How do YOU design a dungeon?

[n00bdragon]

I'm curious how others go about it and who knows, someone just might learn something.

When I design dungeons (or really any locale with highly defined map and more than one highly likely combat encounter) I usually start with the boss, and there's always a boss. Whether it's the ultimate big bad or just the antagonist of the week there'll be a powerful unit at the opposite end of the map from where the players start and defeating him will advance the story. I often start out by statting him and never pull his stats from a book. This takes a lot of time and thought, particularly if you want to integrate the boss with his lair, but I feel it's necessary at least. From there I'll start making notes of other monsters or opponents that might appear with the boss before proceeding onwards.

From there, it's just coming up with a reason or series of reasons the players can't just walk in and fight the boss immediately. It might be an enchanted door that they must destroy the three power stones to unseal or maybe it's just a series of rooms with monsters in them, but I try to come up with a number of trials the players have to pass, encounters, before they can even access the boss. I like to aim for two straight up fights, one puzzle, and one puzzle-fight in a typical session, give or take an encounter. Straight up fights will be a room with one or two interesting features and/or hazards and those usually come first. What's a cool room to fight in, and then what to fight. Usually I bring along at least one of the same mobs from the boss fight to come just to introduce them to the players and then add a few more. Usually these monsters are handmade like the boss but the extras that come with them might be out of a book if I can find something relevant. So if the final boss is Krug Baneface the orc warchief and I made a few orc shamans with a barrier power and some crossbow snipers to go with him then the encounters leading up to him would probably each contain at least one shaman or sniper and then some assorted orcs out of the monster manual.

The puzzle will probably not require combat but it may turn into combat as a punishment for failing the puzzle. Say there's some statues that require the players to make certain gestures as they pass them. Failing to make the gesture causes the statues to animate and attack, you get the idea. Lastly, the puzzle fight will be a fight with either a reduced number of monsters plus some extreme hazard or death trap or timer or something that requires (or at least heavily encourages) at least one player to spend actions doing something other than making attack rolls to succeed. I once had an encounter where the players were riding a stagecoach through a pass as thousands of goblins chased them, trying to jump on. Several players spent time driving the coach while the others fought the goblins trying to climb aboard.

From there it's all packaging and detailing. I might go room to room and add minor features or fixtures or redraw rooms to be slightly less regular and I'm done. The whole process, for me running 4e, takes about five to seven hours.

But I want to hear about how YOU prepare dungeons.

 

[LostSoul]

I made a post about my method a while back... here it is:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ungeon/page3&p=6188337&viewfull=1#post6188337

 

[Grogg of the North]

First thing I do is think what is the purpose of the dungeon? Who lives there? Why? After that I'll start sketching a rough outline. How do the inhabitants get in and out? Where do they keep their food? What about sleep? Go to the bathroom? How do they defend themselves? Each of those questions helps fill in the rough sketch. Scribbles become rooms, traps, defensible locations, etc. I try to make a note for each room so I know what's there and why. If I can't find a purpose for a random scribble to exist, I erase it.

So now that I have a dungeon, I'll start working on the inhabitants. How many creatures call this place home? Whose on guard duty? Who is out on patrol? What are the rest of the inhabitants doing?

Finally, at the very end, I'll see what shinies are there for the PCs to take.

The whole process takes ... well I feel like it takes a long time. Especially if I'm trying to do something kinda unique for the dungeon layout.

 

[n00bdragon]

I made a post about my method a while back... here it is:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ungeon/page3&p=6188337&viewfull=1#post6188337

That's pretty cool. Do you ever have problems with players getting stuck on a certain room? Particularly that "blocked path" that the party is just obsessed with the idea of passing even when they cannot?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Usually I begin with a map.

Well, OK -- that's a bit of a shortcut. I do start with a general theme or idea I'm trying to work with ("Raid the Dragon's Lair"). Then I build the map.

Map building is key, because it helps me insert the type of encounters I want (Here's the complex one, here's the one with multiple terrains, over here is the trap/trick), reminds me to balance ecology (how does the dragon get out to eat? What about water? How does it stay fresh?), and reminds me to provide the players with meaningful choices (for example, always have more that one way to get to a goal. Make the choice between "right" and "left" interesting. If you just have a string of linear encounters, then make sure each encounter has more than one possible "solution".)

Once I have the map sketched, I'll start fleshing out details, which inspires changes in other things as I get more ideas, which cause revision to the map ...

Depending on the size of the adventure I then spiral outward from the dungeon itself to map the near environs, then the far environs, populate the region, and start to insert hooks and reasons for the whole thing to hang together.

 

[LostSoul]

Not yet. Usually there's another way around.

 

[dd.stevenson]

A lot depends on what style of game I'm prepping for. The things that remain constant are:

1) Begin with the premise--the things that are set in stone. In IT you'd call these requirements.
2) Write down all the cool things I've already thought of.
3) Check my work against a gamestyle-specific checklist. For example, if this gamestyle require a boss, then I make sure there's a boss up in that. If I'm playing a style that requires a believable ecology, then I write down a little about how the monsters relate to each other. If I'm playing a highly fluid sandboxy style of game, then I make sure I have motivations and MO's for the denizens. etc, etc.
4) Populate a map, or draw up my own: whichever's easier, really. Since I usually play on roll20 these days, it's often easier just to draw a map within the program and then move the lines onto the fog of war layer to take advantage of the automatic display features of this software.
5) Since I personally dislike perception checks in my games, I make sure to get down the details I need to handle exploration of each and every room. These notes are usually long on spacial relationships (eg, the gold crown is under the bed) and short on flowery details.

 

[Gilladian]

Generally, I start with an idea of what size and type of dungeon I'm creating (am I going for a 5-room side adventure, or is this a multi-level site that is going to occupy several months of gaming?) and then the type of foe that will be inhabiting it. Is it an orc lair, or a wizard's tower? I find or start sketching a map, and then I start roughing out encounter ideas. I will go back and forth between map and encounters, adding and deleting, creating backstory and answering the same types of questions Grogg proposed.

After I know who the major foes are, I go back and start adding details. I may add a few tricks and traps, maybe a puzzle, if it fits the theme I'm building. Some dungeons may be all traps and a few undead, while others are a lair for a functional tribe of humanoids. Each will have very different details, of course. If it is a big dungeon, I'll figure out all the possible secondary encounters, the side-routes and such. I try to always throw in one friendly or potentially friendly resource/group in a larger dungeon.

I'm big on realism, so I've designed dungeons with air-duct systems, and systems for trap-resetting, etc... as well as functional escape routes, water sources, latrines, etc... It can be a lot of fun! But I also believe in the Dungeon World philosophy of "leave blanks", so sometimes I've designed dungeons that are a series of "set pieces" with nothing in between. I fill in the in-betweens as we go along, adjusting the pacing and the mood to the needs of the game at the time. That's as much or more fun, especially if the PCs will help ad-lib what's there.

 

[the Jester]

It depends, firstly, on whether I'm designing for the party or for the world.

I almost always design for the world. If I'm designing for the party, the dungeon is tailored to them in terms of approximate level and so on. It also might tie into the party's quests or goals- perhaps the dungeon is where a macguffin is, or maybe it's another outpost of the party's foes.

In that case, I define the goal first ("the pcs are here to extract information/kill their arch-foe/steal the key/whatever"), then build toward that.

Much more commonly, I'll build a dungeon independent of any party that might go through it. Since my campaign milieu is a longstanding one and a sandbox, none of that work is ever wasted; I can always come back to it years later and use it if the pcs are in the right place. Often, I'll update/revise old dungeons, too- or sometimes tie one into another (especially linking local dungeons to a nearby megadungeon).

For instance, right now I'm detailing a megadungeon that's going to be near the next group I start up; that's months away, and who knows what the pcs will be? I don't tailor encounters or treasure in these cases; I build them according to in-world logic.

So in this kind of case, I'll first ask either who is running the dungeon these days (if that's the sort of dungeon that it is) or where it came from and who/what has lived there over the decades, centuries or millenia of its existence. I'll often have three or four layers of "these guys lived here" in a place, and sometimes you can put together who they were- but other times, the traces are gone, but it helps me to know.

I'll usually work on a map and encounter ideas together; in my current effort, I've been labeling many of the rooms in pencil with names describing their original function even when they are now used for something different or empty and abandoned; it just helps me fill in a lot of the small details.

When I fill in the encounters, including traps and tricks, I try to justify everything. Does this monster have a way to eat and drink? Where does it poop? Is it too close to this other monster? I try to have a fair amount of "no monsters, just flavor" areas- I love the whole weird art on the walls, leering carvings, etc. type of thing.

I tend to use a lot of vermin/scavenger monsters (oozes, stirges, giant insects, etc) in abandoned dungeons. I like to put in big food sources. I like to make sure my elevator room and stairs from level 1 to level 2 line up right.

Sometimes, for especially cool encounters, I'll make custom battlemaps on 1" grid paper I'll print for the purpose.

 

[Jester David]

My last two campaigns as DM have been Ravenlof so I tended to base my dungeons on real world castles and manors. The few times I didn't the dungeons were crypts or caves and much small, so they were based on what I could arrange with Dungeon Tiles. Other times I used a poster map I picked-up and design based on that.

I seldom do large dungeons or places where there are living creatures with a heavy ecosystem. Typically undead, plants, constructs, and the like where they're just there.

Back in High School I used to do big sprawling dungeons with crazy traps and all sorts of weird magical inhabitants but that became problematic for me. I started wondering at the design, the logic of things. I think it was when I switched from D&D to Palladium's Heroes Unlimited and I started designing "dungeons" in the real world and realized how wacky my designs were. After that I started looking at other ways of designing dungeons.