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View Full Version : Dungeons: Up, down, or sideways?



Admiral Squish
2011-07-26, 02:27 AM
Typically, dungeons have traditionally gone down. You descend to the depths of the earth, toward archetypal hell, leaving behind the surface world in search of fortunes stored deep in earth's embrace. Certainly a valid and versatile way to build dungeons, and it has the added advantage of working the collective subconscious. But it's also been done in almost every dungeon I've come across.

Then, we have dungeons that go up. Towers that soar into the clouds, or floating castles in the sky. Much less common, these dungeons allow for options that normally aren't found in a subterranean dungeons. Players can attempt to scale or fly up the sides of towers, and a well-placed trap can force players to begin their crawl all over, or simply send them plummeting to their doom. It has a nice feeling of accomplishment, as you grow in power you climb higher and higher.

And then we have 'sideways' dungeons. Not always literally sideways, these are dungeons that either involve a lot of up-and-down movement with no real preference for one over the other, or dungeons that involve almost NO up or down movement. A tunnel that goes through a mountain, a city street, or even following an overland route are all examples of 'sideways' dungeons. these are a bit harder to do, since a party can typically choose their path more freely in a sideways dungeon.

So, DMs of the playground, how do you prefer your dungeons? Down? Up? or sideways?

Halae
2011-07-26, 04:38 AM
i like to throw around a mix based on the sorts of things my characters are supposed to be doing. wizard's tower? Hell no. You have to find out where he lives, not just scour the general area for a spire. Throw in some ancient ruins that don't go underground because they have no reason to. battle out in the open! then throw an archetypical dungeon. Maybe followed by one that's part of a single incredibly huge living creature.

I do what comes to mind and what works, but I try to avoid stereotypes unless it's nice and well thought out :smallsmile:

dsmiles
2011-07-26, 04:53 AM
Sideways. Most of the dungeons I map out are ruins of some sort with a street level, a rooftop/second floor level, a basement level, and sometimes a sub-basement level. The way I design them, there are multiple entrances/exits due to collapsed structures, etc, so characters are free to move from one level to the next throughout these sprawling ruins.

I've done a few "down" dungeons as well, but I've never tried my hand at an "up" dungeon.

Morph Bark
2011-07-26, 05:01 AM
I prefer mine as a mixture. One of my favourite dungeons so far actually had its tunnels filled with portals halfway through so that when someone went through it, gravity would change as they would suddenly be in a different part of the mountain altogether.

Bob
2011-07-26, 05:06 AM
Always up, final boss: the moon.

Immonen
2011-07-26, 07:34 AM
Always up, final boss: the moon.

Using this in the next Risus game I play.

Mercenary Pen
2011-07-26, 08:39 AM
I'll generally go with whichever I feel is most appropriate, though I do generally make sure there are multiple ways through unless it is inappropriate, so tending towards sideways.

Fiery Diamond
2011-07-26, 10:25 AM
It depends.

Natural terrain, including caverns and the like: sideways.

Castles, towers, and other places where "infiltration" is an applicable word: up, and also sideways.

Ancient ruins, deliberately built dungeons, and so forth: down, and also sideways.

Unless I'm doing a tower or something that intentionally delves deep toward some source of something within the earth, I usually don't have more than three (MAYBE four) vertical layers, and often I only have one or two.

BinaryMage
2011-07-26, 06:32 PM
I think that which direction you must travel in order to progress through the dungeon has little importance, rather, what really matters is the inventiveness and to an extent realism of the dungeon. Not realism in the sense of our world (This is a fantasy game), but realism in the sense of it making sense for the dungeon to be constructed that way.

flumphy
2011-07-26, 06:51 PM
I think that which direction you must travel in order to progress through the dungeon has little importance, rather, what really matters is the inventiveness and to an extent realism of the dungeon. Not realism in the sense of our world (This is a fantasy game), but realism in the sense of it making sense for the dungeon to be constructed that way.

This is my attitude. I try to make the layout make sense in terms of the structure's original purpose.

Tvtyrant
2011-07-26, 07:03 PM
I like the idea that gravity doesn't work the same underground; stealing the Elemental Plane of Earth thing and having tunnels that link back to themselves but now your on a wall or ceiling.

HyperionWolf
2011-07-27, 11:01 PM
Im a bit fond of the "Sideways".

Temples, Ruins, Bandit Camps, that sort of thing. Altho not "Dungeon" in the old sense, they are very nice adventure sites.

But, "Down" cant get old :D be it an old prision, a Dwarven Mine...:smallsmile:

Anxe
2011-07-28, 12:48 AM
Have you considered dungeons that are circles?

Greylond
2011-07-28, 01:09 AM
A mix. Years ago in a Dungeon Magazine(forget which one) there was a Dungeon that took place on a non-Euclidean Geometry pocket universe. I'd have to look it up to remember the name of the adventure. The rooms were globes with Gravity that pointed from the center out to the floor. Tunnels from them appeared straight, to the PCs, but in reality twisted. The poor PCs never knew which direction they were actually going or even if the tunnel twisted around back to the room they just left. Twisted and fun. I wouldn't want to do that all the time but once per campaign is about right.

Knaight
2011-07-28, 01:40 AM
The closest I'm likely to get to a dungeon involves the interior of a star ship or space station. And there is absolutely no reason the gravity has to stay the same throughout the dungeon.:smallamused:

Admiral Squish
2011-07-28, 01:46 AM
I think I'm just going to put non-euclidean and weird gravity dungeons under the 'sideways' category.

Lotta people coming out in support of sideways dungeons, I gotta say.

Knaight
2011-07-28, 02:09 AM
I think I'm just going to put non-euclidean and weird gravity dungeons under the 'sideways' category.

Lotta people coming out in support of sideways dungeons, I gotta say.

Its really how we build most of the time, as a species. Towers are exceptional because they are vertical, the vast majority of buildings, particularly earlier buildings are much more horizontal than vertical. Look at most actual castles, or better yet sprawls of a city, or a village, or whatever. There are exceptions, where the design is largely vertical in some of these as well as towers, but they are very rare.

Morph Bark
2011-07-28, 05:27 AM
I think I'm just going to put non-euclidean and weird gravity dungeons under the 'sideways' category.

Lotta people coming out in support of sideways dungeons, I gotta say.

Considering the difference between them and actual sideways dungeons (my gravity dungeon was prettymuch "down" for the most part), perhaps you should add a new category.

Then you have some place to stuff my four-dimensional dungeon as well. :smallwink:

TopherKersting
2011-07-28, 07:24 AM
I ran a recent module on a Mobius strip. It was a series of twelve rooms all connected by doors, but some rooms had trapdoors in the floor that would allow access to the room on the other side of the strip--with a change of gravity.

Topher

flumphy
2011-07-28, 07:43 AM
Its really how we build most of the time, as a species. Towers are exceptional because they are vertical, the vast majority of buildings, particularly earlier buildings are much more horizontal than vertical. Look at most actual castles, or better yet sprawls of a city, or a village, or whatever. There are exceptions, where the design is largely vertical in some of these as well as towers, but they are very rare.

Also, horizontal easiest to map for the purposes of an RPG. Even if the layout of the dungeon is mostly vertical, you still need the horizontal layout of all the rooms where encounters take place. And vertical distance is much harder to represent visually on a combat grid.

chaotoroboto
2011-07-28, 01:45 PM
Even when I build vertical, I tend to draw it horizontal, just so I don't have to deal with multiple maps and people on different sheets of paper fighting each other and crap like that. So even if heights are distinguished, useful areas are rarely on top of each other.

Usually when you see vertical dungeons, it's a series of horizontal levels that are ostensibly on top of each other, but for all intents and purposes they could be laid end to end.

I think there's a reason people don't play that 3d chess game in Star Wars as often as they play, well, any other board game in the history of mankind. People's brains don't work that way.

Knaight
2011-07-28, 01:58 PM
Also, horizontal easiest to map for the purposes of an RPG. Even if the layout of the dungeon is mostly vertical, you still need the horizontal layout of all the rooms where encounters take place. And vertical distance is much harder to represent visually on a combat grid.

Oh right, maps and combat grids. I tend to forget about them, as I don't use smaller maps heavily. Continents, nations, large scale geography, that gets mapped. Buildings and such only get mapped in exceptional conditions, and even then I favor abstract zones and such.

Pokonic
2011-07-28, 08:14 PM
Sideways is a change, but mine almost always go Down. My Pcs are actualy afraid of going up after they tunnled up from the underdark right into the bottem floor of a dungien, complete with all the varius sorts of nastys you would suspect.

Qwertystop
2011-07-28, 09:10 PM
Sideways is a change, but mine almost always go Down. My Pcs are actualy afraid of going up after they tunnled up from the underdark right into the bottem floor of a dungien, complete with all the varius sorts of nastys you would suspect.

Oooh, nicely done! Most people expect the dungeons to not show up unless they're going in from the normal entrance.

That gives me an idea... Make a stereotypical "down" dungeon, but put the easiest entrance at the bottom. Maybe the plot is that miners tunneled into it by accident. Main threat slowly progresses from high-power monsters, to Tucker's Kobolds near the middle, to puzzles and traps at the top, while the enemies might as well have 1 hp.

Ormur
2011-07-28, 09:23 PM
Mostly sideways, the dungeons I've created are always there for a purpose. The first one was an abandoned dwarven settlement that connected to a tunnel through a mountain and had a spiral stairway up into a high goblin valley. I've made a few crypts and catacombs as hideouts for evildoers but they were usually tunnelled into hills or just under street level. There was also another mountain tunnel used by drow but originally a spiral shaped mindflayer hive. The last one was an underground prison complex but it was only on two levels.

Jay R
2011-07-28, 10:45 PM
I think I'm just going to put non-euclidean and weird gravity dungeons under the 'sideways' category.

Lotta people coming out in support of sideways dungeons, I gotta say.

Well, of course, if you lump the fourth dimension in with it.

Sideways is a Euclidean direction. It is inconsistent with any non-Euclidean dimension.

I once designed the dungeon of the Mathemagician, with several different four-dimensional effects, including a 4-dimensional hypercube and hyperoctahedron.

With that one exception, I think a dungeon goes either upward or downward depending on whether you live on the surface or in the underworld. A dungeon -- a true dungeon, not a pitiful abandoned surface dwelling or tomb -- is an infinitely extensive connection between the lands of Light and Dark. The further you go, down from the Light or up from the dark, the more unknown and dangerous it becomes.

John Campbell
2011-07-29, 01:18 AM
Baba Yaga's hut appeared in Dragon, ages ago, as a dungeon laid out on the faces of a tesseract.

Me, I tend to play in the sandbox. Sometimes we dig down. Sometimes we build up. Sometimes we just throw the little toy bulldozers at each other. It's all good.

dsmiles
2011-07-29, 04:37 AM
Baba Yaga's hut appeared in Dragon, ages ago, as a dungeon laid out on the faces of a tesseract.I feel old now. I remember that issue, it was in the early 80s. :smalleek:

Jay R
2011-07-29, 11:44 AM
I feel old now. I remember that issue, it was in the early 80s. :smalleek:

You don't have to feel old unless you played by the original three books, and remember each new supplement, including the one that actually introduced Baba Yaga's hut. It first appeared in Eldritch Wizardry, as an artifact, in 1976. Its only extra-dimensional power then was that it was ten times bigger on the inside than on the outside.

dsmiles
2011-07-29, 12:04 PM
You don't have to feel old unless you played by the original three books, and remember each new supplement, including the one that actually introduced Baba Yaga's hut. It first appeared in Eldritch Wizardry, as an artifact, in 1976. Its only extra-dimensional power then was that it was ten times bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Nope. I started with AD&D in '83 (at the ripe old age of 7). We had the big 3 books without the yellow spines. I now own the big 3 books with the yellow spines (and a copy of the MM without). I still feel old. All these dern kids and their sideways dungeons and rock'n'roll music. :smalltongue:

ScionoftheVoid
2011-07-29, 12:46 PM
I tend to mix it up, but don't use sideways dungeons very often. I tend to use up (a giant, mostly hollow tree dungeon, for example) or down (I've previously run a natural cave complex affected by magical temperature control - as I said at the time "everything in it is either invading or pissed off"). I need to think about sideways more, and didn't realise it until now. Awesome, excuse for dungeon design.

Jay R
2011-07-30, 09:24 AM
Nope. I started with AD&D in '83 (at the ripe old age of 7). We had the big 3 books without the yellow spines. I now own the big 3 books with the yellow spines (and a copy of the MM without). I still feel old. All these dern kids and their sideways dungeons and rock'n'roll music. :smalltongue:

I understand, but it doesn't seem like old to me unless you're saying "All these dern kids with their hardback rule books and their rock'n'roll music."

And in the original books, the dungeons always went down. The tables for wandering monsters assumed it.

Malimar
2011-08-01, 06:41 PM
Mine tend to be mostly downwards, because that's frequently simplest.

My favourite kind of dungeon, though, is probably the non-Euclidean kind, and the kind that's technically Euclidean but doesn't really fit in any of the above categories. An example, one of the finest dungeon concepts I've come across: this (http://djekspek.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d2l9fxj).