Doug McCrae said:
Certain dungeons - The Temple Of Elemental Evil, the giants' lairs from the G series, the Caves of Chaos from Keep on The Borderlands - are widely regarded as classic. In an attempt to improve my own dungeons I'm trying to analyse what makes them great.
When you talk about what makes a dungeon great, largely you are talking about the map. To talk about the encounters beyond the level of a map and a simple key, you have to talk about what makes the adventure great which is a related but slightly different thing.
The problem is that when people talk about 'a great adventure' they don't usual mean anything but that it is fun, and this is of only tangential help to us if we want to design good dungeons. In the case of something like 'Keep on the Borderlands', this boils down to little more than nostalgia. The 'Caves of Chaos' are not a great dungeon, and get such a blanket pass largely because they are often peoples first experience with a great game. In fact, they are in many ways a very poorly designed dungeon (in other ways, a very good on).
My basic rule of thumb when designing a dungeon is 'Map = Story'. In a dungeon based session, the map is your story outline
and should reflect this. The rooms in a dungeon are chapters, and the corridors between them are the connections between chapters. The different ways that the players choose to travel between these connections represent the different ways that the story can unfold.
A dungeon map should therefore be designed according to the narrative to be played out, or if it is part of a larger story, then according to the role in the story that the dungeon will play out. Story and map are the same, so every adventure is a dungeon, even if the designer takes pains to make it not look like a dungeon. Likewise, every dungeon needs a story.
Older dungeons by and large where not deliberately designed with story in mind. This results in a story that can be traversed without any real dramatic tension or larger meaning emerging during the process. Random story walks can be alot of fun, and they have thier place. They maximize the ability of the PC's to create thier own story, but they tend to become tiresome very quickly once the newness of the gaming experience wears off. 'Keep on the Borderlands' is remembered fondly only because its a low level module typically played by newbies. A random story walk can be good after an extremely linear section, to regenerate the player's sense of being in control. But if that's all you offer, most experienced gamers are going to want more meat.
The reverse problem is more often seen in modern dungeons. In an attempt to tightly entwine the map with the story, the dungeon is laid out in an extremely linear fashion. The result is a strong sense of drama, but very little player choice in how the story plays out. These can quickly turn into site-seeing tours, which are either joyless slogs or at best like having an interesting story read to you.
Classic dungeons get the right mix.
If you look at 'ToEE', its got lots of things going for it. It has a very high degree of player choice, and yet, the map can be broken into subsections each having its own theme, structure, and rising action. And the map in total has the same structure. With very few clues from the text, mostly involving under what conditions the various doors can be opened, the basic story of the module can be recreated from the map alone. I'm not saying that the module is perfect, but it is a great dungeon.
On the other hand, if you look at 'Caves of Chaos', you mostly get chaos. There are themed sections, but very little in the way of a story. Most players go through the dungeon with no clue about what is going on and with very little non-combat interaction with the inhabitants. It's very basic dungeoneering - kill things and take thier stuff. Nothing wrong with that, but you can kill things, take thier stuff,
and be part of an exciting story at the same time. There are alot of things about CoC that has always bothered me. One of them is that if you don't steer the players, they are very likely to get in over thier heads in a hurry. Any door but the kobolds or the goblins is likely to TPK a party of first levels almost immediately. There is nothing necessarily wrong with challenges outside of the characters current abilities and a strong starting hook is a great thing (both play important roles in certain stories), but such challenges need to be structured quite carefully. Another problem is that in a story sometimes you want to have a moment where you unveil something. If the 'reader' looks ahead and sees what's coming, the big moment is lost. The converse problem is that sometimes you want to foreshadow what's ahead so that the players are anticipating it. 'Caves of Chaos' potentially has both problems. Not only is the mechanations of the temple of chaos hidden from the players, but when its revealed it may not even be a climatic point in the 'story'.
On the plus side though, the small sections of 'Caves of Chaos' are very good dungeons indeed. They are about 6-10 rooms, which is as much as you want to bite off in a single chunk without being so small as to have no mystery to them. They aren't linear, but they always have strong starting hooks, strong themes, and strong climatic fights with sub-bosses plus unique features to explore (an armory, a jail, an enchanted chapel, a secret room, etc.). What's needed IMO is not a complete rewrite, but to organize the Caves as a whole according to the excellent design of its parts. I've actually done this, and with very little work or addition on my part, it turns what is in my opinion a potentially pedestrian, frustrating, and forgettable dungeon crawl (if its not your first time) into the true classic it should be and I think EGG intended. Simply, I break the dungeon into 3 parts (levels) - sections suitable for 1st level characters, sections for 2nd level characters, and sections for 3rd level characters. As you go deeper into the dungeon, the action 'rises'. I then add to this structure, components of a meta narrative. Thus, passing through from chapter one to chapter two involves passing through a small arena/commons complex (shared by the various demihuman tribes), where the players can encounter thier first clues about tribal rivalries, perhaps have thier first in dungeon RP encounters, and first get glimpses of the secret temple deeper within. Passing through from chapter two to chapter three involves passing through a lesser temple complex, where the characters can get the first foreshadowing of the minotaur 'boss monster' and face off against a temple priest for the first time. Finally, after negotiating the minotaur maze, the players can enter into the climatic fight against the temple cult itself and thwart thier evil plans once and for all. By which time, the players actually care about killing
this particular foe and taking his stuff.
Alot of that could probably be handled with extremely good DMing, but as an introductory module why demand of the DM so much when something as 'simple' as a good map would do the trick?
In my opinion, if you want to look at well-designed D&D dungeons, you need to look at 'Tomb of Horrors', 'Ravenloft', and the modern classic 'The Whispering Cairn'. Ravenloft may be the best map for a D&D module ever. It's simply too good to talk about meaningfully, because it doesn't have any problems with the possible exception of the catacombs being too large. If you can make a map that intriguing, I'll forgive you for being a little 'long winded' in places. People tend to either love or hate the content of 'Tomb of Horrors', but as a map its a triumph of making what's basically linear map seem non-linear. After playing the module, and then picking it up to DM it, I was shocked at how linear the map was. It doesn't seem like it when you are playing it because of the illusion of choice that it gives you, the few alternative paths, the uniqueness of the individual locations, and a couple oppurtunities to backtrack. Plus, it's the definitive 'find key and open door to access new level' module. Finally, 'The Whispering Cairn' may be the best introductory adventure ever written, and a good part of that is owed to the extraordinarily deep understanding Erik Mona displays in his dungeon design. It's an amazing peice of work, and every DM ought to pick it up just to study the design.
In my opinion though, one of the areas that cRPG's have ultimately excelled the pen and paper games that inspired them is in dungeon design. I think this is perhaps due to the fact that in a cRPG or one its offspring - first person shooters, adventure games, etc. - you've got very few tools for controlling the story but the map. The map is about all the computer can be made responcible for. If you can't design your adventure as a flow chart (basically a map), then you can't design it for the computer at all. Maybe the most inspired dungeon design of all time doesn't look like a dungeon at all and doesn't have combat in the tradiational sense. That 'dungeon' is the flowchart for the game Grim Fandango. It's an amazing peice of work just as a map, much less all the witty narrative and artwork that happens in the places on that map.
