Setting up Exploration Dungeon Crawls

[Yora]

I've never been much into dungeon crawls in the past as I neither find the pursuit of XP nor gold very interesting goals that lead to fun and unexpected roleplaying. But I really like the idea of exploring old places to uncover their secrets and learn new things about the setting, and dungeon crawling in big caves, ruined castles, or remote valleys in the wilderness seems like a fitting kind of adventures to do that.

I have no real experience with running large dungeons that are not simply an enemy base and most published dungeon crawls seem to be funhouse dungeons that consist of various rooms with quirky puzzles, which exist more or less in isolation from each other. That's not really what I would be after.

The only dungeon crawls with a unified theme that I know are The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun and Death Frost Doom, which both look quite intriguing but I have not seen them in action yet. Maybe I also should check out The Lost City, though I heard that opinions are devided about the execution of that one.

What are good methods and practices to make dungeons that provide some meaty substance for parties who are out braving the dangers of the world to learn about its lost and hidden secrets?

[SilverLeaf167]

You and I are definitely in the same boat here. Don't know about you, but one of my main issues with dungeons is that I just can't figure out how to make them challenging, fun and "realistic" (verisimilar?).

If they're just natural caves or abandoned ruins, what are all those dangerous hazards stuffed in there? If they're custom-made dungeons full of convoluted deathtraps and puzzles, it should've been trivial for the creator to make them basically impassable (calling the dungeon an intentional "test" feels a bit tired to me). And if there are neither traps nor monsters, what differentiates it from a set-piece, or a thinly-veiled info-dump? The players probably wouldn't worry nearly as much as I do, but that nagging feeling really makes dungeon design difficult for me. There are ways to work around all of these issues, but it can be tiring at times.

One thing I like is introducing an outside factor to the dungeon, some reason it's particularly dangerous at the moment. Maybe there are other, possibly hostile people exploring it and (intentionally or not) hindering the party. Maybe the event that revealed the entrance has also affected the insides, blocking passages or messing up enchantments. Maybe the whole reason the party needs to go in is to clear a recent monster infestation, discovering the dungeon's deeper secrets in the process. This basically answers the first question I presented above. Some of these options also have the additional benefit of discouraging the party from wasting too much time and resting after every encounter.

I feel like a lot of dungeons really should be much larger, more confusing and more maze-like than is practical to represent on any sort of grid. In those cases I think it's best to just map out the "relevant" places and simply wing the areas where a grid isn't immediately necessary (if you use one in the first place).

[GloatingSwine]

What are good methods and practices to make dungeons that provide some meaty substance for parties who are out braving the dangers of the world to learn about its lost and hidden secrets?

Try thinking through the following questions:

1. Who built this?
2. What was it for?
3. What happened to them?

That's how you get lost and hidden secrets. It's how you decide what hazards and traps make sense, and if the "what happened" has a nonzero chance of happening to the party (or still being there) then you provide a nice doomy challenge for the party to overcome which is directly related to your lost and hidden secrets.

(Also: Go and watch the design club video series on Durlag's Tower on the Extra Credits youtube channel. They're technically talking about a videogame level but the principles of encounter design can easily be backported)

[Yora]

Well,I do have some answers to at least these two obstacles:

A good explanation for having a lot of creatures and magic stuff in a place that is supposed to be ancient and abandoned is the idea of the Mythic Underworld. These dungeons are not simply ordinary caves or ruined castles but supernatural places on the border between the ordinary world and magical otherworlds, or located in a different reality altogether. (http://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.de/2011/12/musings-on-mythic-underworld.html) They follow internal rules and laws of nature, but not the rules of the nature the PCs are familiar with. It can be a justification for why there's a high concentration of strange magical phenomena all very close to each other, and why numerous powerful creatures spend centuries crammed into a relatively small area without wanderin off in boredom or killing each other. The monsters in a mythic underworld are to some degree more like spirits than animals or people. Time also regularly seems to have little impact on life in a magical dungeon, with creatures surviving on remarkably little food and ancient machines inexplicably still being in working conditions. Mechanisms can be the work of past explorers and sorcerers who had attempted to utilize the unique supernatural properties of the dungeon for their own esoteric goals.

It's not always an appropriate approach, for example when making regular bases and outpost for various groups of other normal people. But a small ogre lair could be enhanced greatly by giving it a coat of supernatural paint, and villainous sorcerers and their minions could set up shop in the mythic underworld, with the normal mercenary guards being appropriately creeped out by their unnatural surroundings. You can have a campaign with a very serious mood that still is full with funky craziness.

To make dungeons properly huge, I really like to abandon the idea of mapping everything out in 5-foot squares. It's just not practical to do and the result always looks weird because you never get all the plumbing and other infrastructure right. The most elegant solution I've seen for this is to make them pointcrawls (http://hillcantons.blogspot.de/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html). You basically make maps like bus or subway line maps that only show the various interesting locations the party might visit plus the connecting paths between them, while pretty much ignoring the actual geography. (This system of mapping goes back at least to the Roman road system.) Each of these points of interest can have its own grid map of various sizes. All the endless tunnels of identical doors leading to identical homes or cells can be ignored. All the interesting stuff is going to happen at gatehouses, throne rooms, vaults, royal chambers, and so on.

[Rogozhin]

If you're willing to read a massive amount of content on the matter the Angry GM has a series of articles about building a mega dungeon that goes so far in depth on this it's almost absurd. Great read though if you can get past the typos.

[thirdkingdom]

Dwimmermount is a great example of a dungeon with a past that is uncovered as the adventurers delve deeper.

[Yora]

Most megadungeon advice probably applies to kilodungeons as well.

One thing I am always unhappy with in videogames in particular is the way information is given to the players and the same methods regularly show up in RPGs as well. There's the villain monolog before a fight (or after a fight before the villain runs away taunting the heroes), left behind letters (or audiologs), and item descriptions.
Exposition in boss fights doesn't really work when the players are able to interrupt and talk back, and item descriptions that include their backstory just don't make any sense.

What I think probably comes across as more believable is to have NPCs who the players can talk to but who only know a few details that are new to the players, not the whole story the players try to find out. What NPCs don't know they can not share, regardless of how persuasive the players get.

Instead of letters and journals, I favor inscriptions. Stone tablets are nice, bronze tablets are cool, and gold tablets are really fancy. Crude scratches in the rock of the walls can also be interesting. Inscriptions are ways through which the creator of the place can communicate information that he wants future visitors to know. Usually it's for bragging, wanting future generations to know who deserves the credit for these cool things. Or it can be warnings that tell visitors to come back.
The nice thing about such inscriptions is that the inscriber made assumptions about what future readers would already know, but it's very unpredictable what information might become lost or forgotten with the ages. This means you can have inscriptions in which one part of the text makes sense, one part might make sense if the players return later with new facts learned elsewhere in the dungeon, and one part that will never be decipherable. A nice aspect of this is that the players can never be sure if a sentence is of the second or third type and whether the key to make sense of it is still hidden somewhere to be found. There can also be some doubt on whether something actually means what it obviously seems to mean, or if it will perhaps mean something different if they know some additional context.

I think that all the information that can be gathered from NPCs, texts, and the environment should never reveal 100% of the place's backstory. Mystery is fun, while the full solution is rarely as interesting as the speculating ended up getting. It's always better to have people think that they probably got it mostly right instead of letting them know that they have it completely right. In some cases it could be fun to reveal 95% of the fact, while in others it might only be 30%. I think leaving with minimal answers is probably the most satisfying with dungeons where the players are just happy that they escaped alive from the freakish stuff they encountered. It still counts as a success. Little risk with only small fragments of knowledge probably wouldn't be very satisfying. It might instead feel like the party got stuck and unable to continue rather than having reached a conclusion.

[GloatingSwine]

I think leaving with minimal answers is probably the most satisfying with dungeons where the players are just happy that they escaped alive from the freakish stuff they encountered. It still counts as a success.

So you're making Dark Souls then?

[prufock]

I would think of an exploration-only game (as in, no combat, no traps) in terms of a mystery. There is some unanswered question (what happened to the wizard who lived here? for example), clues as you explore, and an answer that can be deduced from the clues. There are no real dangers in this type of game, but "winning" basically means solving the mystery.

[Yora]

I think Dark Souls games actually have almost the complete information somewhere in the game. A lot is just hidden really well or lines that an NPC says only once at a point when it's still incomprehensible. Relying primarily on item descriptions to provide information also doesn't help things.
The pieces are all there, but the games make putting them together really hard.

When you do a first blind playthrough, the games certainly feel like that, though. (Which adds to the replay value.) But with Dark Souls you have to consider that it's primarily a combat game that is still fun without understanding anything that's going on. If you run a dungeoncrawl adventure that focuses on exploration with some minor fighting to add to the atmosphere, it's probably not such a goo idea to make it too hard to put things together.

[GloatingSwine]

I think Dark Souls games actually have almost the complete information somewhere in the game.

They don't, and deliberately so. Quite a lot of what fans "know" about Dark Souls is interpretation and guesswork and choosing which bits to believe because you can't get a straight answer out of anyone. (And that's the point. It's based on Miyazaki's experience reading fantasy books that were above his reading level because that's all the library had and not understanding all of the words so he filled bits in by imagining them).

The pieces aren't all there, and some of the ones that are have been chewed by the cat (or at least the translator's cat).


In a D&D campaign obviously you can't use the same means of delivery obviously. Magic swords do not come with handy labels with bits of lore on them. But the principle of spreading out bits of information about the place so that the players have to put it together as they adventure is applicable because if the mystery is interesting enough to them it can be a motivator in itself.

[J-H]

One of the two games I'm running here on the forums is a mega-dungeoncrawl.

Key things to include:
-A hook - Why are they here?
-A way to prevent the 10 minute adventuring day (wandering monsters, difficulty leaving)
-Things that make sense (a rough ecology covering food, lighting, and the presence of monsters)
-Multiple factions and/or agents involved. The giant dungeon has hundreds (or more!) of different creatures on it. Each creature should have its own agenda that makes sense.
-An overarching theme or two (why is this place here, what does it do, who designed it, who mantains it, etc.)

So far, I have mapped the dungeon out (in generalities) quite a ways ahead, with what species live where and what events are going on. When my players pick a direction, I get more detailed, and then I fill in the actual map right before I hit the area.

Parts of it are more "natural," and parts of it are more "artificial." Artificial parts are more likely to have assigned construct guards in specific areas, and the more natural cavern areas have more typical denizens like umber hulks, darkmantles, and spiders. There are some large "ecology" type areas (a hundred square miles or so) with trees, artificial suns, and their own independent ecology, with some limited movement to/from them.

Early on, the group ran into a grimlock fishing outpost. In the room to the east of the outpost, they found a few darkmantles first, and some fish bones. In the room to the west, they found some spiders, and more fish bones. The grimlock fishermen were putting out a few fish every day to keep the predators in the area to help guard their outpost.

Spoilered for length, here's what I'm running:


Spoiler: Overview
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Underneath the continent of Hybora lies a great complex full of arcane and eldritch machinery. A number of great adamantine and mithril spikes, covered in runes, project upwards from it, through the skin of the world, and high into the sky, almost as high as the tallest mountains.

The origin of the great device is lost, along with much of the older histories. What is known is that it is constantly drawing power from the earth itself, and that when it reaches full charge, the spikes light with a terrible glow; indescribable colors coruscate up and down them for 5 minutes, and then death comes; random destruction covers anywhere from a tenth to a quarter of the continent, and the ocean around it besides. Sometimes death comes in fire from the sky; sometimes in the form of reversed gravity. Plagues, darkness, armies of strange twisted creatures, instant conversion to undeath, and other forms of doom have been observed. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the method, only that it always comes, and never in the same way twice in a row.

Circles of runes randomly appear in the air around the continent, forming doorways to the Complex; always one at a time, never more than two, and not in the same place for more than a week. It is those circles that have preserved life. Through them, daring adventurers have entered and explored. Tales come back of strange environments, dusty rooms, and lines of strange pulsing crystals that can be smashed to release some of the power stored in the machine. If enough people succeed, the machine can be kept at low charge. Over the last few centuries, it has only reached full charge twice.

Hyboria's soil, despite all this, is fertile, and rich in metals and minerals; it's a good place to live, as long as enough adventurers do their part to preserve the peace. As a result of the constant low-level drain on risk-takers and ambitious fighters, it's also a peaceful place. The hotheads already have something better to do than attack the species next door.

It is said that more species once lived on Hyboria; that some have chosen to migrate entirely within the complex, reasoning that destruction occurs only outside, and never inside.
note: so far the players have encountered an alliance of goblinoid species; goblins are not present on the surface; we now have someone playing a hobgoblin swordsage


Luckily there are many brave, heroic, profit-seeking, and/or "this or jail" adventurers willing to jump in any portals that pop up nearby in hopes of smashing crystals, delaying destruction, and acquiring magical items, power, respect, etc. Enough people have been doing it that the chance of a regular activation is quite rare.

The way things are going now, there's only a 1 in 2 or 3 chance of it going off during a human lifespan, and a 10-20% chance of dying if that happens... total risk is thus 3% to 10% of sudden(?) death, in exchange for the most fertile soil, productive mines, and lowest risk of death-by-warfare on the planet. It's a pretty good deal for races with shorter lifespans.

Hybora is the largest continent on the planet, representing over 60% of the temperate/tropical landmass available for life. Dwarves and some other races live underground, but there is no Underdark or equivalent - aside from the Complex, of course.

Although old records have mostly been lost to random destruction, plus the usual ravages of time, enough groups make it in and out that many basic functions are known.


Portals & Teleportation
Long-range teleportation spells do not function reliably inside or to/from the Complex. The probability of splinching is high in any case, but seems especially high deeper in the complex, and in the less-natural caverns.

Entry portals to the complex appear randomly, and do not stay active for long periods of time. Exit portals link to the same rune circles as entry portals, but seem to be 5-15% as frequent.

An active entry portal is blue, an active exit portal is red. Inactive portals do not glow, although the runes are still visible.

Yellow stepping pads are spread infrequently throughout the complex in two-way pairs. They are 10x10 and can accommodate 1 teleport every 30 seconds. For them to activate, something must be resting on the pad, and nothing must be crossing the boundary of the teleport pad at either end (making it possible to hold or block a pad relatively easily).

Equipment Upgrades
A few groups have reported finding what are dubbed "Runeforges." Resembling an altar or large box with a tray on top, they are surrounded by faintly-glowing runes. Magical items and/or gold can be transmuted to create newer or more powerful magical items. There is some energy loss in the process - magical items render out at 50% of their Standard Arcane Construction Valuation. Almost any type of magical item can be created, given sufficient inputs. It is believed that there is a psionic component to the runeforges, as even barbarians have been able to create sophisticated items with little difficulty. However, special materials such as adamantine or mithril, must be provided by the user.

There is some speculation that the 'energy loss' in the Runeforge process may be deliberate.

Runeforges are a powerful tool for anyone who can gain access to or control one.

Ecology
Sages have attempted to map the functions of life on the surface, and talk about things like "deenay" and "heritable traits." All adventurers, however, know that magic does many things, and that what neatly fills a scroll in a study often differs from the physical reality.


Light
Some areas are lit by vaguely luminescent fungus. Some areas are lit by magical torches or light-balls. A few areas have walls that simply glow, or reflect the tiniest amount of light like a mirror. Some areas are unlit.

Water
Throughout the complex, water flows in and out from underground rivers and streams. Slow drips of water can also be found from aquifers and other sources, as would be found in a natural terrestrial caverns. No poisonous waters have yet been found. It is not known whether some natural mechanism keeps the water safe to drink, or whether a magical effect is in place.
Many of the water sources are small, and obviously unsafe for any but the tiniest of creatures to swim through.

Food
Several varieties of edible mushroom growing from organic matter as well as from certain veins of mineral and pulverized rocks. At least two mildly toxic varieties have been identified. The mushroom species are well-known enough that a Survival or K: Dungeoneering check against DC 15 is sufficient to gather food safely (Take 10 is available unless rushed).

Some groups have reported seeing groups with chickens as a source of eggs.

There are several small mammal and lizard species, filling the basic ecological functions of rabbits and squirrels.

Some areas of standing or barely-flowing water have species of fish and eels in them. Not all are benign.

There are also a number of large caverns with large artificial lights at the top. These lights seem to function with a modulated, permanent Daylight effect, and are sufficient to grow crops or even trees.

[HidesHisEyes]

If you're willing to read a massive amount of content on the matter the Angry GM has a series of articles about building a mega dungeon that goes so far in depth on this it's almost absurd. Great read though if you can get past the typos.

I heartily second this. There is a lot of good stuff in there about making the lore of the dungeon mesh with its layout, denizens and gameplay aspects. He has also done an article about "abstract dungeoneering" which fits nicely with the "pointcrawl" idea - although his vision for the mega dungeon is decidedly not abstract (he is just now at the stage of pre-planning his dungeon map in an abstract way but his end goal is to have every single five-foot square of dungeon laid down in a grand map any section of which can potentially become a battle map for an encounter at any moment. Yeah it's a pretty ambitious project).

[Yora]

Unless the players all outright say that they don't care about character advancement and want only to explore, I think it's quite important to tie XP to the activities of exploration and decouple it from fighting enemies.
XP for treasure is a reasonably efficient way to do that and one that is easy to track and calculate. It actually encourags players to look for gold in hard to reach places and behind looked doors but in practice players don't know what they will find until they find it. And whether they find gold or knowledge (or preferably both) doesn't change the incentive to keep looking for more hidden stuff.
You can also make puzzles that first require finding knowledge to solve them and then open the way to a reward of gold.
Searching for gold and knowledge can be wonderfully done simultaneously.

Abstract dungeoneering (http://theangrygm.com/abstract-dungeoneering/) was something I was also thinking about but I didn't want to put too many links with long texts in the opening post.
But now that we're at it,here's some more relevant Angry posts: Megadungeon Backstory (http://theangrygm.com/welcome-to-the-megadungeon-backstory/), Everything I need to know I learned on Planet Zebes (http://theangrygm.com/everything-i-need-to-know-i-learned-on-planet-zebes/), and something about encounters that don't have to end in fighting to thr death (http://theangrygm.com/how-to-build-awesome-encounters/).

And something a bit more abstract about players filling out the blanks in the adventure with their own imagination (http://hillcantons.blogspot.de/2012/05/proairetic-code-and-player-driven.html) from Hill Cantons.

[J-H]

I track XP and loot against WBL, and will usually have them level at about the right time XP-wise. So far, I've been able to tie level-ups to plot-related milestones.

None of my players have XP-burning abilities yet. I'll deal with that when we get to it. Ability burn that heals slowly might be a good solution.

In my overland game, one character does have an ancient +2 sword of 3 wishes, but the 3 wishes are depleted. Short of having someone cast it into the sword, the only way to recharge it is to kill an efreet or djinn (one wish gained per kill). They're level 7 and on the prime material plane...

[kyoryu]

Read these:

http://odd74.proboards.com/thread/7539/advice-build-megadungeon-setting-campaign

[Yora]

I think one interesting idea that might work quite well to merge megadungeon play and design with open sandbox campaigns is to make a decentralized megadungeon in which the wilderness serves as dungeon level 0.
When you are using a pointcrawl map there isn't even any real difference between adventuring outdoor and indoor. When using turns to measure time you can simply keep an indoor turn at 10 minutes and an outdoor turn at 1/3rd or 1/6th of a travel day.

Structurally each dungeon would be identical to one megadungeon level. To make it easier for players to walk into high level dungeons early on by accident, maps and keys to mid-level dungeons could be hidden deep in low-level dungeons, and so on. At first only three or four dungeons in the overworld are accessible but the party would unlock new dungeons through exploring them.

If you build them all together like a single megadungeon you can connect the content that is found in each location and make it so that a discovery in one dungeon can help with an obstacle in another one.