Dungeons. How do you populate them?

[Falontani]

Basically the title.

Do you start with a concept? A dungeon and fill the rooms? How do you go about actually choosing what's inside?

Do people even use dungeons anymore? How do you stat a dungeon for a level range? How much of a level range is too much?

How do you deal with player ingenuity allowing them to skip large swaths of the dungeon? How do you reveal the map to the players?

Basically if I could ask one hundred questions on how to dm a dungeon, how would you do it?

[DwarvenWarCorgi]

I don't DM much anymore,not usually in a dungeon setting either, but the advice on how to run a dungeon that feels like a living ecosystem printed in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is actually pretty good. I always built my dungeons around a theme while trying to bring some variety, who knows what kind of beasts the bad guys have locked up they might let loose on your party. As far as revealing map, you don't really have to, you can just describe hallways and draw rooms on a battlemat or a sheet of plexi with a grid under it, after all, if your player's aren't making a map or marking their way, they may get lost, if they are then you can just fast forward leaving. And if your player's show ingenuity and skip large sections, oh well, less treasure and xp for them for not taking on the challenges, but probably some bonus xp for the ingenuity, and maybe they miss some key item or piece of information or important hostage they've gotta go into that area to find anyway.

My current DM ran a dungeon recently where the rooms were only connected by portals, several different colors of portals, we had to find a keyed gem and password for each color after the first, we never knew what we were walking into, it was interesting.

[Eldariel]

Well, when there's a dungeon, there's a reason it's there. As the DM, I know this reason and thus the chain of events that has lead to its population. And so, the population more or less builds itself. Define the Powers that affect said dungeon, what kinds of underlings and things they can keep, what they would allow to stay for reasons (think Shelob in LotR) and what wouldn't be there. Of course, powers are periodically challenged. Thus, might as well roll a bit and see if some other Powers active in that part of the world have taken over.

The most barebones is something like a forgotten temple, which depending on the alignment, is probably either crawling with undead or mostly just filled with various mechanical/automated defenses and potentially some Outsiders. Forgotten locations mostly have immortal things that were ordained into guardianship (constructs, undead, outsiders, elementals, fey, etc.) unless e.g. some humanoid or dragon or whatever actor came across and took over (aware or not aware of its original function). This is mostly a world building thing. Of course, Goblin or Kobold Burrows are going to be a whole different beast.

[MisterKaws]

The most important thing to remember is: restrict movement.

After levels 5-6(and even before it with Incarnum and some other tricks), PCs get a huge maneuverability boost, with flight and teleport techniques everywhere. You gotta stop those to make a good dungeon, otherwise the PCs will just methodically dismantle it.

Common tricks include: simply disabling teleport and flight; making sectioned dungeons across demiplanes, using plane shift traps as the only way of movement between sections; creating tight spaces to disallow flight, or, instead, extremely large spaces that can only be traversed through flight.

There's other tricks, of course, but if you're making dungeons for high-level adventurers, it's better to remember this.

[Eldariel]

The most important thing to remember is: restrict movement.

After levels 5-6(and even before it with Incarnum and some other tricks), PCs get a huge maneuverability boost, with flight and teleport techniques everywhere. You gotta stop those to make a good dungeon, otherwise the PCs will just methodically dismantle it.

This is more relevant in the sense that in-universe, there are lots of beings with those abilities and there are many that are far more troublesome than the PCs generally (Outsiders, Dragons, the apex predators of D&D), so you absolutely want to keep those away. Few dungeons should be built covered in Forbiddance (or Weirdstones or whatever) for example if there were only a couple of things you'd actually need it for, but since the D&D universe is full of at-will teleporting flying things, you probably need some plan for those.

[Segev]

The most important thing to remember is: restrict movement.

After levels 5-6(and even before it with Incarnum and some other tricks), PCs get a huge maneuverability boost, with flight and teleport techniques everywhere. You gotta stop those to make a good dungeon, otherwise the PCs will just methodically dismantle it.

Common tricks include: simply disabling teleport and flight; making sectioned dungeons across demiplanes, using plane shift traps as the only way of movement between sections; creating tight spaces to disallow flight, or, instead, extremely large spaces that can only be traversed through flight.

There's other tricks, of course, but if you're making dungeons for high-level adventurers, it's better to remember this.

I'm firmly on the "make the abilities required to get around" side of things, and loathe the "special conditions turn off your cool abilities" approach. If you wanted to use that latter, don't run it for the level of play where those abilities exist.

There is one more alternative, however: Don't make obstacles that rely on the lack of those abilities, unless those obstacles are meant to be like "do you have this dungeon item yet?" checks in Legend of Zelda. (For instance, you can't complete the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time without the Megaton Hammer, so you have to at least get to the point where you acquire that dungeon item from the Fire Temple to beat it. It's rare for people to stop mid-way through one Temple to go do another, so it's a soft pressure to complete the Temples in order. By design.)

A dungeon where it's much easier if you can fly is fine; just don't plan on the obstacles flight overcomes being serious obstacles you factor into its difficulty.

[the_david]

Stick to the theme?

There will likely be something to ward of unwanted visitors. Say, a curse trap or something. Something that could withstand the ages would be a good choice, like a golem.
If it's an ancient burial place you might want to fill the place with undead. That can get a bit boring though, and not every burial place is teeming with undead. That's mostly a necromancer thing.
That big monster that is trapped in the dungeon is in the hardest place to reach. Ofcourse, once it's free it'll need a way to get out of the dungeon.
Maybe you should look into the 5 room dungeon.

Ofcourse, you could go all mad mage and use whatever you want. An Ethereal Filcher that lures the PCs into a trap, only to take their stuff and run away to its lair on the other side of a wall is always funny. You get bonus points for every hour it takes the players to track down the ethereal filcher.
Other fun ideas are an Efreeti in a bottle, a suggestion trap on a book that will make you read troll smut out loud, a mimic lavatory.
And ofcourse the mad mage is only mad because he trapped an eldritch horror at the bottom of his dungeon. The traps and monsters are only there to keep you from accidentally freeing the eldritch horror. That actually makes for a cool adventure. It's not the best, but it could make a good hack and slash.

[Bucky]

I start with the dungeon's Quandry: what are the players trying to do?
Examples: escape, retrieve an object, destroy the building

Then I look for different ways the players might be frustrated. Suppose they want to escape. They might have a monster blocking a route, or a lock-and-key situation, or something harassing them constantly until they chase it deeper and deal with it. Each of those is an encounter.

Then I build the tactical skeleton of each encounter. For example, we have a monster blocking the route. It's mostly immobile. It's tough enough that they can't just kill it in the surprise round. It needs to not be vulnerable to ranged harassment. So I'm going with a huge monster in a room with small hallways.

Then, I fill in the details of what the monster is (e.g. a starving giant ) and why it's in the dungeon where it is (trapped by a cave-in) and the implications of that (the PCs might be able to excavate an alternate route after beating the giant, but it'll take more than brute strength).

[jintoya]

I usually build mine with a "what is most fun, but still dangerous" approach.
Strange fungal dungeons filled to the brim with myconid and other mycelium based life.
lich lairs filled with moving walls and secret rooms, I had one dungeon that was full of runaway fetches that gained free will.
another was actually a vampire town, full of non-evil vampires who farmed strange blood sack monsters underground.

What I'm getting at is that there should be danger, and that it's a great opportunity to really do odd stuff, your players will be begging for a dungeon if you do it right, you know you are spot-on if every time they hit a new area, they start rolling gather-information checks and hitting the task board asking you if there is a local dungeon to plunder.

They don't have to be purposeless, but most of mine are just to get away from the regular stuff, and do something fantastical for a little bit, for maps, I'd just randomly generate the rooms, it's just easier

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Eldariel
Well, when there's a dungeon, there's a reason it's there. As the DM, I know this reason and thus the chain of events that has lead to its population. And so, the population more or less builds itself.

Definitely this. I design “dungeons” which were built for a specific purpose, so the physical design follows that purpose. I once worked out the measurements for a barracks mess hall based on how many elves in armor were sitting at each table. I also work out the history of why the original structure fell into disuse, and as Eldariel says, this leads to the events that determined its inhabitants.

And I like to include successive layers of intrusion, since for very old dungeons the current PCs aren’t likely to be the first ones to find their way in. It’s an extra challenge for them to work out what’s happened when, once they start finding different kinds of bodies and the remnants of fights between different factions.

Also, don’t be afraid to repopulate earlier sections of the dungeon if the PCs have cleared them and are naively expecting them to stay cleared. Wait until the PCs are comfortable going back and forth through the “cleared” sections, then spring something new on them they weren’t expecting.


Originally Posted by Segev
I'm firmly on the "make the abilities required to get around" side of things, and loathe the "special conditions turn off your cool abilities" approach.

Very much this. Having a special “nope zone” tends to feel contrived and frustrating for the players.

Again following the purpose-built theme, I like to work out what the structure’s original builders were expecting in terms of intruders, and then install defenses according to those expectations. Later inhabitants might well add their own very different defenses, some of which the PCs can easily counter and some of which are more challenging.

And whenever possible, I like to add in common-sense design elements which clever PCs can exploit for their own purposes. In one dwarven citadel built deep into a mountainside, I added a narrow vertical shaft that rose for hundreds of feet, with a permanent gust of wind blowing across the top, to help drive air circulation in the citadel below. The party druid used that shaft to fly out in owl form to scout ahead, which was a good use of an unobtrusive feature.

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