I don't know how to dungeon

[Yora]

I've been running campaigns not very frequently but for a pretty long time now, mostly D&D, and I think I tried running adventures out of the box maybe twice in the early 2000s.Promising looking adventures rarely are in the same edition that I use, and when they are not at the right level the party currently is at. And often many of the monsters don't really fit in the location the campaign takes place in, so in the end I always end up creating my own encounters and redrawing floorplans from scratch.

And usually I find that my dungeons end up simply being the places where an NPC is who the players are looking for, or in some cases a special object they need to get. I can put a few gaurd creatures between the entrance and the destination, but that's usually the full extend of my dungeon creativity.

But I never feel that the dungeons I am making are interesting as places that are worth exploring. I try to make them big and varied, but ultimately they could all be condensed to two rooms. A room with a guard monster and a room where the goal is found. When the whole point of the party going to a place is to find an NPC, a location doesn't really need to be big. But I still feel that a big fantasy adventure with wondrous places should have cool dungeons. And I never really know what to do with them.

The typical non-encounter room for dungeons are puzzles, but I never find thise to be in any way believable. And when I think a puzzle if forced, silly, and has no plausible explanation to exist in that olace, how would I even begin to try selling it to players?
Doors that allow access only to people who possess a piece of secret knowledge are great. But in that case, they would be inaccessible to the PCs. So instead dungeon puzzles are always made to be easily figured out by some random people with 10 minutes of thinking, which makes them completely unfit for purpose. And I simply can't take cocaine wizards seriously.

So I am rather at a loss what to do with dungeons. Some of my recent dungeons had sleeping rooms, kitchens, storerooms, and stables to appear like places that could actually be inhabited by a group of people. But that only reaults in players going from basically empty room to empty room, wondering why they can't find anything and what they are missing.

Simply shrugging and just not doing dungeons, with NPCs simply living in hpuses and opening the door when the players knock is certainly an option. But a little hut on Mount Doom just isn't nowhere as compelling as a giant volcano lair. There are plenty of great ideas for big adventure locations, but turning them into playable dungeons that also make sense within the fictional world always turns out to be a completely different business.

[Palanan]

By coincidence, I've been wondering how to run a sword & sorcery campaign, so maybe we can help each other out.

Is there a particular type of dungeon or lair that you're going for? There are enough published examples that it might be possible to adapt one for your purposes.

[Telok]

I've used actual castle maps/floor plans as dungeons. It can take a bit of searching to find some and they are often a bit small for most gaming purposes. European palaces might do better, just turn the indoor spaces into underground rooms.

[OldTrees1]

Consider starting with an interesting environment:

1. Can you use Hex maps? Why not try things that rotate. Draw 8 circles that are either tangent or overlaping at least 1 other. Those are your gears. When a circle overlaps it acts like a spinning bookcase but for sections of a room. Circles that are tangent turn together (reconfigure it to be nice diameter ratios).
2. What about water? Have a single floor with multiple layers because some paths are up high and some under the water. Then have places to change the water level.
3. What about a dungeon that slowly rises from the desert during the morning and sinks back in the evening? This is kinda like the water idea but for multiple floors.
4. Ever have a dungeon with multiple thriving communities rather than just the bad guys to loot?

[Lagtime]

Well, maybe I can help....

I assume you feel you do other in place adventure locations fine, like a tower or a castle? Maybe if you can simply do whatever works for you with other locations for a dungeon too.

If you think of a dungeon as simply a place to meet and NPC or get an item, then that is all the dungeon is. If your playing a more storytelling game, like say the Pcs are trying to stop an evil cult, you might find it hard to drop in a dungeon: you and the PC would much rather complete the quest story.

Technically, exploring a dungeon does not fit into a rational world. Just the idea that the world has strange places underground filled with monsters, tarps, puzzles and weird things makes no sense. And the idea that people with a torch, sword and a spellbook might willing walk into such a place is just crazy. See, dungeons are more of a metagame thing: they are a place to have fun.

If you don't like puzzles, then don't put them in your dungeon. Or maybe figure out why you dislike them so much? Why do you feel it's so unbelievable that someone put a puzzle in a dungeon? Puzzles are used all the time in real life.

The big fun thing about dungeons is not having things like kitchens, it's having weird and strange rooms. It's having fun discovering new, unknown things. There is a fountain in this room. Under the flow of this fountain is a silver plant that is protected from the fountain's flow by a force field. Is the force field is interrupted a green gem at the base of the silver plant will begin to glow.

Or An hourglass with three chambers on the top feeds into a single chamber at the bottom. Each chamber contains a different color of sand. Coiled at it's base are the skeletal remains of a large lizard. The skeletal lizard will attack if the PCs approach the hourglass. It will attempt to drain them of blood, doing so slowly begins to put flesh back on it's bones

See the point is the PCs will stop and explore and investigate each location. Not just say "NPC Bob is not here we move on".

[Darth Credence]

Great topic here - I know I have stuff to learn as well, but I'll tell you how I've done things in general. I'm going to assume by "dungeon" we are talking any kind of sprawling complex like a ruin, a cave system, a mine, and so on.

There's the Elder Scrolls method - where there is a lost race that lived in carved out cities underground. Since then, other things have taken to living in them. The race doesn't have to be lost in any campaign - Moria is the same thing in LotR. This lets you create sprawling places, with the justification that this was a city/town. Cave ins can block off areas, allowing it to feel like it was once bigger, and to funnel people the direction you want. If they are after a MacGuffin, then it is somewhere in there, and they have to search for it. This can also let you go for a mystery of what happened that lead to the fall of the city. Old documents, wall carvings, damage that looks like it came from weapons or spells - if your players like to learn your lore, you can make a dungeon like this great with very little in the way of monsters or combat.

Or, it can be the current home of bandits, or goblins, or something like that. Is the NPC a prisoner, and the players have to fight their way in or out to free them? Perhaps with an option to try sneaking through? Or is the NPC a member of the faction in the dungeon, and the PCs have to kill or capture them? This can give a reason to have a place be well populated.

I can justify puzzles from time to time. For example, I have an NPC group that are basically professional dungeon delvers. When they take on new associates, such as the PCs, they have a testing ground that the newbies have to retrieve something from. The group can make the kinds of puzzles that people can solve, and justify it as a test of the newbies critical thinking skills. Or a particular type of crazy NPC can surround themselves with traps and puzzles that people can solve, because they want people who are "worthy" to find them. Whether that's because they like to kill those people in single combat, or because they are looking for an heir, or anything else, is up to the direction of the campaign.

For the specific problem you addressed, doors that only allow for people with secret knowledge to get in, you can always make it a quest to get that knowledge. Is it the headquarters for a cult, and as you rise in the cult you find out more information, which will give more access to different areas? Then the players need to find out more about the cult. I think of the original Clash of the Titans, where the unsolvable riddle was about a ring that a particular demon thing had, and the only way Perseus solved it was by following the princess and discovering the demon. The players could infiltrate the cult, research it through magic, question a member, or whatever else they come up with to get the proper secrets to make it farther in.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Yora
So I am rather at a loss what to do with dungeons.

You might take a look at the Dungeon Mapping subforum on Cartographer's Guild, which has some interesting maps and concepts. Those combined with some of the suggestions in this thread might give you some new ideas.

[kingcheesepants]

In addition to the excellent points already made in regards to thinking about who made the dungeon and why, as well as who or what might also be living there. Think about what you are trying to gain from having a dungeon in the first place. Typically dungeons are places where the players can work together to overcome a series of obstacles before eventually fighting a strong enemy and getting some kind of reward. Often these obstacles will be puzzles, skill challenges, traps and smaller fights. These obstacles encourage the players to use all of their character's skills and think creatively and as a team while the characters slowly expend resources which makes the end fight that much harder. A trek through a desert, jungle or other harsh environment with a big monster at the end can fulfill these goals in the same way that a dungeon can. So can tracking down some crime boss and infiltrating his lair. Or even something like a heist. Dungeons are very often ruins, temples, fortresses and caves but they certainly don't have to be.
Also if you are doing a classic dungeon (temple or whatever) remember traps and puzzles as traps. A block puzzle or a skyrim style match the pictures puzzle might break your immersion but how about a floor with pressure plates and some of them shoot arrows or drop you into a pit with a gelatinous cube, and then you have some subtle (or if you're my players not so subtle) hints as to which panels are safe (perhaps in a song the locals sing) Or a puzzle wherein you have to prove that you have the same ideals as the people who made the temple for example a temple to a particular god of peace might have a puzzle where you need to put an olive branch into the statues hand. Or even monsters as puzzles for example a basilisk who is looking at a man holding a key in one hand and a mirror in the other (both man and basilisk are petrified and they need to unpetrify the man without undoing the basilisk.) There are lots of possibilities but many people in real life and especially in classic fantasy utilize traps and you can too.

[Yora]

There is a fountain in this room. Under the flow of this fountain is a silver plant that is protected from the fountain's flow by a force field. Is the force field is interrupted a green gem at the base of the silver plant will begin to glow.

Or An hourglass with three chambers on the top feeds into a single chamber at the bottom. Each chamber contains a different color of sand. Coiled at it's base are the skeletal remains of a large lizard. The skeletal lizard will attack if the PCs approach the hourglass. It will attempt to drain them of blood, doing so slowly begins to put flesh back on it's bones

But who put them there and for what purpose? It can't be for the entertainment for looters and assassins who want to harm the builder and still be in some way plausible.

[NichG]

I think you should make use of time and decay to layer more incidental challenges into a dungeon rather than focusing on dungeons as structures built to protect their contents. So at first this was some piece of celestial machinery that governed the orbit of the moon. It was broken free and fell to the material realm in a lower planar attack 3000 years ago. Five hundred years ago a local mage found it and adapted the parts he could understand to advance his golemcraft, building a quarter of it into a lab. However, the golems have gone to seed and are playing out the last instructions in weird ways. Also part of the lab collapsed, freeing a number of oozes from containment who have replicated into an ooze lake.

Two hundred years ago, the local city made a huge operation of scavenging metals from the ruin for a war effort against a necromancer's undead forces. The necromancer attacked the site, leaving behind some undead deeper in the ruins who were too much trouble to extract. Also there are lingering negative energy effects and ghostly fragments of the last memories of the miners where the worst massacres happened. Furthermore, the miners had built lots of scaffolds and pathways to deal with hard to access areas or gaps from removed materials, which have partially collapsed.

Ten years ago, a demon who escaped their summoner's control found the site and corrupted the mechanism, creating a curse that causes periodic earthquakes and landslides in the region by trying to move the mountains rather than the moon. Now the demon rules over an apocalyptic cult in the inner parts of the ruins.

[Dr paradox]

I'm by no means a "Dungeoneer's" Dungeon Master either. I like playing NPCs and describing horrific things, and my encounters are very much more of the "One nova fight a day" variety than the "six to eight on a floor" variety. I also have a hard time with standard "dungeon puzzle" conceits that make up classic funhouses; I don't look down on them, I'm just compelled for everything in a space to have a reason for being there.

That said, I think dungeons are valuable as self contained spaces built to stand up to intense player scrutiny and problem solving. Making plans and executing them is one of the greatest pleasures of the game, as far as I'm concerned, and Dungeons are spaces built around that.

To that end, I tend to build dungeons Engagement First: structurally, it's important to think about the navigational choices they're presented with, and within rooms it's vital to think about what challenge the players perceive is there to be solved.

First, structure and navigation: I strongly recommend you vary your room exits, by purpose and appearance. I once made a vast dungeon where every room was a bizarre experiment left over from an insane epic level wizard, and it was a bore because there was no way to make an informed decision about where they were going to end up. It turns out that, from the players' side of the equation, it might as well have been a linear sequence of rooms. Since then, I've learned how important it is to make the navigational decisions THEMSELVES interesting, beyond the results of Going That Way. Include conspicuously more secured passages, doors that have been broken down, open hallways that are plainly main thoroughfares, well-shafts that may connect to other rooms, holes in the floor and ceiling. Others have mentioned, and I'll echo here, that it's very useful for dungeon design to have the current residents not be the original builders, because that opens the way to all kinds of potentially hazardous hacks they've installed for getting around. Think rickety rope bridges, unsecured scaffolding, capstan-operated elevators, and so on. Make the passages distinct, and where possible, indicate the immediate destination. If they know that destination isn't their ultimate goal, include some extra information to entice them that way: A prisoner calling for help, a sign that says Armory, the smell of something delicious cooking, a cute dog that runs down the corridor when it sees them. Conversely, make certain destinations especially hazardous looking: Rappeling down the crevasse to that lit balcony gets you to the bottom of the dungeon faster, but you can see an immense monster restlessly churning the water at the bottom. There are the main stairs to the duke's quarters, but you can hear the sounds of easily a score of guards carousing at its foot. Again, the key is informed decisions and calculated risks, whether it's trying to sneak past the monster, bluff your way past the guards, or bypass the most straightforward route by (best of all) exploring the nooks and crannies of the dungeon.

Second, room by room engagement. A good room has a challenge in it, or is at least a hub for an interesting navigational choice. Combat and puzzles are the bread and butter challenges in a room, but there could be mysteries, backstory, more navigational hazards, or treasure. Take the idea of a kitchen, for example. You've got several exits: servants stairs for bringing meals up to the bedroom, passage to the grand dining hall with plate and silver storage on the way, maybe an exit to the yard for delivering supplies and fetching well water, stairs down to the cellar for beer and other things kept cool, and an adjoining pantry. In the kitchen, you might have a portly imp who's contract bound to taste meals for poison, plus a guard passed out drunk in the cellar, and the cook himself who's very alarmed at these heavily armed strangers who've just burst in. The challenges: talk down the cook from calling for the guards, don't wake the guard in the cellar, and figure out if you can trust the imp's advice about a secret staircase accessible via the cellar.

Mysteries are nice because they provide optional engagement that you can space out over several rooms. The party enters a chamber that was a barracks originally, but the furniture is smashed and both doors were barricaded from the outside, though one is smashed. Investigation can reveal that something with claws was trapped in here, but broke free into the common room and climbed up the chimney. There's a shredded suit of leather armor in the barracks, but no blood. From the broken arrows and axes you can determine that weapons were no good against it, and it's probably still waiting somewhere above. Players can choose whether to look into the clues or not, but it's up to you to provide the initial burst of anomalous information: It's a library BUT there are obviously books missing. It's a dining room BUT the chairs have been scattered around the room. It's a chapel BUT the stained glass has all been blacked out and there's graffiti on the tile floor.

Final suggestion, you don't need to map out complete floorplans for all or even most of your dungeons. A concept map that just shows connections between areas of engagement will work just fine nine times out of ten, and save you energy for writing good scenes to take place there and punch up the encounter maps for your few fights. Additionally, concept maps free you from having to match realistic locations to real-life architecture: it's enough to know that the second-floor servants quarters are in the east wing, you don't need to kill yourself over the exact number of rooms you can cram between the solarium and the back staircase.

All this might be a lot of talk and little help, but I hope it gives you a few ideas. Good luck!

[Dr paradox]

I think you should make use of time and decay to layer more incidental challenges into a dungeon rather than focusing on dungeons as structures built to protect their contents. So at first this was some piece of celestial machinery that governed the orbit of the moon. It was broken free and fell to the material realm in a lower planar attack 3000 years ago. Five hundred years ago a local mage found it and adapted the parts he could understand to advance his golemcraft, building a quarter of it into a lab. However, the golems have gone to seed and are playing out the last instructions in weird ways. Also part of the lab collapsed, freeing a number of oozes from containment who have replicated into an ooze lake.

Two hundred years ago, the local city made a huge operation of scavenging metals from the ruin for a war effort against a necromancer's undead forces. The necromancer attacked the site, leaving behind some undead deeper in the ruins who were too much trouble to extract. Also there are lingering negative energy effects and ghostly fragments of the last memories of the miners where the worst massacres happened. Furthermore, the miners had built lots of scaffolds and pathways to deal with hard to access areas or gaps from removed materials, which have partially collapsed.

Ten years ago, a demon who escaped their summoner's control found the site and corrupted the mechanism, creating a curse that causes periodic earthquakes and landslides in the region by trying to move the mountains rather than the moon. Now the demon rules over an apocalyptic cult in the inner parts of the ruins.

This came in while I was writing my post, and I just gotta say: outstanding ideas.

[Eldan]

I'll join that opinion: things that once had an entirely different function but fell apart are great challenges. Imagine some ancient factory, if that fits your setting. If some of hte machines are still half-working, that could be an absolutely deadly puzzle challenge.

One of the most memorable dungeons I've been in was in a post-apocalyptic game: it was an interactive science museum, using some kind of super high tech and virtual reality. We had to do things like navigate a zero-G room to get through the astronomy exhibit (and convince the AI not to skip to "surface of Venus, full immersion simulation").

For low tech solutions: room that is flooded by a cave-in. Magically powered forge that is failing and heating up the room to near-lethal temperatures. Maybe the room with confusing illusions and trapdoors wasn't meant as a trap, it was a theatre stage of a high-magic elven empire.

[Vahnavoi]

I feel like this is the second time you've had this thread. Though last time, it was more strictly about dungeons worth exploring.

Let's talk about some adventure modules and supplements I've found usefull, primarily from Lamentations of the Flame Princess catalogue.

Spoiler alert, I guess, for those who'd like to play them.

Let's start with Death Frost Doom. The way I've gotten people into this simple: "there's this mountaineer who disappeared going up this mountain, the local tax collectors would like you to find him".

This initial motivation is a red herring. Any group that seriously focuses on finding the mountaineer, will find him outside of any dungeon, with minimal risk. The only real risk in finding the mountaineer, is in attempting to retrace his exact steps, as that will lead to the characters going up to the adventure location the hard way. So, in this sense, exploration is already rewarded, because it will provide an alternate route to the goal.

Along the easy path, they will run into a crazy hermit. The hermit has nothing to do with the goal and has no information to give regarding it, but they have deep personal reasons to stop the characters from going up the mountain. They aren't a real threat or an obstacle. They are a warning, a hint of the deeper sinister nature of the location.

Once at the peak of the mountain, the characters will find a lot of disturbing details with seemingly no rhyme or reason to them... and it will have almost nothing at all to do with their mission. The mountaineer is trivial to find and take back to civilization.

What keeps the players around, at that point, is their own perverse sense of curiosity. They want to know more about this place. They want to know how those disturbing details go together.

What follows is essentially a series of traps. Every step gives the characters a reason to run away. Everything they do risks turning a location that was largely inert, into an escalating catastrophe that will both destroy the location and everything near it.

What's the lesson here?

Well, the first lesson is that how interesting a dungeon is as a location has nothing at all to do with nominal goals of the player characters. So if you're building your dungeons around such goals - finding a particular NPC or getting a bunch of loot - you're already failing.

A location that is interesting in its own right, is by its nature diversionary. It begets new goals, it warps existing ones, it makes characters forget about the NPC or the loot in favor of asking and answering questions such as "what is behind that door?" or "what does this button do?"

When your players are going through stables and kitchens and sleeping rooms, wondering what they're missing, you're almost already there. What they, and possibly you, are missing is that they have a function - need to have a function - outside whatever fleeting objective they're currently chasing. Stables implies horses, if it's a living location, you can go to an empty stable and wait for them to come back - to steal them for yourself, or to kill them, or whatever. And if they don't come back, that's a hint of the location being dead - which paints a larger mystery, asks questions which point to actions to answer them.

So on and so forth.

So if I were you, I'd start by taking one existing dungeon of yours and then asking yourself, "if I came to this place with no specific goals in mind, what would I do there? What would pique my interest? What would prevent me from investigating that interest? What would happen if I did investigate? "

[kingcheesepants]

But who put them there and for what purpose? It can't be for the entertainment for looters and assassins who want to harm the builder and still be in some way plausible.

It could be anyone and for any number of reasons, maybe the original inhabitants/builders, maybe the people who are there now, maybe some passing devil or wizard. Maybe they're a trap to kill invaders, maybe they set off a signal that warns the inhabitants, maybe they're part of some ritual (possibly gone wrong), maybe it's just decorative and will serve as a cool trinket or loot for the party. You don't necessarily need to know the answer and your players definitely don't. If they ask, you can just tell them that whoever or whatever put it there either didn't explain why or if they did it's lost to time. Mysteries can be exciting and sometimes those mysteries can be jumping off points for new and interesting quests.

[Vahnavoi]

But who put them there and for what purpose?

See, that's the right sort of question, but the important part is to get your players to ask that question - and then take action to answer it.

[Composer99]

It seems to me that there are a few archetypes of dungeon.

(1) The base. This could be the moathouse in The Village of Hommlet, or the ruined castle of the dragonlord in the original Dragon Quest. This is someone's base of operations. It might be custom built for the purpose, or it might be repurposed.

(2) The Indiana Jones. This dungeon was built to store something and keep it there, either for ever or only to be removed by those the dungeon creators deemed worthy. This could include the dungeon at the centre of the Isle of Dread, if I'm remembering well enough. Typical tomb dungeons would also qualify.

(3) The deathtrap. Think Tomb of Horrors, or the old Fighting Fantasy book "Deathtrap Dungeon". Easily the most quixotic and bizarre category.

(4) The ruin. This could be something like Moria or the Lost Mines of Phandelver. Often serves as a base. Lots of room for hazards as a result of decay.

(5) The cave/cavern complex. Big ones can have settlements, mini dungeons, factions. Smaller ones will probably resemble one of the other archetypes.

Each one of these will have different denizens with different purposes, different mixes of traps or hazards, and different reasons why PCs might want to go in them.

[King of Nowhere]

my dm has devised a bunch of powerful dragons locked extradimensionally that can be freed by navigating equally extradimentional, thematically related dungeon. why? it was a sort of mitigating condition for the spell. in order to work, the spell that imrpisoned those dragons required that there would be a way to free them by solving puzzles and fighting monsters.
it worked very well as an excuse for a dungeon.

But who put them there and for what purpose? It can't be for the entertainment for looters and assassins who want to harm the builder and still be in some way plausible.

aside for the "harming the builder" part, they can be for entertainment. in my world they sometimes make dungeons filled with monsters and traps and send adventurers through them for the entertainment of the public.
that's also an excuse for a dungeon, because i also don't have much use for them otherwise.

[D&D_Fan]

Here is a great book I can recommend:
Dungeon Alphabet

Besides that...

Use unique and challenging traps.
Here are some of mine you can borrow:

• Weight-activated Magnetic Floor.
• Pit of Lava that must be swung over. There is a rope, but it is actually a Rope of Entaglement, or an Assasin Vine
• Room filled with Whipped Cream. No spells are designed for it.
• Polymorph a character into a Dolphin.
• Turn off gravity.
• Upside down Spiked Pit Trap 100 feet high + Reverse gravity.
• The floor is alive: it is a monster.
• Greased Stairs.
• Just a door that is fake, and skewers the opener with a jagged blade coated in Purple Worm Venom.
• Room of poison gas that must be solved in real time.
• Crushing Wall pushed players through Giant Dicer.

Also, make lots of different routes, so they players can backtrack.

Remember, not everything has to be magic, gold, or monsters, or traps. Maybe throw in other fun rooms, like a library, or an NPC.

Also... How does the dungeon work?
What do the monsters eat?
Is magic affected by the dungeon to prevent escape? a common restriction is no teleportation.

[Lagtime]

But who put them there and for what purpose? It can't be for the entertainment for looters and assassins who want to harm the builder and still be in some way plausible.

Well, you just add in the details.

In 766 the Dark Druid Yondi built the fountain as part of a display for plants he had found in the Underdark. Once the room was filled with other plants too, but they have long turned to dust.

The fountain was built by a drow band, known as the Night Bite. The fountain was their source of fresh water and food.

Everything in the dungeon has a purpose and reason for existing...though often it's long gone. A room that was once a small mushroom garden is now a mushroom forest. The cells are just rooms with iron bars.

And most of all is the weird, broken, strange, unknown magic. The altar of the frog once had a simple bowl of blood(filled with blood on command!). That bowl has long sense broken...but the magic seeped into the room and makes all the frog statues bleed blood...and covers the room in blood.

A typical dungeon, like any old structure will have some history:

Year 102 the dungeon is built as part of Castle Karg. The middle section is cells and torture chambers. The rooms to the east are storerooms. The Dark Emporium of Yondi takes up the north. The south are the holding chambers for a clan of enslaved dwarves. And the west is used by the Cult of the Fatal Frog.

By the year 202, Castle Karg is nothing but rubble....but the dungeon is still there. The Big Boot goblin tribe has moved into the old storerooms. The Dark Emporium is over run with lots of plants and plant monsters(and food for the goblins). The dwarves are still trapped, but "free" though they fear to leave the dungeon. The cult is long gone too, as back in 117 they summoned a frog monstrosity from the outer darkness that ate most of them....and it's still down in the dungeon(it can't get past the ward sigli).

Year 302 the dungeon is still there. The goblin tribe has broken into two: the Right Boot and Left Boot tribes, each ruled by a son of the last Big Boot king. The Right Boot goblins live in the old storerooms, the Left Boot have re-enslaved the dwarves. The drow of the Night Bite have cleared a lot of the monstrious plants, and trade with the goblins. No one goes near the area of the cult and the frog monster.

Year 305 is the current game year.......The drow are dead and gone, and the Left Boot goblins now control the dwarf prison and the dark emporium...and the Right Boot goblins are ready for war any day now. And Dwarf Durt has escaped...will a wild plan to let out the frog monstrosity to kill everyone.

And you just keep making stuff up of there.

[Yora]

A dungeon full of broken devices that now are a hazard actually sound really reasonable.
Monsters or NPCs the players are looking for could make their lairs in sections that have been cleared of dangers (or left in place to be a danger to intruders). There would have to be at least one safe path (at least safe and passable for the creatures), but it would not have to be an obvious one, forcing the players to experiment where they can get through, quite possibly setting off dangers that the inhabitants knew to leave alone.
In case of the players looking for a tomb or treasure room, there doesn't even need to be any safe passage.

You would have a large amount of ruined underground constructions to make this a plausible common lair for creatures, but the usual adventure fantasy world generally does.

(Since we're already throwing around specific examples, a neat one might be a collapsed passage that allows squeezing through at the top. If that passage is reasonably long, it could be quite dangerous if they get pursued by small enemies. Might even make the players want to search for an alternative way they could use.)

[Lagtime]

A dungeon full of broken devices that now are a hazard actually sound really reasonable.
Monsters or NPCs the players are looking for could make their lairs in sections that have been cleared of dangers (or left in place to be a danger to intruders). There would have to be at least one safe path (at least safe and passable for the creatures), but it would not have to be an obvious one, forcing the players to experiment where they can get through, quite possibly setting off dangers that the inhabitants knew to leave alone.
In case of the players looking for a tomb or treasure room, there doesn't even need to be any safe passage.

You might be getting it now. Add as much detail and history as you need to a dungeon...like any other place.

You would have a large amount of ruined underground constructions to make this a plausible common lair for creatures, but the usual adventure fantasy world generally does.

Well, they built plenty of stuff underground here on Earth too.

(Since we're already throwing around specific examples, a neat one might be a collapsed passage that allows squeezing through at the top. If that passage is reasonably long, it could be quite dangerous if they get pursued by small enemies. Might even make the players want to search for an alternative way they could use.)

This is a dungeon classic. And it's one of the points of Tuckers Kobolds.

Also, a lot of old stuff right here on Earth was made very tiny too. Plenty of old houses are small, with tiny doorways and windows. And plenty of cellars and basements are quite small too.

[Yora]

Things are just much easier to build when you build them small. And that goes especially for digging underground. It might be a literal pain in the back to move through a 1.20m tunnel every day for year, but expanding the tunnel so that you can walk upright and people can move in both directions at the same time would take a lot of time and work you could instead use to just do more actual mining.

[Jornophelanthas]

I found inspiration in this link:

https://www.roleplayingtips.com/rptn...dungeon-model-

The five room dungeon model can offer some handholds for DMs without too much experience in dungeon creating.

[jayem]

Perhaps take a break from thinking of things from the players/DM perspective.
You want the boss to be in his 'dungeon', fine

Now switch to the Boss's perspective, play Dungeon Master
Who am I, a bandit chief then I presumably need some Barracks(1) for my Troops so I need some Dining Halls(2) attached to some Kitchens(3) and in turn to the Stores(4), the Stores need to be accessible. I want to eat as well so the Kitchen needs to connect to my Rooms(5). I guess I need an Armoury(6) as well. Obviously there's an entrance(7).
That gives seven regions and some connections. And they needn't be monolithic square rooms.
Now put patrols and things in.

Now switch back to the players, can they still just rush in a straight line. He's a bandit king expecting attack, lets add some decent defences on the front gate (including actually having a gate), and on the main route to his chambers.

We we know he's in his Rooms, so that gives one room that justifies it. The entrance is the entrance so again that already has a clear role.

The armoury gives you weapons, essential if somehow you end up without weapons. The barracks and armoury hold the troops, so if you can close that off somehow, that makes things a lot easier, otherwise you have troops chasing you through. In any case even if the players don't engage with the room, at least it gives an interesting structure to the gangsters response.

The kitchen/stores gives a legitimate way to access sans weapons (of course for this to be interesting you need bluff to be calibrated so that it's not magical, but is useful), so that gives you one interesting interplay. In any case the kitchen side can't be made as trivially strong/secure, so even in a more punch your way through it approach that gives an incentive to at least go through it.

You have the dining room, which is a large open central region.

That leaves the stores unplayed with, the stores full of stuff you can Mcguyver to get through a locked door or other reasonable problem(again this requires you not to be able to just cast ignore door), in fact we don't have a dungeon so, lets go full A-team, if the party get caught in the locked stores they go.

[Cicciograna]

I haven't been building a meaningful dungeon for a long time, but generally I care for questions like "What is the ecosystem here?" or "What would creatures in this dungeon drink?". I never felt the need to flesh out a complete food chain, generally I assume that the omnipresent vermin - mice, rodents, insect and similar - form the bottom of said chain, and that smaller creatures living in the dungeon feed on them, slightly larger creatures feed on these, larger still feed on these ones and so on. Inteligent humanoids don't necessarily occupy the top rung of the food chain. Also, mushrooms: edible, light-emitting, poisonous, noxious, everywhere underground.

Then, I worry about where people live. How they see underground. What they do when they are not planning world domination. While these rooms could sound "empty", they give color: when finding a room with a burn mark on the floor, a vent in the ceiling, half rotten cabinets and moldy food, the players might realize they are in some sort of a kitchen; and they would probably know that a kitchen wouldn't be too far from living quarters or a main hall where to mingle, and where something useful could be found.

Dungeonscape actually gives pretty solid ideas on what is a dungeon, or why would somebody use a dungeon. There are two other sources that I found useful and interesting when designing dungeons: the first is How To Host A Dungeon, an actually really fun game in which a dungeon is procedurally generated, complete with a structure, story, ruins and denizens. The pdf is very cheap, on YouTube there are a couple of gameplayes and it's very enjoyable.
The second is Dwarf Fortress: the learning curve is somewhat steep, but once you master the game, it truly gives you an idea on the logistical issues of building a usable dungeon. Where is water? What could the denizens of the dungeon eat? How would they repel an invasion? Where would they sleep? Where would they mingle? Do they have temples, and if so, are they simple shrines or are they grandiose cathedrals? Dwarf Fortress puts you in charge of finding an answer to this: after some games played (and many fortresses lost) you'll start to realize what shapes are functional and what are not. And in addition to this, it is an addictive game.

[Duff]

I think you should make use of time and decay to layer more incidental challenges into a dungeon rather than focusing on dungeons as structures built to protect their contents. So at first this was some piece of celestial machinery that governed the orbit of the moon. It was broken free and fell to the material realm in a lower planar attack 3000 years ago. Five hundred years ago a local mage found it and adapted the parts he could understand to advance his golemcraft, building a quarter of it into a lab. However, the golems have gone to seed and are playing out the last instructions in weird ways. Also part of the lab collapsed, freeing a number of oozes from containment who have replicated into an ooze lake.

Two hundred years ago, the local city made a huge operation of scavenging metals from the ruin for a war effort against a necromancer's undead forces. The necromancer attacked the site, leaving behind some undead deeper in the ruins who were too much trouble to extract. Also there are lingering negative energy effects and ghostly fragments of the last memories of the miners where the worst massacres happened. Furthermore, the miners had built lots of scaffolds and pathways to deal with hard to access areas or gaps from removed materials, which have partially collapsed.

Ten years ago, a demon who escaped their summoner's control found the site and corrupted the mechanism, creating a curse that causes periodic earthquakes and landslides in the region by trying to move the mountains rather than the moon. Now the demon rules over an apocalyptic cult in the inner parts of the ruins.

That sounds like a fun dungeon to me!
Jayem has also laid out a fairly conventional dungeon which will be a lot quicker to build and should play out faster.

So, in D&D*, The party that is going to take on NichG's demon is probably going to spend 12 hours or more working through the different areas and challenges , will probably rest (or long rest) several times and may well get part way through and head back to town for more supplies before coming back. They might pick up some allies along the way and meet a number of mini-bosses in different areas.
OTOH, the bandit lair is probably a single session, almost certainly the party won't rest and if they have to withdraw and come back the GM should consider how the bandit leader responds to the 1st intrusion.

[Saintheart]

How about building more literally to the idea of a dungeon?

The dictionary definition of 'dungeon' is "a strong underground prison cell, especially in a castle."

So make your dungeon an actual prison.

As in, it was built to keep several terrible somethings in and keep other people out ... and ensure that if someone did get in, that they don't get out again.

Want to upend the normal dungeon design? The moment the characters enter it, trigger a trap and collapse the entrance behind them. Sorry, Mr Wizard with your teleport tricks, the makers of the prison designed it so it's locked against teleportation including extradimensional spaces like Rope Trick or Magnificent Mansion, it wouldn't be much of a prison if you could just dimension-hop your way into the place, now, would it? Oh, sorry, Mr Cleric, the same designer of the prison was smart enough to also put dimensional locks in place and make sure divination spells don't work inside the place, no Guidance or Planar Binding for you. Let's see how your 15 minute adventuring day works now with no town to go back to.

Now your dungeon is not just about finding the NPC and beating the snot out of every semi- to non- sentient creature in between, it's about figuring out a way out of there before your consumables run out and you starve. And indeed beating the snot out of every guard in the place might not be such a good strategy, those guards may have important clues about how to get out ... of which there might be a few, but which have tradeoffs to them: go this way, the cleric's healing powers won't work. Go this way, enemy spellcasters are overpowered. And so on.

[Tanarii]

Dungeons are ancient and probably magical places to explore and wonder at. And depending on the edition, loot them and/or kill things and/or take their stuff. Often if there are builders, they put puzzles, traps, and other things there as some kind of test.

Basically, adventuring parties are akin to Egyptian tomb robbers, but in magical tombs that have spawned a weird ecology.

If you're mostly running adventures where people need to go get info/maguffin from a guarded NPC, there's not must point in exploring*. Although there's still options for looting, killing, and taking stuff so you've still got the core elements.

*unless they don't know where the guarded NPC is.

[AdAstra]

Well, fundamentally, the fun of a dungeon is the place, not the objective, most of the time, so you gotta come up with an interesting place.

There are multiple ways you could go about this, but you can boil the two main approaches down to realism and sport. For sport, you basically just need to come up with fun challenges and oddities, then arrange these attractions in an interesting order, then maybe come up with a backstory to justify it a bit. For realism, you would essentially build this place from the ground up. Who built this place, if anyone? Why does it exist, and what led up to its creation? What function does the place serve? What's happened to it in the intervening years that would influence its current state? If other people have come into possession of this place, what did they use it for? What happened to the original owners?

For example, imagine a dungeon in the most classical sense: a prison, usually below ground level.

Well, most dungeons are built into castles, to help guard the contents from internal and external threats. Castles are usually built to keep people from getting in, so it's definitely got a nice wall, gate, and moat, very classic. Bastions and internal barracks to house troops and defensive armaments, all sorts of things that can be repurposed by the new occupants. Castles often have small settlements around them as well, farms to keep the troops fed at the very least. That little village might be occupied by monsters, wild beasts, ghosts of the previous inhabitants, etc. It might also be trapped by the new owners, to catch food and intruders. It's also almost certainly overgrown by plant life with no one maintaining the fields. If it's ancient enough, a forest might be springing up around and inside it, providing more concealment for threats.

The new owners most likely only use the top portion of the place, assuming they're mortals. Not a whole lot of point going too far underground when you have to go topside to pillage and hunt. Let's go with Hobgoblins for a simple case. Perfect sort of base for them to train out of, and they can make good use of the fortifications and defensive weaponry. Nothing more fun than sniping passing peasants with a ballista.

Once you've gotten past the aboveground areas, you've probably found the dungeon, assuming it wasn't hidden too carefully by the builders. Now, let's say our prospective dungeonmaker is a classic nasty necromancer. He's probably got all sorts of messed up stuff in his dungeons, and wizards are pretty wacky, so he's probably got traps, too. Plus, prisons should ideally be a bit hard to navigate by design.

So, making your way past magic wards and the occasional zombie snake pit with overhead compartment that drops more zombie snakes, which also explode, you get to the basic cells. The place you put dissidents, test subjects, regular humanoids, essentially. All sorts of things could've happened to those folks. Maybe they're just bones. Maybe they've been kept alive by the necromancer's insane experiments, insane from the torment. Perhaps the cells are now a larder for the new owners. Maybe the immortal prisoners formed an elaborate mini-society, manufacturing tools and goods out of toenails and hair that they throw to each other. Fun things, mixed up with the occasional exploding acid zombie cyborg flying snake pit.

Then you can find your way to the lower levels. If I were a necromancer, I'd probably put my main lab here, surrounded by a little trapped labyrinth. Nothing too elaborate, I still need to get down here regularly, but I need somewhere to put more traps without cluttering up my lab. Gotta find a use for all these weird snakes I make. Probably also have some loose experiments wandering around, forever lost in the winding halls. Close to all the cells, but easy enough to escape, especially since I probably built in a secret tunnel or teleport pad that leads to some concealed location out of town. So I've got my operating tables and my shelves of wacky evil ingredients. Plenty to gawk at, could put some lore here. The good ol' mad ramblings about all the secret cool stuff I've got below. Of course, half the books are probably mimics, and I've probably left some half-finished monstrosity or three on the table, ready to bust out at a moment's notice. Given the dungeon so far, I think it'll be snake-like, but like, made of Big Flesh. Might be a nice image to have like ten operating tables with a single giant monster strapped to all of them. Behind the shelves I might put a secret door, if I'm into that sorta thing. It's where I'll put my acid tank, because I think that's funny. And of course, I'll keep my gold in the acid tank, because who'd ever think to look in there?

Below, though, that's where I'd keep the good stuff. All kinds of exotic monsters and horrid experiments. But not in any old jail cells, that's for chumps like upstairs. For maximum security, I'm going to use special teleport pads to connect to sealed rooms deep underground. Some places I store my cool stuff, some I'll put monsters in, and others might have more traps. Some big inscrutable control panel can be used to teleport things to the main room, where they can be observed/fought/retrieved. It's the world's worst filing system, but it's also a hilarious and a solid security system. Sure there's no bars on the containment area, but that's what Forcecage is for! For maximum humor, I think I'll give each pad a 1 minute cooldown, so people can't back out too easily. Maybe my corpse is in one of these rooms because I wandered in while drunk. Would be pretty neat and and appropriate end for someone who builds a dungeon this convoluted.

If there's a person the party needs to rescue/capture, they might've ended up down here after escaping from their captors above. A treasure could obviously have ended up down here when the necromancer put it there.


Just a start though, and I'm no expert.