Looking for inspiration: Dungeons

[NRSASD]

Hey Playground!

Half the fun of being a DM is building the dungeons. Seeing how everything fits together, all the horribly inventive death traps, the almost-sensical ecology that makes the place tick. What are some examples of dungeons you've really enjoyed, and where could I find them? Big or small, I'm just looking for ideas to plunder.

Also, a while back I heard of a 3rd party dungeon module called Barrow-something, or something like that. Does anyone know what that was called?

[JAL_1138]

No idea on the 3rd party module, but for dungeon inspiration the old 2e box set for Undermountain is a great resource. You can just lift out a (comparatively) small section of the (ginormous) map wholesale and call it its own dungeon.

[Delwugor]

Anything and everything from Dyson Logos http://www.patreon.com/dysonlogos and http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/. Lots of free maps and OSR type adventures (easily converted to other systems).

[EccentricCircle]

It isn't RPG related, but I would start by watching the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark (or the whole movie for that matter). The fun thing about translating those sorts of Spielbergian deathtraps into D&D terms is that players can decide to climb up the shaft the massive rolling boulder drops from, and you have to decide that, yes, they really do have a huge hopper full of boulders up there, with a clockwork contraption to lift a new one into place each time the trap resets! (I'm speaking from experience here, It hadn't occurred to me to figure out the details of how it worked until the players started investigating it!)

I quite like to subvert trap expectations. The last game I ran included an obviously trapped floor, which triggered some easily dodged axe blades. So far so traditional, but the axes weren't the danger. They were just there to convince the would be trespassers that they should levitate over the floor and cleverly avoid the trap's trigger. Casting the levitation/fly spell was what triggered the contingent Chain Lightning effect...

[Winthur]

I like hijacking ideas from video game level design, particularly dungeon crawlers. Wizardry had plenty of traps that did stuff like turning you around (often without any indicator that you have been turned around) or pitfalls to lower levels of the dungeon, forcing the player to suddenly keep on the defensive because they'd be suddenly tossed into a place where they don't know the way back upstairs and that presumedly has tougher guardians.

I once used this example from Duke Nukem 3D: this level's geometry looks impossible. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlfoEehWoxE) At around 2:00 you can see the player running in a circle and entering a completely new area instead of coming back where he came from, and it looks like he's been just running circles around the middle of the map. From the game perspective, it's an engine laying a room-over-room, which is a nifty visual trick; for your perspective, you can take this trick and run implications with it - an eldritch room that evolves as you go through it or an illusionist's design tricking your players.

IMHO? Just steal ideas from all media you can get your hands on, anything that has a nifty design at all, and up it to eleven. Playing a platformer with conveyor belts may inspire you to make an entire dungeon or battle arena where the tiles slide every so often. Rewatch the whole scene with the Death Star in A New Hope - you have characters balancing carefully above bottomless pits, knocking enemies into those pits, forcefields, a secret escape into a trash chute, a console that lets you control the building...

[Bohandas]

The Temple of Elemental Evil (from the module of the same name and the computer game based on the module) is always a classic

[Segev]

White Plume Mountain holds a special place in my heart for the politics between the three wings of the dungeon.

[Lord Torath]

One of the things that's important is player choice in how to proceed. A linear dungeon just isn't that fun. There should be multiple paths to just about anywhere. See this blog post on "Jaquaying" the Dungeon (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon).

[Segev]

The Tomb of Horrors is considered a classic "killer dungeon" for good reason. There are, however, solid arguments that it's less a dungeon than a guessing game, wherein the players have to luck into thinking like Gary Gygax and pick correctly amongst several options, with all information about them hidden or unrelated to their actual safety. And doing what is "stupid" in one part (which will get you killed) can be the right choice to get the big reward in another.

But one major thing that dungeon does is address some of the more powerful abilities PCs at high levels tend to have for bypassing challenges that would stymie lower-level characters. Traversing the Etherial or Astral plane in the dungeon immediately gets you #defined "enough" fiendish foes to kill you. Teleportation is simply shut down, save for the traps in the dungeon itself which do it. I believe flying also fails, entirely, to work, by dispelling flying magics and...I forget what it does to winged flight.

Regardless, the dungeon pre-emptively has rules set up to reduce player characters to doing the low-level methods of walking through the dungeon.

I have always been a fan of designing dungeons to exploit high-level abilities, to the point that some trick from that toolbox will be required to even begin to explore it properly.


What if, instead of punishing and shutting down Ethereal or Astral travel, the dungeon itself is primarily on the Ethereal Plane? On the Material, it's solid stone, or a not-so-hollow hill, or what-have-you. You're not "navigating" it so much as excavating a new set of tunnels and holes if you try to brute force into it on the Prime. But if you use etherealness or some other means of getting to that plane, you find yourself facing the dungeon. (Remember, the Ethereal Plane has ethereal stone and other solid objects on it; it's often treated as a place where ghosts and the like can "go through" things in the Prime Material, but that's because the Ethereal usually lacks objects, walls, etc. If the dungeon is actually built coextant with solid matter in the Prime, and has its own solid walls on the Ethereal, being Ethereal becomes a prerequisite for even navigating it, thus rewarding HAVING the ability, but not allowing trivial bypass.)

Similarly, rather than deactivating/punishing flight, have the dungeon be designedly easier for those who have it. Vertical shafts that are hard to climb or guarded by traps and monsters, for instance. There are other solutions (climbing, as suggested earlier), but they're harder. And don't rely on traps in the walls or floor or ceiling when you know fliers are possible; design your traps to trigger off of things going through the middle of the room. Spider-thread-fine tripwires in random stretches that fliers might bungle into, for instance.

Have barriers that just can't be bypassed without teleportation, gasseous form, or similar. It won't inherently prevent use of such abilities elsewhere where they "shortcut," but the need to preserve them or use them up can render use where other options are present less desirable.

In all, if there's a power you fear will "shortcut" your dungeon, incorporate it somehow. Don't no-sell it; make it useful while taking it into account.

[Tanarii]

Wasn't tomb of horrors designed as a convention tourney module, with the scoring on how far you got before you died or ran out of time?

If so, it'd have a different set of design criteria: no ultimate assumption there is a reasonable way to get to end, and the only question is how far the PCs get before they die.

[Segev]

Wasn't tomb of horrors designed as a convention tourney module, with the scoring on how far you got before you died or ran out of time?

If so, it'd have a different set of design criteria: no ultimate assumption there is a reasonable way to get to end, and the only question is how far the PCs get before they die.

Yes, but it was also a specific response to players telling Gary Gygax that their characters could handle "anything." He says so in his forward to it.

And as a tourney module, it falls a bit flat because so much of "how far you get" is a question of "how many times can you correctly guess whether the coin will flip heads or tails?" The things that will kill you are not detectable as distinguishable from the things that take you further in the dungeon. By design. So it's more like one of those really old choose-your-own-adventure books where a lot of the choices lead to death, with no hint as to why they would. Choosing to go down into the basement to get the milk reveals that this is a zombie horror story and there's a graveyard down there? Wha? (That's seriously the kind of nonsense that showed up in some of those.)

[Tanarii]

I'd say I really need to play this module some time, but I suck at both puzzle solving, and mind reading Gygax :smallamused:

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I'd say I really need to play this module some time, but I suck at both puzzle solving, and mind reading Gygax :smallamused:

I wouldn't bother - it's a set of arbitrary kill-traps with no discernible point, let alone plot. Maybe just read it?

[Segev]

I'd say I really need to play this module some time, but I suck at both puzzle solving, and mind reading Gygax :smallamused:


I wouldn't bother - it's a set of arbitrary kill-traps with no discernible point, let alone plot. Maybe just read it?

Yeah, I suggest just reading it. If you want to spend money on it, get the Return to the Tomb of Horrors box set; it has the original reprinted in it, and a rather interesting campaign attached to it. As with all module-chains, it tends towards the railroad-heavy, but there's enough in there you CAN go off-script if your players choose to.

[Tinkerer]

I'd say I really need to play this module some time, but I suck at both puzzle solving, and mind reading Gygax :smallamused:

Nah, I'd disagree with both of them. It can be a fun enough little romp just make sure that you take disposable one time characters instead of the characters you're actually playing. Besides you are more likely to die at the entrance than in the Tomb. The one time that I actually ran some people in it I handed out characters and everyone died fast enough that we could still play our regular game for the evening (I think it was about 10 minutes in?). Funny enough while people use "Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies" as a code for GM rage quit the actual origin was just for an unfair trap (the first trap).

[Avonar]

One dungeon I was a part of that was really interesting was a dungeon that was split between the material and ethereal plane. We all entered, and randomly ended up on either one. It was a case of finding out how to switch between, and finding out how to communicate between them. Unfortunately it was a homemade dungeon so I can't give you anything to read but it's an example of how gimmicky you can get.

[UristMcChoupon]

i always make my dungeons the same way i make my npc's and pc's and other things in setting:

backstory, why is this dungeon here. how long. who built it. what kind of people were they, did they like traps, were they good at stonework?
leaves you with a lot of fun doing stuff like 'it was built by this crazy warlord guy as a tomb complex, then these things took over. then they all died of old age/plague/eaten by angry dead/whatever and now its full of crazy necromancers and basket golems.

one of my favorite dungeons i came up with was based off eschers relativity. i was so proud of drawing up the maps, one for every 90 degree shift for changing perspectives. nonlinear space dungeons are fun, but they are hard to make work without making it feel unfair to the pcs.

[Hellpyre]

I highly recommend looking at The Wurst of Grimtooth's Traps for some inspiration on trap and dungeon design.