melech-Kal they sought out his Phylactery and headed straight to his stronghold.

The stronghold was a slave based town. They snuck in and found the Lich's dungeon. They conquered it and found the Lich once again, so they killed him. The were unaware the Phylactery was the central column under the whole city. Tom wanted the gold but Voltus told him there were more important things to discover such as the nearby secret phylactery.

Tom thought about something and reasoned that there was something more important than the gold and that was the city above.

Tom sealed the Phylactery and Gold rooms with Voltus still inside searching for the phylactery. It was just as good as any other dungeon wall.

Tom freed some of the slaves. And made himself Mayor of the newly founded town of Mansworth, so named as it was founded on the worth of a man.

Voltus stayed in the lowest level. Killing the Lich every time he started to regenerate. Unable to destroy the column and town up above he lived a boring life only ever killing the Lich. Eventually he became undead himself. But his paladin mind was strong enough to stay himself.

About 70 years later there was a breach. The PCs had shown up. Voltus was told by Melech-Kal it was his followers coming to free him and so Voltus activated the summoning circles on the path down. What he didn't know was that Melech-Kal was able to put a few gold coins from his hoard into each monster. That would encourage whoever it was to come down further...

charl
2009-02-13, 08:07 AM
Pretty good way to defend your phylactery, though personally I would just bury it in some random spot in a desert or forest, where no one would find it.

Wizard_Tom
2009-02-13, 10:15 AM
My favorite dungeon was based around the idea that an old wizard in a major city had recently died, and the PCs were contracted to clean out his attic and basement (which were much bigger on the inside then the outside).

Thane of Fife
2009-02-13, 10:37 AM
Hmm, I've run caves, mutated wizards' schools, ancient ruins, catacombs, you name it.

But I think that my favorite would be my Shattered Atheneum (http://www.strolen.com/content.php?node=4409). It's an enormous underground continent-spanning library which has fallen into disrepair over the centuries, to the point where it has essentially split into multiple dungeons.

I'd also highly recommend How to Host a Dungeon (http://planet-thirteen.com/Dungeon.aspx). It's an amusing evolve-a-dungeon kind of game.

Lappy9000
2009-02-13, 10:52 AM
I prefer towers actually. My favorite was the gargoyle tower with the entire building being some 8 stories or so, filled with gargoyle statues. They're all mundane statues, until the PC's take the final treasure in the blocked-off final floor. An entrance to the roof opens, and the PC's jump through to notice the hundreds of gargoyles swarming on the outside of the tower, turning it into a walking gargoyle colossus. It was one of those dungeons that had no real world reason to exist other than it was totally awesome. Those are the best sometimes.

It was amazingly epic and fun :smallcool:

Telonius
2009-02-13, 10:53 AM
A sensible (though boring) reason for a dungeon to exist: it functions as a dungeon. It was built to hold someone or something. It has good security, traps, guards, and monsters because it's supposed to prevent the person from getting out, and also to prevent outsiders from breaking in and rescuing him. It's usually underground or in some hard-to-reach place because that makes it harder for the person to escape and harder for other people to break in.

So, the question then is, what are you guarding? It could be anything important to the plot. Trapped comrade, trapped enemy that you need to pump for information, trapped demon who's posing as a friend, trapped demon that the cultists are trying to free, fragment of the Lost MacGuffin of Ultimate Explodey that you need to find and destroy, broken Fargate to the plane of Sticky Mess that the mad scientist is trying to reactivate. Anything, really.

Though one idea I had, was a dungeon created as a spiritual test by a group of pacifist clerics. The initiate would go in, and be told to get ready for a spiritual struggle, and that the greatest foe of the world is at the heart of the dungeon. The dungeon is in a timeless plane, and would go on indefinitely, with increasingly more difficult creatures. Anyone who fights and kills the monsters gains illusory XP and treasure for as long as they're in the dungeon. But if they subdue the monsters without killing, the XP and treasure is real. If a character dies fighting a monster, they end up back at the beginning with the Cleric, who tells him to go back and face the challenge again. But if they either turn back or willingly let a monster kill them, they've beaten the dungeon.

Sstoopidtallkid
2009-02-13, 10:59 AM
One of my DMs set a campaign in an underground city surrounded by an infinite, ever-changing dungeon. Fairly interesting.

valadil
2009-02-13, 11:09 AM
I keep finding it harder and harder to include dungeons. They're almost always based on some sort of MacGuffin (which can include people). The thing is, I use dungeons as a crutch. When I don't want to deal with world plot, the players go into a hole in the ground under a rock for a while and fight stuff.

Hal
2009-02-13, 11:14 AM
I used a Lich prison dungeon too. Inside was the evil Melech-Kal.

Originally the dungeon was made for the defence of his Phylactery. He placed his treasures down there and he put magic circles in the rooms so that his minions could summon monsters from the phylacteery room. An adjacent room contained a summoning circle too and he occassionally used it to hoard gold there when he was away pillaging.


I did the opposite in a game. It was a dungeon housing a lich and his phylactery, but it was meant as a prison. The lich had put some really nasty curses on his phylactery, so that whoever destroyed it was in for a world of hurt (100mi. radius death spell). So, his vanquishers just sealed him up with the hope that no one would ever find it.

This actually made for some interesting puzzles for the players. Most were non-lethal, as the creators wanted to be able to access everything in the dungeon. There were a lot of work-arounds for the puzzles as well (the creators would know how to bypass them). The players never found them, alas.

Flickerdart
2009-02-13, 11:17 AM
100 miles radius? Aside from Locate City Bomb, that's an uber-Epic spell. And if the Lich could make those, then why couldn't he just crush everyone who opposed him?

Mando Knight
2009-02-13, 11:41 AM
Here's a justification for a dungeon:

Ancient not-completely-ruined-yet-seemingly-unoccupied-at-first-glance ruins.

The adventurers stumble upon an impressive piece of architecture, and want to check it out, possibly spending the night on the precipice. Describe it as looking about a millennium old, though still regal and intact. Then they delve inside, and it's a beautiful, massive building stretching both far above and below the ground. Then they find the main hall... in which there are some kobolds, who are trained in using the building's defenses. The adventurers continue along, exploring the fortress, encountering a few kobolds. All of the kobolds have similar battledress, and fight as if they were trained, like a human might train hunting dogs...

...Then they find the architect and financier of the complex. And he measures nearly a hundred feet from snout to tail. The kobolds were only trained because the owner was bored for a couple dozen years. Same with the last dozen or so levels. The question is, fight the dragon... or amuse it?

Hal
2009-02-13, 12:06 PM
100 miles radius? Aside from Locate City Bomb, that's an uber-Epic spell. And if the Lich could make those, then why couldn't he just crush everyone who opposed him?

For starters, it's "rule zero" magic. That is, I just sort of hand-waved it into existence. (The lich had centuries to work on it, right?)

Second, the people who took him on were only able to conquer him by joining together. After he was taken down, they scattered and grew old (and died, in some cases).

Third, one of the key points in the campaign for the players was to figure out how to separate the lich from his power. Letting him have his phylactery was out of the question. If it could be sealed away from him, the PCs would have a shot at taking him out.

FWIW.

TheCountAlucard
2009-02-13, 02:33 PM
I like dungeons and I'd like to use more of them but I'm having trouble thinking of a way to introduce them into a narrative again.

Fear not, fellow raconteur!

One that I've done had a mansion owner with a vast series of ancient catacombs beneath his ancestral residence on the edge of town. However, after his death, the mansion was seized by a local noble, although it has yet to be reinhabited due to "some tax issues."

CarpeGuitarrem
2009-02-13, 02:48 PM
I've used a burial crypt as one dungeon (including a massive chamber fight against a bunch of skeletons who were the Shadar-Kai-imprisoned people buried there, who needed to be freed). And one of my friends actually made a giant Dracolich into a dungeon. That one sounded cool. (Somewhat like Lord Jabu-Jabu from Ocarina of Time)

Reaper_Monkey
2009-02-13, 04:16 PM
Dungeons are easy to include once you get into the mind set of them. I personally use the term "dungeon" much in the same way as the new MMORPG community seem to use the term "instance". I.e- "A self-contained area in which a task of significance takes place".
Being self contained means you can plan out a lot more, and it means things have to be done in the order you want them too (although players have a tendency to skip things you hoped were unskippable anyway, had one group scale the walls of a castle to talk to a king, instead of making one bloody diplomacy check after a simple gather information check, but nevermind, its more interesting that way anyway)

When viewed this way a classic cave or underground labyrinth is a dungeon just as much as castles and keeps are (yes quite commonly used also),
but also just as much as a city (or section there of, like sewers or slums),
or a church (catacombs/wine sellers, even the church itself if there are enough undead outside),
or a courtyard (hedgerow mazes and animated plants are fun),
or a river crossing (with bridges/caves/cliffs/rapids/sink-holes/deltas which require lots of coordination to traverse safely, often with water elementals or amphibious creatures, if you've got a lot of height then sometimes flying creatures too),
or a wizards tower (wizard can be dead or not, still going to be interesting),
or metal works (large complexes with air-vents and forges and possibly mines nearby/attached to make for interesting layouts and fun locomotion at times),
or a ship (pirates anyone? maybe just retrieving an item which involves getting to a secluded floating craft and on board),
or an academy (mad apprentices, experiment gone wrong, retrieving research without being discovered),
barracks (easy to formulate things there),
villages (yes, they are dungeons too at low levels (preflight), more so if the inhabitance don't like unwelcome guests or do a lot of animal trapping),
etc...

The list goes on, a dungeon is anything that you can draw on a map and not have to worry about what's outside of it as it doesn't play a role in what's going on. Watch horror films for classic examples of potentially deadly areas people get stuck in, action films for how to keep people from leaving even if though they other wise could (think Die Hard here), and of cause adventure films for interesting locations and reasons for them being there.

Planar travelling is a good way of creating "bubble" universes too, as you often want to get in and get out and so there is little else to distract the players with, its also easier to keep players in line when they get to higher levels (never have my group ever regretted selling a "useless" item quite as much as when they sold the Boots of Walking I gave them. Just to find that they were the only thing they could use to get around an air plane they needed to go to because they allowed normal walking even in extremely high winds. A condition they had not expected when they had identified the item and glared at me for giving them such a clearly useless item :smallamused: but it meant I didn't have to worry about my warlocks 24/7 flight while they were there.)

Dungeons are basically an excuse to plan things out in more detail and not worry too much about rail-roading your players as they expect it (and if they are worth their salt they will get around anything you throw at them in ingenious ways you'd never even considered possible).

So go mad, not every dungeon has to be underground or classically trapped to the back teeth, think about the function of any place, and then think of a reason why the players have to go there. Even if its just a case of it being in-between position A and B (hell, there's that classic level 1 dungeon where your in a storm shelter weathering out heavy rain and you stumble across stuff of interest), don't be afraid to make them short lived, as long as its a challenge that gets your players thinking and lets them sink their weapons into some unfriendly's they'll be happy, I guarantee it. :smallsmile:

Archpaladin Zousha
2009-02-13, 04:23 PM
I'm wondering how to handle a massive dungeon environment.

In our homemade campaign setting, the campaign takes place in The Vale of Thorns, a nation-sized briar patch with a mean streak a countryside wide, with several isolated city states and vilalges that try to eke out an existence in this hostile rosebush.

The thing is, the entire Vale rests atop a massive ruined city, that is now infested with undead. It's generally intended for the players to make short forays into this place, known as the Labyrinth, to get from one place to another, or just fight undead. The thing is, this place is a nation-sized city. How can one make that work? And so it's clear, it wasn't underground when it was still habitable. Some cataclysm buried the city before the Thorns grew.

Is something like our Labyrinth even logically possible?

Atamasama
2009-02-13, 05:14 PM
Is something like our Labyrinth even logically possible?

The first question is, who built it, and why would they build it the way they did?

That's why I love temples. :smallbiggrin: You can justify almost anything if it's in a temple. Temples are designed by people who are devoted to a particular religion or philosophy, and often are designed to honor the god/principle they are built around, and sometimes the temple itself is meant to enlighten pilgrims or residents.

Imagine a temple that once belonged to an order of monks, it is fully of dangerous traps meant to keep them on their toes to improve their training (and because they haven't been properly maintained, the safety features no longer work so they are now deadly). A temple to a god of Order may have every room have perfect dimensions, a temple to a god of Chaos would have crazy doors to nowhere or rooms with low ceilings, etc.

In your specific example, the culture that created the city built it that way because it made sense to them. Perhaps what seem to an outsider to be unnecessarily-branching hallways was a way for the old culture to properly organize storage rooms. Perhaps they had forbidden areas of the city that you could only reach through a maze, and unauthorized people who entered the area would get lost and starve to death before they got to the forbidden part.

This is always the most fun part of designing a dungeon to me; not actually putting in monsters/traps/rooms, etc. but coming up with the reason for its existence. You can even make that reason a mystery that the party needs to solve to advance the campaign story (if that's your thing).

Prometheus
2009-02-13, 06:17 PM
One dungeon was full of undead, but the way I did it made it seem like it detoured into a horror campaign (without the danger) but seamlessly returned to traditional fantasy. It was an abandoned fort built into the mountainside that was held by human soldiers but goblins had besieged it and in the process inadvertently collapsed it. Knowing they were cut off from supplies the goblins left them to starve. The PCs pass through the ruins of the surrounding time, complete with destroyed homes and corpses bloodying a now stagnant fountain. The PCs scale the only remaining tower, pick the lock, and start to climb down the spiral staircase when it breaks and takes them down to the ground floor. They immediately notice that the entire fort is filled with smoke and the revolting smell of dead flesh. As the cross over scored planks, it breaks and they fall below into a pit of rotten meat, where it had been previously stored. After defeating the swarm of maggots and crawling out, they investigate the rest to discover that a) the noblemen had committed suicide early on and their possessions were guarded by an incorporeal undead, b) that a wounded and slowly dying man had written his last words in blood on the wall (lines from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner)), c) the commoners had been sealed off in the fire and forced to survive on cannibalism, the "victor" of which had become a fiery ghoul, and d) the soldiers had died guarding their king and priest and remain vigilant even in undeath (this is where the treasure is). The PCs really enjoyed the different flavor, but were also happy to surface and forget it all.

Ones the PCs ran afoul with the law in a way I did not expect them too, so the next session was the half of them that got caught breaking out while the half that didn't broke in. It was a highly entertaining and actually fit really well with the story.

Xuincherguixe
2009-02-13, 06:22 PM
I was watching cities of the underworld. Which is a series about... basically "stuff under other stuff." This episode was about Paris.

Between the Subways, Sewers, Irrigation Tunnels, Limestone quarries, and Bunkers, it had a very extensive underground. Even more fittingly, there was a section with millions of skeletons. There were more skeletons then there are people living above. This is because there's not enough space to bury everyone. So after a few years, they dig up people's graves, and move the skeletal remains here.

Naturally, subways and bunkers wouldn't fit, but the rest might.

The same "dungeon" could even be used several types. Just different sections.


The players could even be commissioned to clear out whatever unspeakable terrors lurk beneath so that the sewer system could be maintained.