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Thoughtbot360
2008-12-04, 05:48 AM
Lets say you had to make a handful of dungeons and abandoned in a months or so time. Where do you look for dungeon ideas?

Also, if you can share any ideas on mapping out dungeons once you have an idea, I'd like to hear them.

Thanks ahead of time.

Sstoopidtallkid
2008-12-04, 05:52 AM
One thing everyone forgets. Why is it a dungeon? What is this location supposed to do? Everything will follow that. Is it a hidden base? Then there will probably be a hidden front door, a set of bypassable traps, and a fools vault, after which it is much easier to travel through due to no one anticipating anyone making it that far. The Dungeonomicon (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=28547) had good advice.

Totally Guy
2008-12-04, 06:08 AM
I had a bit of a silly dungeon but played entirely straight.

The dungeon was built by a Lich who hid Phylactery inside the big structural column inside the lowest level. If it were destroyed then the town above would also be destroyed.

On this lowest level there was a paladin that had been trapped down there by their traitorous friend. The paladin killed the lich during his respawning period but couldn't destroy the phylactery bacause of the town above. On this level there was a big pile of treasure that the traitorous friend of the paladin ignored. There was more value in becoming ruler of the town than in the pile of money.

When this dungeon was opened the paladin at the bottom would summon up monsters on the upper levels thinking he was preventing the Lich's followers from coming down. The lich used his "veto" on this summoning technique that the paladin was unaware of, the lich modified the spells slightly to also move a small amount of gold from the pile into the flesh or shell of the monster that the paladin was calling.

So the paladin was trying to dissuade minions of the lich from coming down and the lich was trying to encourage the adventurers to come further down, for him anything was better than being killed all the time.

The dungeon played out much like an MMORPG, with extra adventurers wanting to join in. The monsters dropped gold loots and respawned. The economy was getting screwed by gold farming. It could have gone so wrong if the players had started gold farming themselves but they knew something was wrong with the whole set up and wanted to fight whatever was causing the wrongness.

Edit: the layout of the dungeon was designed to be a typical adventurer bait dungeon with seemingly pointless rooms and an unliveable layout. Secret doors had been placed between sections by the traitorous mayor character to keep his friend trapped.

daggaz
2008-12-04, 06:57 AM
I usually think ecosystem first when I set up caves and the like. Dungeons are just man-made caves, they have less ecosystem, but have purpose, and are often invaded by monster species...which then sets up a new, limited ecosystem.

So yeah, food cycles, predators, prey, those sorts of interactions go a long way to giving sense and believability to a cave. It also helps to spawn ideas and makes things less random. My players at least really enjoy it, everytime they find a mangled kobold or troglodyte corpse, they are trying to figure out what the hell kind of nasty thing has been eating them.

valadil
2008-12-04, 09:45 AM
I don't spend too much time worrying about how the dungeon came to be. If I do think about it I end up getting stuck there, trying to find a logical way to justify each and every room. In the end, no dungeon gets written.

Instead I choose a type of dungeon: natural, man-made, or magical. Sometimes it'll also be something weird like underwater or a mixture of two other dungeon types.

I never map out the dungeon as a whole. When I do map it out I invariably make mistakes transcribing it to the battlemap and the mistakes never ever matter. Instead I make a bunch of rooms and hallways. I also make a list of traps and monster manual pages. As the players progress through the dungeon I pull out one of these rooms, hallways, traps, or monsters as I deem appropriate.

Prometheus
2008-12-04, 06:36 PM
My players always complain about a lack of dungeons (and dragons, for that matter) in my D&D campaigns. But I have had a couple of underground excursions with various excuses.

A mine, overrun by evil goblinoids enslaving kobolds

Temple ruins, with competing treasure hunters

Various forts, one of which completely underground, burnt from the inside out, and subsequently haunted.

Tunnels, which are shortcuts through mountains but with evil creatures lurking inside.

A prison, when the PCs ran afoul with the law and had to break out.