Enter The Dungeon!

[Jakodee]

Caves. Catacombs. Castles. Fortresses. Sewers. Basements. Temples. Prisons. Ruins. But they are all...DUNGEONS! This is a thread for discussing dungeon design, style, gimmicks, traps, monsters, themes, trends, and types.

[Feddlefew]

I made a dungeon with rotating T-shaped corridors once.

The look on the party's faces when they figured it out was worth getting pelted with cheese doodles. :smallbiggrin:

[Rhynn]

Preface: my preferred style of dungeon is that found in old Basic D&D and AD&D 1E modules; although I also love the style found in MERP modules and HarnMaster material, but those games have different assumptions (no XP-for-GP and fewer monsters/encounters, mainly, and more purpose and internal consistency). I have a particular fondness for megadungeons, in either style (compare the original published Undermountain and MERP's Carn Dum).

I was just reading a couple of awesome articles on dungeons over at the Dreams in the Lich House (http://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com/) blog:
Megadungeon Topology (http://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com/2013/11/megadungeon-topology.html)
Dungeons with Hexes (http://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com/2013/11/dungeons-with-hexes.html)

Both are excellent stuff, and I definitely plan to use them; for my basic megadungeons, I really want to go with the "traditional" full-map style, but I am absolutely going to use the hex approach to my underworlds (my Athas Underworld and my OSR-Faerun's Underdark). I plan to use the Donjon Random Dungeon Generator (http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/dungeon/) (NB: there's system-specific versions found under the menu entries on the left!) to create natural cave maps for nodes (except, of course, the nodes that involve worked rooms). The node-and-hex approach is also perfect for creating enormous dungeons in the style of Moria.

I've also been reading about sensible OSR approaches to keying dungeons (that is, creating the contents).

In short, if you're creating a dungeon to use at your own table, you're not writing for publication; so imitating published material isn't actually sensible at all. Instead, use short keys whenever possible. Some rooms will require fuller description, but most rooms can be keyed in the style of "#12: 8 skeletons, 1000 gp".

From those short key entries and knowing the dungeon (to help your memory in the future, you can write a few paragraphs about the style of the dungeon), you can improvise everything you need during play. Anything of note you come up with can be written down in the room key/description (necessary in any case; you'll be crossing out slain monsters and looted treasure). The idea is to not front-load your work and spend time creating things you can come up with on the spot.

Some rooms, of course, will need to be keyed more precisely. A good idea is to use number and alphabetical notations in parallel: rooms keyed A...Z are "special", with more complete descriptions; rooms keyed 1...n are "standard", with short and simple keys read off a concise list and improvised on.

This simplistic approach won't work with all games, though: for instance, D&D 4E requires enormous specificity in encounter keying, which can give you fun and memorable encounters, but requires far more creative work than I'm looking to put in, even when the mechanical framework is so relatively robust and easy to use.


Also, many D&D retroclones (check out my sig for links) provide exceedingly robust dungeon-crafting and -stocking guidelines and tables: ACKS and OSRIC are stand-outs. Dungeon dressing tables can be a great help if using the above styles (although it wouldn't be that hard to create a few short tables of your own for each dungeon, to give them a specific style; probably much less work than writing full-on descriptions for all rooms!).

[Dawgmoah]

I took the tables out of the 3.5 DMG and made them into a short program. Basic but good to use but limited. So I went back to my 1st edition DMG and grabbed some of their tables for scenery; they have things like Smells, Air, etc. Then I added the charts from the AEG book, "Toolbox," and added material from the Dungeonscape book.

Though I do not use the exact output from the screen, it gives me things to work with in order to build a dungeon on the fly. Coupled with a monster list (I usually know what monsters are going to live in the dungeon, or why the dungeon needs to exist, before building the actual dungeon.)

So I can shorthand Room #1 as:

The air is warm and misty for some reason (build in a reason why).
There is a strong urine smell, probably coming from deeper in the dungeon.
There are cracks in the masonry walls, and an intermittent grunting can be heard from below. (what is grunting?)
The room is 30 X 30; some cinders and ash from a long extinct fire show the passage of people to the corridor on the left wall of the room, an iron gate with a rusty lock secures the corridor.
Several large rats glare at you and slink off upon your approach.

Took all of 30 seconds.

For years I never had the luxury of lots of time to plan out dungeons or encounters so I built tools that helped me create things on the fly. The players rarely know if it is something I have just made or something that has been laying around for years.

[Rhynn]

So I can shorthand Room #1 as:

The air is warm and misty for some reason (build in a reason why).
There is a strong urine smell, probably coming from deeper in the dungeon.
There are cracks in the masonry walls, and an intermittent grunting can be heard from below. (what is grunting?)
The room is 30 X 30; some cinders and ash from a long extinct fire show the passage of people to the corridor on the left wall of the room, an iron gate with a rusty lock secures the corridor.
Several large rats glare at you and slink off upon your approach.

Took all of 30 seconds.

:smalleek: That's shorthand?

I'd go with "#1: warm, misty, piss stink, cracks, grunting noises, ash, big rats" (the size and the gate are visible on the map). Although, honestly, that's way too much scenery in one room for me.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

The thread title makes me think of an awesome kung fu dungeon crawl with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.

[Cicciograna]

I took the tables out of the 3.5 DMG and made them into a short program. Basic but good to use but limited. So I went back to my 1st edition DMG and grabbed some of their tables for scenery; they have things like Smells, Air, etc. Then I added the charts from the AEG book, "Toolbox," and added material from the Dungeonscape book.

Though I do not use the exact output from the screen, it gives me things to work with in order to build a dungeon on the fly. Coupled with a monster list (I usually know what monsters are going to live in the dungeon, or why the dungeon needs to exist, before building the actual dungeon.)

So I can shorthand Room #1 as:

The air is warm and misty for some reason (build in a reason why).
There is a strong urine smell, probably coming from deeper in the dungeon.
There are cracks in the masonry walls, and an intermittent grunting can be heard from below. (what is grunting?)
The room is 30 X 30; some cinders and ash from a long extinct fire show the passage of people to the corridor on the left wall of the room, an iron gate with a rusty lock secures the corridor.
Several large rats glare at you and slink off upon your approach.

Took all of 30 seconds.

For years I never had the luxury of lots of time to plan out dungeons or encounters so I built tools that helped me create things on the fly. The players rarely know if it is something I have just made or something that has been laying around for years.

Would it be possible, o good fellow, to partake in the magnificence of thine fine piece of software?

[Rhynn]

The thread title makes me think of an awesome kung fu dungeon crawl with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.

Well, Tower of Death is a dungeon crawl with an undead Bruce Lee (whose scenes are lifted from Enter the Dragon) ... :smallamused: Chuck Norris was in Way of the Dragon, though, not Enter the Dragon.

[Dawgmoah]

:smalleek: That's shorthand?

I'd go with "#1: warm, misty, piss stink, cracks, grunting noises, ash, big rats" (the size and the gate are visible on the map). Although, honestly, that's way too much scenery in one room for me.

To each their own.

My own notes, for my use, get pretty cryptic so I decided not to use them in this post. But you get the gist of it.

[Warlawk]

Personally I have always loved the idea of setting a dungeon crawl inside a tesseract. The issues being
1) I'm not sure I could pull it off as a DM.
2) I don't think my players would figure out what was going on.

[DigoDragon]

Personally I have always loved the idea of setting a dungeon crawl inside a tesseract. The issues being
1) I'm not sure I could pull it off as a DM.
2) I don't think my players would figure out what was going on.

I tried it once. It is quite tricky. There are ways to simplify a map (http://www.enworld.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=13046) of such a dungeon, but when I ran it only one player figured it out. The others were a little annoyed, but just followed the one player who was able to get them to the exit.

I made my tesseract dungeon appear like a posh mansion. A puzzle in each room and all puzzles had to be solved in order to know which room had the exit (it was the waredrobe in the closet room).

[Yora]

For me, all dungeons have to have a plausible and belivable purpose. Someone once put a lot of money and effort into their construction and would have done so to get something back in return. Rarely you get such insane vanity projects like the great pyramids that have the sole purpose of prestige, but most of the time, every construction should be an investment of some kind.
If the dungeon is an abandoned fortification or city, or even an industrial facility (more common in sci-fi, but there are a couple of examples from antiquity) that has been repurposed, that's already a good reason. If it's a tomb or safe storage, it would have been build to be impossible to open.

But under no circumstance would anyone go through the effort and build massive door mechanism that can be opened by randomly pulling levers for 10 minutes. Either you want something to open easily, or you want it to not open at all.
The only kind of puzzle that makes any sense for me is sabotage. You are faced with a locking mechanism that is supposed to be impossible to open for you, but you have to find a way to destroy it anyway.

I know only of one case of a puzzle to open a door in non-RPG fiction and that is the gate of Moria. And that one wasn't suposed to be solvable. It was the security question for people who had already been given the correct password. And it seems now everyone wants to use puzzles and riddles for the sake of puzzles and riddles, even though they make no sense at all.

[Dawgmoah]

For me, all dungeons have to have a plausible and belivable purpose. Someone once put a lot of money and effort into their construction and would have done so to get something back in return. Rarely you get such insane vanity projects like the great pyramids that have the sole purpose of prestige, but most of the time, every construction should be an investment of some kind.
If the dungeon is an abandoned fortification or city, or even an industrial facility (more common in sci-fi, but there are a couple of examples from antiquity) that has been repurposed, that's already a good reason. If it's a tomb or safe storage, it would have been build to be impossible to open.

But under no circumstance would anyone go through the effort and build massive door mechanism that can be opened by randomly pulling levers for 10 minutes. Either you want something to open easily, or you want it to not open at all.
The only kind of puzzle that makes any sense for me is sabotage. You are faced with a locking mechanism that is supposed to be impossible to open for you, but you have to find a way to destroy it anyway.

I know only of one case of a puzzle to open a door in non-RPG fiction and that is the gate of Moria. And that one wasn't suposed to be solvable. It was the security question for people who had already been given the correct password. And it seems now everyone wants to use puzzles and riddles for the sake of puzzles and riddles, even though they make no sense at all.

I believe in using evolution and entropy if you will in dungeon design. There is a good chance that the current use of the dungeon, or even its shape, is the same as the original designers intended. Things change over the centuries: creatures move in and out. The walls weaken over here and a new passage is dug by a passing bulette or something.... Think about that one published module, the Sunless Citadel I think it was called. A castle fell down into a chasm and parts of it were intact.

Then also add in the different races who may have inhabited it the place over the years. I'm not talking granpa's house on the back forty falling in but a relic of a civilization dead now these last eight thousand years. Did a githyanki reconnaissance group once use it as a base? What did they leave behind or do to make it more comfortable for themselves?

I do get your point about the levers to open doors though; but once again it is just another factor of the game for you to use or ignore.

[Rhynn]

If it's a tomb or safe storage, it would have been build to be impossible to open.

Historical evidence sort of disagrees: most of the tombs in the Valley of Kings were looted. It's fairly hard to build something that's impossible to open.


Either you want something to open easily, or you want it to not open at all.

There's plenty of examples of doors you want to open only to people with specific knowledge. Like, in the real world. Keycodes and keycards, etc.

Let's say you've located your dark temple on the first level of Undermountain (AKA the Temple Level). You'll obviously want to limit access, so you can either try to replace the door with one that has a lock you've built (quite an effort) or put a spell on it that causes it to open for a password (either spoken or physical, e.g. placing an offering in a bowl) known to your people. All of those make a puzzle, in essence: find the key, learn the word, or figure out the action. The difficulty will depend on how critical it is to keep people out, and will be affected, for instance, by whether you want only specific people to get in, or want anyone affiliated with your cult to figure it out.


I know only of one case of a puzzle to open a door in non-RPG fiction and that is the gate of Moria. And that one wasn't suposed to be solvable. It was the security question for people who had already been given the correct password.

The door to Moria was absolutely supposed to be solvable, and not really a security question; it told you the password, and was more of an invitation than a puzzle. "Say friend and come on in," essentially. Gandalf was kicking himself when he got it, because the answer was literally right in front of him.


For me, all dungeons have to have a plausible and belivable purpose.

Personally, I've always felt it's sufficient for there to be an interesting reason for them... like Satan Built It (https://hugeruinedpile.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/pnurv-satan-built-my-dungeon/) (or, indeed, Hades Built It (http://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com/2013/10/death-mountain-megadungeon-concept.html)). Especially for Megadungeons, I think the "Mythical Underworld" deal is great, right down to evil doors (OD&D dungeon doors open for monsters but must be forced by PCs, and close after them).

[Jormengand]

I tried it once. It is quite tricky. There are ways to simplify a map (http://www.enworld.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=13046) of such a dungeon, but when I ran it only one player figured it out. The others were a little annoyed, but just followed the one player who was able to get them to the exit.

I made my tesseract dungeon appear like a posh mansion. A puzzle in each room and all puzzles had to be solved in order to know which room had the exit (it was the waredrobe in the closet room).

Tesseracts are fun, though you have to invent slightly odd rules for what happens when two people are operating under different gravitational pull (especially if you get a midair grapple, or whatever). It's quite fun though, and confuses the hell out of players.

[Yora]

Historical evidence sort of disagrees: most of the tombs in the Valley of Kings were looted. It's fairly hard to build something that's impossible to open.
Every measure to stop thieves and intruders can be broken. Nothing is ever completely secure. The goal of good security must always be to delay any intrusion attempt for long enough for personell to arrive at the scene, or to make entering so difficult that intruders simply won't bother with it because the effort isn't worth it.
In either case, you don't build in ways to make the work easier for intruders.

The same issue also affects traps. Traps are only a useful thing if they allert guards or slow down the enemy until guards can arrive. There is one additional possibility, which is making the traps so deadly that they simply scare away any intruder. But again, that also only works if the traps are constantly maintained and reloaded.
If you put traps into your dungeon, you should also figure out what happens after the traps are triggered and how it stops intruders. The problem with deadly traps is, that they simply kill PCs without any way for the players to do aynthing about it. Either random dice rolls say you live, or you die.

To some extend, you could probably use traps that have fallen into disrepair because the facility was abandoned by the people who build and maintained the traps. Like poison gas that has mostly degraded and doesn't kill instantly anymore. Or automatically looking doors that ring an alarm that nobody is going to hear. But that probably shouldn't be overdone either.

[Rhynn]

If you put traps into your dungeon, you should also figure out what happens after the traps are triggered and how it stops intruders. The problem with deadly traps is, that they simply kill PCs without any way for the players to do aynthing about it. Either random dice rolls say you live, or you die.

I absolutely prefer deadly traps (you're quite right that traps that wound make no sense), but it's in no way true that PCs can't do anything about them: my players learned after the first room of the Lost City module to search everything suspicious (e.g. closed doors) for traps.

Now, they keep their dwarves in front, because I'm folding in automatic find traps rolls for classes that can do it into the sloooow dungeon exploration movement; one guy is taking 10 minutes to map every 60-90' they travel, the others are taking 10 minutes to search for traps. (Combat movement, such as fleeing from enemies, doesn't get that benefit, obviously.)

I certainly agree with warning-traps; there's at least one in the Lost City module (I forget; it's the only one they've run into so far).

[Seharvepernfan]

I think the problem with dungeon design is that it acts as if people in the game are aware of the genre, "It's a dungeon with traps and monsters because we're adventurers in a world where adventurers loot dungeons." Really, dungeons ought to something else first.

The first "dungeon" in my last campaign was a haunted house that goblins were using as a cover for their warren (dirt tunnels connected to the basement). An aranea and her spiders lived up in the attic. It was technically a dungeon, but nobody ever called it that in-world.

Military bases (makes sense in a D&D world, with big flying dragons and wizards with scrying spells) now defunct and held by squatters. Holding area for monsters and people too dangerous or powerful to kill (either they literally can't kill it, or they don't want anyone to just raise it fro the dead) - the builders knew that kingdoms rise and fall, so they can't expect their own people to guard it for eternity, so they hid and protected it as best they could, and there you go. A powerful person or group wants a hidden place where they can do illegal/evil things without people knowing, so they build a laboratory or whatever under a house or out in the woods.

A good (and common) setting is after an advanced culture falls, and people are rediscovering the bits and pieces that are left. The people that built them might not have had defense against invaders in mind, or they might have, but either way many of these places are either undiscovered so far, or held by people who came later and added to any existing defenses.

You just have to work for a bit to come up with a good reason. As long as it's not a dungeon for a dungeons sake, you should be good. Adding to that, if it makes sense in context, it's good.

As for traps, I don't think they're intended or designed to keep all people out forever, just to get the ones that manage to find the place and get in. OR, they're intended to help the defenders stop invaders, and weren't intended to do the work themselves.

[Cicciograna]

The first "dungeon" in my last campaign was a haunted house that goblins were using as a cover for their warren (dirt tunnels connected to the basement). An aranea and her spiders lived up in the attic. It was technically a dungeon, but nobody ever called it that in-world.

This is a good example of the problems I have with dungeons, namely to rationalize its denizens and their interactions.
What does the aranea does in the attic? What is its day-to-day routine? I mean, it obviously hunts for prey, but it's an intelligent being so it must have some other way to spend its time. Does it read? Does it interact peacefully with goblins? Moreover, where does it dump its waste?

And the goblins, do they know about the aranea? Do they accept to foster infants near a so dangerous creature? Does the aranea hunts for their infants? Do they pay the aranea to keep away from their lair, or they tried to beat it off and failed?

These, and many other questions regarding the day-to-day lives and interactions between dungeon inhabitants are those who plague and prevent me from building meaningful dungeons. For some reason my brain paralyzes when I try to figure what the most plausible reactions to these scenarios would be.

[Seharvepernfan]

This is a good example of the problems I have with dungeons, namely to rationalize its denizens and their interactions.
What does the aranea does in the attic? What is its day-to-day routine? I mean, it obviously hunts for prey, but it's an intelligent being so it must have some other way to spend its time. Does it read? Does it interact peacefully with goblins? Moreover, where does it dump its waste?

And the goblins, do they know about the aranea? Do they accept to foster infants near a so dangerous creature? Does the aranea hunts for their infants? Do they pay the aranea to keep away from their lair, or they tried to beat it off and failed?

These, and many other questions regarding the day-to-day lives and interactions between dungeon inhabitants are those who plague and prevent me from building meaningful dungeons. For some reason my brain paralyzes when I try to figure what the most plausible reactions to these scenarios would be.

I don't find it very difficult. Here's the setup for that adventure: A knight from one kingdom loses his wife to childbirth (it's actually never mentioned), and he decides to step down from his duties, so his king and a secret order he belongs to both ask him if he wants to quit being a knight and become a sort of ambassador to the next land over. He agrees, so they set up a manor with fields in the next land over, and our knight gets to be the leader/lord of the place (which will be used to gain contacts among the wealthy in that land, act as an embassy of sorts, a temple of heironeous [the state religion], and a secret base for his secret order [who act to protect the kingdom]).

Well, our knight never remarries, and raises his only daughter on that farm/manor. I up and decided that aranea are always female and reproduce by taking human or elf form, getting preggers, then running away. Well, that happens when an aranea pretends to be a servant girl and gets with our knight. More on that later.

Eventually, when the knights daughter is about 8, they are throwing one of their usual balls with all the well-to-do's of that land, when tragedy strikes. A hextoran assassin has found the secret areas of the manor where the knight meets with those of his order, and has killed the daughter and hidden her there, but the knight does not know this. The assassin sets fire to the barn with all the horses that the girl loved, and uses illusion magic to make her screams come from it, so our knight runs into the fire to save her and dies. Then, back in the kingdom, hextorans start a war for control of the kingdom, and our embassy is forgotten. The knight's friend, a dwarf who acted as his bodyguard and architect, shuts down the manor and becomes sheriff of the nearby town, in shame over his perceived failure.

Fast forward forty years, after the hextorans lost that war, and are in the process of starting a new one in secret. They have been gathering allies and mercenaries, who are working at the edges of the kingdom. One such group, a tribe of kobolds, has infiltrated a gnome burrow and kidnapped an alchemist, who they have forced into teaching them alchemy, specifically the creation of smokepowder. The PC's employer has captured and interrogated an enemy who delivered these alchemical supplies, and they gave up the location of the manor as the location of the alchemist, so off our PC's go.

A priest of kurtulmak, one of the tribes leaders, oversees the operation in the basement of the manor (which he knows about through his hextoran employers, whose assassin ended the place), where they have told this kidnapped gnome that they have his family, so he better do as they say (he's been holding out as long as he can). The kobolds hired a local tribe of goblins to guard the place, paying them with a kobold designed warren of dirt tunnels that connect to the manors basement (better than the goblins could build).

The goblins lost a member or two to the aranea and her spiders, who live in the attic and upper floors of the place, before the tribes leader could strike a deal: you get the upper bits, we get the lower bits, and if you help guard the place against intrusion, we'll bring you food. The goblins have a couple rangers with wolves, so they manage to bring back deer (they also have tons of rats). The aranea used to hunt in the fields and nearby forests at night with her spiders, but her spiders got a centaur child, which she wouldn't ever knowingly kill, and now theres an angry centaur parent out there in the woods, waiting for the aranea to show herself, so she agrees. She spends her time in the manor, mostly bored now. She has a journal which explains some of the plot (written in sylvan). I never considered where it dumps its waste, but there are plenty of places to do so nearby.

Turns out the aranea is the knights daughter as well, and is using the manor's haunted reputation to live in what she sees as her birthright (she even wields the knights sword). Also, yeah, the manor was (and still is) haunted, though the knights ghost has been laid to rest by the nearby towns' priest (leaving a few "haunts" [undead traps] and the ghost of the daughter, who is harmless). Both sides know that the knights ghosts isnt around anymore, and that the girl is harmless. They even use illusions of ghosts against the party.

Further complicating things, the tribe of goblins (about 32 in total), is split roughly down the middle into two factions, secular and religious. The secular faction is led by the tribe's leader, a Neutral goblin rogue, who just wants prosperity for his tribe, the other half is led by an evil adept, who wants to use her tribe to please her god. She created a new spell that uses willing martyrs as walking bombs, and the kobolds are interested. She has made six of the tribe members into martyrs under her direction, and has a few other lower level adepts who are loyal to her. The three rangers don't lean to either side.

Besides a couple unrelated fights (an ooze creature created by the gnome in the cistern under the basement that leads to the creek), a couple firebreathing pigeons on the roof (a gag joke that never came up, since the PC's never attacked them), a couple half-starved young wolves in the courtyard (that the goblins weren't using), and some bandits from town who always wanted to loot the manor but never did because they were afraid of ghosts (but who follow the party to ambush them after they loot it), that pretty much covers it.

[Cicciograna]

I don't find it very difficult. Here's the setup for that adventure: lots of stuff
That is very interesting. That is what I miss, the ability to come up with so many threads :smallfrown: