Dungeon Design

[pyrephox]

Here's the thing. I very, very rarely do straight up dungeon-crawl types of games, even when I run D&D. A large part of this is that it's always been hard for me to /get/ the standard RPG dungeon. It's just not all that intuitive. But since some of my mind is sliding back towards classic fantasy gaming, I've been thinking about dungeon design. I think, as I create a dungeon, I need to work to establish a few things:

1. Original Purpose. Dungeons are rarely just...dungeons. People just do not dig a series of underground passages and fill it randomly with traps and monsters. So, what was it? A dungeon doesn't necessarily have to be underground...it could be a city, where some buildings have collapsed and only their undercellars are still standing, whereas some towers still rise a good thirty feet in the air.

2. Ecology. If there are monsters, are they living? If they're living, what do they /eat/? 'Adventurers', while a fun answer, is probably not sufficient, unless there's a godawful stream of adventuring fellows wandering in. I like the idea of mapping out areas where food is grown, or massive grubs are farmed. Also, midden heaps, living quarters, and 'territory'.

3. Traps. Traps are odd. If they were set by the original denizens...why? And why haven't they all been set or broken by now? What are they guarding? Unless your past civilization was particularly bloodthirsty, all traps do not have to be lethal, either. Many civilizations might simply want their intruders confined or knocked out, so that they can be caught. Later denizens, of course, may set cruder traps to guard territory and the like. But there should always be a /purpose/ to a trap.

4. Treasure. Mmmm, treasure. I like treasure! However, I'd like to see it come in more varied forms. Ancient books of lost knowledge, murals painted with pastes made from crushed gemstones, statuary and other objects of art, and so forth. Stuff that's fun and fits the setting.

Comments

[dreadmouse.livejournal.com]

Many of the earliest D&D dungeon crawls were purposeless dungeons that completely ignored your points. The famous nameless orc guarding a treasure chest in a 10'x10' room springs to mind, or the horror that was Castle Amber, a module that was truly fascinating in its terrible badness and disfunctional plot. I got into the hobby as it was getting off the ground (I played D&D Basic) so I suffered for the art, so to speak.

I think that the bulk of published adventures are far better now then they have been, but there are still terrible omissions. Very rarely are there midden heaps anywhere in a castle, or garderobes. Dungeons are even worse.

The nastiest dungeon I've ever played was terribly realistic, if somewhat disgusting. It was a homebrew low-level creation, an abandoned dwarven mine that was now largely populated by two tribes of kobolds who mostly ate... each other. Traps were ever-present, set by each tribe to hunt the other.

[aerlorn.livejournal.com]

I agree with you there on all accounts. It is easier to do in a tabletop setting however than on a CRPG where they have limits on what they can show. You have to use your imagination and figure that you just never got to see the food stores. But in a table top setting, it could be interesting if the dungeon traps all guarded the monsters food stores while the treasure (useless to the monsters) was left largely unguarded. That is assuming the dungeon wasn't created as a tomb to guard something specific. In that case undead/constructs don't need to eat anything so you can plop them anywhere.

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

Yes. :D Undead and Constructs are an easy way to get around the food requirements. So are, for that matter, NPCs with Cleric classes, for the food and water conjuration spells. You still need somewhere to discard the food, but producing it is easier.

[cpip.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think one of the best dungeon crawls remains B2, The Keep on the Borderlands, as ancient as it was. It included "what do the monsters eat?" and "Where do they go to the bathroom?" and "how do they get along with the neighbors?"

Is it perfect? No. The Caves of Chaos were still pretty tightly packed even so... but it could've been far, far worse.

[cappadocius.livejournal.com]

Phil Reed's small press company Ronin Arts has a series of cheap PDFs called "101 X" - including "101 Mundane Treasures" - that do things like you're thinking about in 4. They're totally worth it if you're looking for variety in your dungeons.

Traps are odd and fun and completely context reliant. I wish they were more appropriate to most Makes-Sense Dungeons; tombs and kobold-containing dungeons are the limiters if you want some common sense.

Dungeon ecologies are one of the most fun things about D&D for me; actually, all the different weird ecosystems D&D creates are a huge part of the fun. A D&D foodweb can be maddening using only published monsters - there's so few herbivores compared to the carnivorous horrors PCs like to fight.

As for #3 . ..

[amethystjade.livejournal.com]

I have a trap/rogue book that has a bunch of suggestions for traps that go from mild deterrent, to containment, to I-hate-people-and-wish-them-all-bloody-deaths.

[cythraul.livejournal.com]

All four of your points are discussed with a touch more length in the 3rd Ed. DMG. You've definitely hit the main points, but it's always nice to hear someone else's take. :)