[3.5/any] Dungeon design

[SillySymphonies]

Most dungeons¹ I encountered (whether during play or in a commercially available adventure module) consist of a bunch of monsters and traps located in a clearly mapped out collection of rooms.

I was looking however for some clever dungeon designs in which the dungeon (or the physical conditions thereof) itself provides a challenge to overcome.

I was thinking of platform games like Prince of Persia, Abe's Oddysee, Abe's Exoddus, Braid and Portal (technically the latter one isn't a platform game, but you get the idea). The only example of such 'clever' dungeon design I ever encountered was an encounter in a floating restaurant in Sharn of which the levitation enchantments were failing (link).

Does anyone know of more examples of such 'clever' dungeon designs, where there are challenges to be overcome beyond the obvious monsters and traps? I'm sure I'm just looking in all the wrong places.

¹'dungeon' in the broadest sense of the word: an environment in which an encounter takes place, be that on a train, boat, crowded market place or in an underground cave

[The Big Dice]

The Tomb of Iuchiban, a boxed module for Legend of the Five Rings is both a traditional dungeon and something else entirely. Skipping past the booklet that is basically a means to get the PCs to the place, the first part is a fairly traditional trap filled dungeon level.

The second part is where it gets unusual. Because of the nature of the place, which is basically a trap to hold a super powerful evil shugenja who exists as a spiritual entity rather than a corporeal being, the second part of the dungeon isn't mapped.

Instead, the set includes tiles that the GM shuffles and draws at random as the characters go from one room to the next. And once you leave a room, the tile gets shuffled back into the deck rather than being left in place, so it's possible to go through the same place multiple times. At least until you figure out how to "lock" the places you've passed through.

It's a fun twist on your traditional dungeon bash.

[jseah]

Made of lots of identical looking octagonal rooms with strangely spaced corridors such that a room one wall over could be three corridors away?
Mapping hell. Expect the players to get lost very very fast.

For the record, I tried building a fortress in DF (dwarf fortress) using dice to make a random fortress. It resulted in something like that above.
After 20 rooms, even I, an all seeing overlord with a perfect map couldn't quite keep track of where everything was.

That was the first DF game in which I actually lost a building. As in, I'm sure I built it, but I can't find it anymore.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Tomb Radier and other puzzle / action video games have loads of these in, as the OP said - and that's exactly where I plunder them from for my dungeons.

I think it's quite reasonable to take puzzles and traps out of your favourite games and drop them right into a dungeon.
I made a whole adventure that was based around the Tomb Raider chapter set in the Greek crypt, St Francis's Folly. The PCs overcome obstacles in very different ways - having thought of bringing rope, unlike Lara Croft in the firstr generation of TR games.

[Serpentine]

There's a very, very incomplete version of one I'm making here. I'd post what I've done so far, but it's really big, and I'll have to fiddle around with it a lot before it'll be uploadable. Also it's not done yet.

[CockroachTeaParty]

Tomb Radier and other puzzle / action video games have loads of these in, as the OP said - and that's exactly where I plunder them from for my dungeons.

I think it's quite reasonable to take puzzles and traps out of your favourite games and drop them right into a dungeon.
I made a whole adventure that was based around the Tomb Raider chapter set in the Greek crypt, St Francis's Folly. The PCs overcome obstacles in very different ways - having thought of bringing rope, unlike Lara Croft in the firstr generation of TR games.

St. Francis' Folly was probably the best part of that whole game. An impossibly vertical dungeon with some awesome traps that rewarded knowledge of the mythology in question... good times. The Tomb Raider Anniversary game did a pretty good job of bringing the Folly up to modern standards, but nothing will ever beat the first time you had to figure it all out on your own. NOSTALGIA OVERLOAD.

As for interesting dungeon design, I've always wanted to try an adventure inside a living dungeon, where the dungeon is actually the inner organs of an enormous creature, ala Ocarina of Time or Legend of Legaia. Giant pits of acid would make a certain amount of sense in the digestive track, and the monsters could be parasites, diseases, other swallowed victims, or autoimmune defense systems.

If you really want to fry your players' (and your own) brain, try making a dungeon inside a tesseract.

[Totally Guy]

I did a vertical dungeon about this time last year.

Here.

It was pretty good. Our regular Games Master was very ill so I threw the session together at short notice.

[Jack_Simth]

I once ran a 4-dimensional dungeon. They needed to find the center. It was a hypercube, 13x13x13x13.

[TheThan]

A 3d mapping/drawing program would do wonders for someone designing dungeons. A lot of the games that have been mentioned are just that 3d. To use Tomb Raider as an example, Lara doesn’t just run around on the ground floor. She instead climbs, swings, jumps, swims and otherwise traverses horizontal and vertical terrain.

Having a fully 3d map will give your players the same sort of 3d freedom, instead of being confined to 5’5 squares they instead get to do the sort of stuff that you do in these video games. that not only opens up your options, both as a player and as a dm, but it can really ramp up the fun factor of the game.