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Lemmy
2012-05-20, 12:52 PM
Hello, Playground.

I'm currently DMing a 3.P game and one of the most fun aspects for me is creating the world around the characters. Of course, this includes building dungeons. Which I freakin' love.

However, creating a cool dungeon is hard. The map itself is quite easy, but creating a cool buildings with secred/locked areas and cool/creative ways to get access to them instead of just a "enter room - kill hostiles - go to next room - repeat." grindfest is where the difficulty lies.

So I come here to ask:

How do you guys create dungeons? Do you have a concept for each area/room and then build it from there? Do you create the most imporant rooms firstand then surround them with secondary areas?

Share your advices, ideas and stories about creating awesome dungeons!

Craft (Cheese)
2012-05-20, 02:10 PM
I've always worked with this model: There are three "levels" of dungeon design.

The first is the macro-concept. "A castle made of clouds", "A red dragon's lair", "Tunnels carved into the corpse of a dead god" are all macro-concepts. This primarily impact what you'll be doing with the micro-concepts (see later) and how the players interact with the dungeon while they're outside it: Getting to the cloud castle will require some method of flight, for instance.

The second is the map. This is the actual layout of chambers that the players will play through.

The last is the micro-concepts, or the fluff attached to each room. A throne room, a slave pit, an armory.


Now, the really counterintuitive part is that the map actually doesn't have to be connected at all with the macro/micro-concepts. Things actually work out for the best if you design only the crunch of the map, without giving thought to the fluff at all, then design the fluff around the map. The way to build a great dungeon is to make a generic dungeon crawl that's compelling all by itself, then adding cool fluff to each element.

dsmiles
2012-05-21, 07:00 AM
I've always gone with making dungeons living (or unliving :smallwink:) ecosystems.

Take your intended BBEG (be it a necromancer, dragon, giant, or whatever), and build the dungeon around it.
If the BBEG is some type of living thing, it usually needs to eat, right?
What does it eat? How does it get its food? Create a whole food chain to support the BBEG (and run interferance on the party).
What type of environment does it need? Is it hot, cold, or temperate? This narrows your choices down a bit.
Is it a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore? Narrows down your choices even more.
Keep asking yourself these types of questions until you have a working ecosystem. From the lichens and mosses on the walls, all the way up through the food chain to the BBEG. Once you have an ecosystem that makes sense, draw the lines around it.

Undead are a bit different. Maybe they're in the ruins of an evil temple, with a minior portal to the negative energy plane to sustain them. Maybe they need to scavenge the countryside for braaaaaaaiiiiiiiins. If it's a vampire, maybe he's/she's trying to maintain their old lifestyle. Liches could live in a tower (dungeons that go up are awesome, until they start to fall apart around the party). Necromancers could have a warren of tunnels that run underneath a local cemetary.

Also, make it a living part of the world. Monsters don't just sit in one room waiting to be slaughtered by adventurers. They move about in search of food. Intelligent ones set up defenses, run patrols and raids, and (again) move about in search of food.
Maybe you have a non-evil tribe of (insert monster race here) that trades with the locals, but is under threat by it's larger, hairier, angrier, evil neighbors.
Monsters have plans and plots that move and evolve, even when there's no adventurers around. Maybe they have a plot to invade someplace, and the party is on a time-sensitive mission to stop them. (I absolutely LOVE time-sensitive quests. It gives the players a sense of urgency.No more searching every nook and cranny, just get the job done. Come back on your own time to loot the joint.)

Yora
2012-05-21, 07:20 AM
My aproach is usually this:

1. Like dsmiles, the first question is "Who are the main inhabitants of the dungeon?", followed by "What kind of place would they look for to set up their base?"
If you know the quest is going to be about a gang of ogre bandits, then they will want to find a cave or a ruin with high ceilings. On the other hand, an insanely rich wizard would build his own palace. A noble from an old family would live in the ancestral castle of his family. Fire elementals would want to find a nice volcano.

2. Who created the dungeon and for what purpose? At that point, complete ignore who is now living in the place, unless the current owner had it build himself. Then build the place as it would orignally have been, in a way that is best for its original purpose. After that take the current inhabitants and think what they would have done with the empty place when they had decided to make it their new home. Ogres might have widened some doorways that where too small for them, while goblins might build barricades to close of certain passages.

Sudain
2012-05-23, 04:18 PM
The Dungeon Alphabet from goodman games(http://www.goodman-games.com/4385preview.html) covers this quite well for me.

I try to keep tons of small ideas (curved walls, purple torches, moss that smells like sulpher, traps under beds, etc...) and put them all together to form lots of little interesting challenges with a theme in mind. For example, One of the rooms is to have large door with a key protected by a challenge. One incarnation may have the key protected by an ogre; another incarnation may have the key stuck to a high ceiling with some amber goo. Then I put them together in a setting and re fluff for ambiance.

Frenth Alunril
2012-05-23, 06:26 PM
Personally:

When I create a dungeon, the first thing I think about is why? Why a dungeon? What purpose does it serve. Of course, this changes for every group, every race, and ever campaign, but the best thing you can do is come up with a good "why" then you can add all the intricacies. Often the races involved in the "Why" of the dungeon can make for a good set up, and then, the "Why" itself creates the map and the traps for you.

For instance. I had a renegade Conjuror/Transmuter who wanted to profit off selling baddies to different kings. He create a Deepspawn to which he fed many other monsters that were captured. Selling off the monsters that the Deepspawn created. Eventually he was overthrown by a renegade beholder he was trying to control. The Beholder took over the place. Populated it as he saw fit, remodeled by having the wizards clones turned to stone in places where they would make good pillars, etc, and then took to hosting battles of offspring just because he was bored.

There needed to be certain things, and there needed to be other less important things. Some history to fill in, what have you.

When I sent the adventurers in, it was to capture an item that was lost to the cave a long time ago. The hook was set, the mystery explained, to myself, and the adventure began.

I think, before they got to understanding the adventure, if I remember correctly. The Cleric and Wizard finally decided to have a level 16 PvP fight, and went at each other while the Beholder was attacking. Fortunately, the Cleric was able to save everyone with magic after the wizard betrayed the party.

The dungeon was great, threatening and entertaining. The party collapsed under their own stress due to the added mystery of a dungeon they had been exploring.

The lesson I took away from this is, if you know why there is a dungeon there, and why it is the way it is, and a little bit about the history, then everything else will write itself.

Salanmander
2012-05-23, 11:07 PM
I typically do campaigns that don't involve much dungeon crawling, but I have made one dungeon that was, I think, very successful.

The way I did it was similar to what Frenth said, and ended up being contrary to what Craft said. I started with the reason for the dungeon to be there: in this case to protect a powerful artifact. With that in mind, I decided that an archmage focused on each of the schools of magic had created a ward of some sort, and each one had to be overcome to reach the artifact.

Because of this, the fluff almost completely drove the crunch, because I specifically wanted challenges themed around the different schools. It ended up adding a cool metagame to the dungeon, because once the PCs figured it out they had conversations along the lines of "which room do you think /this/ is?".

So what I would say is, one way to have a compelling dungeon is to have it very strongly themed.