The Lost Art of Dungeon-Crawling

There is a certain type of adventure that in recent years seems to have fallen out of popularity: dungeons.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

"I Look Up!"​

The release of several old D&D modules got me looking at some of these old original adventures, and they are quite eye-opening on the subject of dungeon design. These are the first games of D&D we played and while some are a little dated, it's easy to see why they kept us playing. While almost everything in those adventures was dangerous, there was magic and mystery in the rooms you found. There were rooms with strange orbs suspended from the ceiling; mysterious indoor gardens full of medicinal plants, poison and monsters; ghostly feasts that share a tragic history; and mysterious keys guarded with fiendish traps.

I think I know why dungeons fell out of vogue. Way back in the early 80s we discovered city adventuring. Modules then became quests or investigations across a cityscape full of NPCs and role-play opportunities with all manner of details and cultures. This new way of gaming outside a maze opened a whole new sandbox. This change in adventure design opened new vistas for adventurers, but crowded out the traditional dungeon crawl as a result.

A Return to Form​

Luckily, in recent years we have seen a more interesting return to dungeons. More designers are coming back to them and trying to break the myth. Mork Borg has its share and a other ‘old school’ games have sought to blow the dust off the idea of raiding underground facilities. Its fun to dive into these lairs once again, and a simple diversion from what has become the usual kind of game. While I’m certainly more on the side of narrative play and character interaction, sometimes it is nice to know that you just need to pick a door rather than work out the villain’s plot and craft an elegant plan (that one of the players may just ignore anyway).

If you are thinking of crafting a dungeon of your own, here's a few pointers.

Give the Place A Reason​

Whether it is an old ruin or an underground laboratory, make sure the dungeon has a reason to exist and some sort of history. A hole in the ground isn’t very interesting so give it a back-story, even just a small one. It might be a tomb, an old ruin creatures have taken over or a lab where magic went wrong. It need not be especially clever, just as long as you can place it in your setting.

A Dungeon Need Not Be an Actual Dungeon​

What you are creating is a place full of rooms linked with doors and corridors, so it need not be underground. A house or a castle is basically the same, as is a sky city, large airship, underwater citadel or even a walled in town (put a roof on real world Venice and you have an epic dungeon).

Don’t Construct It with Only One Path​

When you are making a lot of cool stuff it is very tempting to make sure none of it gets missed. But you should avoid the temptation for having only one path through the dungeon that takes in every room. If the player characters miss out rooms 34-48, you can use them in the next adventure. Nothing is wasted. But if you insist they follow one path you are ruining the fun of exploring a dungeon and taking away the agency of choice. If you offer several different paths, when they enter the room of certain death you can point out with a clear conscience that they didn’t have to open the black door with the skull on the front.

Corridors Are Rooms Too​

Don’t reserve encounters just for rooms. They can happen anywhere in the dungeon, in corridors, on stairwells; anywhere the player characters don’t expect one.

Add Some Mystery Not Just Monsters​

While you will need a few monsters to fight to gain some treasure, put in traps and just weird stuff too. Not everything need be deadly, just something weird to make the player characters think can be fun too, if only to cross a room (the Crystal Maze will be a big help here). With magic in the world you can put some very odd places in a dungeon. Just imagine something that would look strange and enticing when they open the door and then figure out what it does. It might be a room full of glass spheres, a garden with odd looking plants, a table set for a feast with only statues as guests. The weirder the room the more the player characters will be intrigued.

Make Sure There Are A Variety of Encounters​

This relates to the above; don’t rely on one sort of encounter. Make sure you have a mixture of traps, monsters, weird rooms and role play encounters. Try to avoid having the same type of room twice in a row if you can.

Don’t Skimp on the Role-Play​

Even dragons might chat; just because it is a dungeon doesn't mean there are opportunities to role play. Trapped creatures, intelligent monsters under a curse or a contract and even the odd guard might be talked to as easily as fought. You can let the player character make this decision, by who they choose to attack on sight. But remind them that they can talk their way out of situations as well.

Make Every Door Worth Opening​

If you do the job right, each door the player characters come across will fill them with a mixture of fear and anticipation. What lies beyond this door, a trap, a fearful death, untold riches or wild magic? If a room or encounter doesn’t’ feel that interesting to you, cut it from your dungeon. Maybe consider it a little and use it later on when you’ve made it work better. A dungeon need not be a sprawl, and a shorter one has the advantage of potentially allowing the player characters to escape and try another one some other day.

 

[overgeeked]

Well, because no you can't.

You’re the DM. You can do anything you want. You just have to be creative with it.

Sure, you can have that ooze garbage eater. But, you won't have oozes all over the place (presuming a functioning town).

Sure you could. Invent a town where they figured out how to domesticate oozes. The oozes follow people around town like pets. If you want to give it a horror twist something goes wrong and the oozes revert to their instincts and you have a D&D Blob movie. Or make the oozes semi-intelligent or better and they have a plan, even if a basic one. Like any episode of Doctor Who where the Daleks convince some dumb group of humans they’re there to help. Things go wrong.

Again, sure you could make the entire town full of mimics, but, that only works once. How many mimic towns do you think you can have in your setting?

I suspect like anything you’d get one shot at the “wow...that’s cool” response before you’d hit diminishing returns. Just like every other monster in the game. After 3-4 your players would be yawning. “Oh, gee, another warren of kobolds...yawn.” Track that out after nearly 40 years of playing and plop a kobold warren in front of them and you’re somehow surprised everyone’s grabbing their phones between turns.

By and large, towns aren't full of monsters. They aren't full of traps. They don't have threats around every corner, because, well, they're towns. Regular people, ie. not monsters and not adventurers, live in towns and do their day to day stuff in that town.

Only if you design them that way. Towns have an ecology just like a dungeon. Towns certainly can be filled with monsters. Either proper D&D-style monsters or human monsters. Cultists, worshippers of dark gods, cannibals, any variery of nasty human you want. The benefit of a town is that the players and characters don’t generally expect danger in a sleepy sea-side town. But Innsmouth. And they don’t expect danger at the summer festival. But Midsommar.

Sure, you could turn every town into a dungeon, but, that kinda defeats the purpose.

Towns have whatever purpose you give them. There’s no rule that towns have to be safe.

It's fairly difficult to put a dragon in a town. Again, presuming that the town is functioning and not in the process of being destroyed. But, I can plop a dragon, or a beholder, or any number of other critters in a dungeon and it makes a lot more sense.

You said you liked and missed the weird, so why not go weird with your towns?

Make the dragon the mayor. In disguise or not. Let the characters slowly figure that out. You’ve suddenly got something interesting to do. Make a kobold lawyer or a bullywug judge. Hell, make a beholder sheriff.

Do something different. Something weird. At least that would be interesting.

Towns, by their very nature, are limited in the types of threats you can place in them.

You’re the DM. You can do whatever you want. You’re only limited by your imagination.

Same goes for most above ground locations. You don't expect a dragon to keep his hoard in a big pile in a clearing in the forest do you?

Subverting expectations is the best place to be. Giving players exactly what they expect, especially after they’ve played for decades, is boring. “Oh, gee, another mostly linear dungeon with lots of oozes and kobolds and traps...yawn.” Subverting expectations is what wakes up the players. “What do you mean there’s a troll in town? And the people aren’t running screaming? WTF is going on?” That’s interesting. That’s a mystery to solve.

Do your towns have trolls in them? And giants?

Sure, why not? The only thing stopping you is your imagination.

I mean, I look at this:


And think, wow, I could do SO MUCH with this. To the point where I am beginning to stat this beast out (although, not quite all of it). This is the lair of Thessalar, the lich responsible for the owlbear, whom the party has been tangling with for some time now. This is the climax of a year long (or so) campaign. So far, I've only done the west most section - the Woodland Shrine. One of the encounters there is with a celestial that can open teleport gates. Should the party search around, and get past the rather nasty hydra guarding the celestial, they can use that celestial to teleport into the dungeon and bypass the Ancient Castle.

Ok, I haven't gotten further than that, but, the party has a specific goal, a honking big dungeon to deal with and lots of goodies.

I’m glad that gets your juices flowing. That’s awesome.

I see that map and nearly pass out from boredom. That map will be filled with dozens of the same monsters in basically the same set up as they have been for the last 40 years. Your players with have to murder their way through a series of increasingly difficult monsters. Just as expected. They will face traps. Just as expected. They will have secret doors and portals that bypass content if found. Just as expected. They will learn of animosities between the factions and be able to play them off each other. Just as expected. Skip all the boring stuff and get to the good stuff. The new and different. You stock it with the same monsters and same traps and samey sameness for 75 rooms and tuck two rooms with new and novel encounters, I’ll still be bored to death long before we get to those two interesting rooms...if we ever even get to those two interesting rooms.

That’s not me attacking you, that’s me being bored to death with dungeons. They’re all the same. Five guys got together over 40 years ago and had a few good ideas. After all this time later and we’re still just regurgitating them with minor variations at best.

People can talk about mythic connections all they want. Until someone puts out a properly mythic dungeon, it’s still 2d6 goblins in room 4 repeated hundreds of times. That’s the trouble with making myth and magic mundane...it becomes mundane.

 

[Dioltach]

As a general rule I really dislike dungeons without a thought out ecology, so my designs for long lost locations are limited to a small pallette of monsters that are essentially "timeless guards" OR I have to throw away the classic traps and puzzles because they have already been sprung or solved by the current inhabitants.

What I'll generally do is have a "living" dungeon that's "open access", so to speak, where the monsters interact and change. Within the living dungeon I'll add various "closed" areas that are sealed off by hidden doors and other challenges, with traps and puzzles and populated by the "timeless guards" as you call them.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

What would something new or different even mean at this point? 4th edition came out over a decade ago, and adventuring outside of the dungeon was already plenty in vogue (that was around when I started playing by GMing my first game) and had been for a long time. Ben Robbins West Marches with it's hex map was a third edition thing, and people had obviously been hexcrawling prior to that, with the TSR games having explicit procedures for them. For a good bulk of the time I've been a GM (again, a decade or so) I've been running almost entirely outside what can properly be called Dungeons, and have stuck with Dungeons that have 2-3 encounters at most when I have run them, 4 or 5 counting non-combat challenges.

So its not like leaving the dungeon is some kind of new and exciting thing, the rest is just as old and tired, in practical terms. Except a generation of gamers hasn't really been interacting with Dungeons the way the older generation thought of them, us 3rd and 4th edition types could only use dungeons as a small part of the game, because our Dungeons were essentially World of Warcraft style, simple romps through a selection of set-piece encounters with minimal branches, usually heading towards a set climax boss encounter.

A proper Dungeon Crawl, with ecology, decentralized narrative where the dungeon can be revisited, jacquayed layout, factions, and so forth is actually a pretty new and interesting possibility space for the majority of us. I'm especially interested in how they might intersect with more modern game design conventions, as opposed to OSR environments (which deprioritize character customization, combat as sport, and so forth.) There was a while there where kobold hall style five room dungeons were pretty much considered the only acceptable standard for a dungeon that wouldn't grate on the nerves of the players.

 

[overgeeked]

What would something new or different even mean at this point?

Something that's not your standard sprawling dungeon with dozens of rooms that are mostly combat encounters, trap-laden rooms, and minimal (faction play) interaction.

4th edition came out over a decade ago, and adventuring outside of the dungeon was already plenty in vogue (that was around when I started playing by GMing my first game) and had been for a long time. Ben Robbins West Marches with it's hex map was a third edition thing, and people had obviously been hexcrawling prior to that, with the TSR games having explicit procedures for them.

West Marches was a Ben Robbins thing, but people were playing that exact style since almost the beginning of the game. One DM with a large pool of players who self-organized into groups of adventurers plotting their own course into the wild or dungeon. That was standard back in the day.

For a good bulk of the time I've been a GM (again, a decade or so) I've been running almost entirely outside what can properly be called Dungeons, and have stuck with Dungeons that have 2-3 encounters at most when I have run them, 4 or 5 counting non-combat challenges.

Even that would be a welcome change of pace. If you're going to push linear combat fests, at least keep them short. The sprawling map of endless nothing but combat...ugh.

So its not like leaving the dungeon is some kind of new and exciting thing, the rest is just as old and tired, in practical terms.

Leaving the dungeon isn't new. But there are more options when you're not limited to a linear dungeon. When you're in a town or city or hexcrawling you can pick a direction and go. You have a freedom of movement and choice you simply don't have in a dungeon.

Except a generation of gamers hasn't really been interacting with Dungeons the way the older generation thought of them, us 3rd and 4th edition types could only use dungeons as a small part of the game, because our Dungeons were essentially World of Warcraft style, simple romps through a selection of set-piece encounters with minimal branches, usually heading towards a set climax boss encounter.

Even that would be a refreshing change. Again, if it's going to be a boring linear slug-fest, at least keep it short.

A proper Dungeon Crawl, with ecology, decentralized narrative where the dungeon can be revisited, jacquayed layout, factions, and so forth is actually a pretty new and interesting possibility space for the majority of us. I'm especially interested in how they might intersect with more modern game design conventions, as opposed to OSR environments (which deprioritize character customization, combat as sport, and so forth.) There was a while there where kobold hall style five room dungeons were pretty much considered the only acceptable standard for a dungeon that wouldn't grate on the nerves of the players.

The bolded bits would be new for me as well. Faction play has been around since at least 1980 or 1982.

Though I'm not sure what a jacquayed layout would add to a dungeon, unless the point was to avoid things like tracking time, movement, resources, and wandering monsters. I like the moment when the torch goes out and the players realize they just encountered a wandering monster. Skipping that would make what little there is to like about dungeons disappear.

I think combat as sport is part of the problem. Combat as war at least relies on the players' creativity to overcome and/or avoid some fights. Combat as sport makes every fight a stand-up brawl to the death and turns things tedious and dull rather quickly.

 

[transmission89]

Something that's not your standard sprawling dungeon with dozens of rooms that are mostly combat encounters, trap-laden rooms, and minimal (faction play) interaction.

West Marches was a Ben Robbins thing, but people were playing that exact style since almost the beginning of the game. One DM with a large pool of players who self-organized into groups of adventurers plotting their own course into the wild or dungeon. That was standard back in the day.

Even that would be a welcome change of pace. If you're going to push linear combat fests, at least keep them short. The sprawling map of endless nothing but combat...ugh.

Leaving the dungeon isn't new. But there are more options when you're not limited to a linear dungeon. When you're in a town or city or hexcrawling you can pick a direction and go. You have a freedom of movement and choice you simply don't have in a dungeon.

Even that would be a refreshing change. Again, if it's going to be a boring linear slug-fest, at least keep it short.

The bolded bits would be new for me as well. Faction play has been around since at least 1980 or 1982.

Though I'm not sure what a jacquayed layout would add to a dungeon, unless the point was to avoid things like tracking time, movement, resources, and wandering monsters. I like the moment when the torch goes out and the players realize they just encountered a wandering monster. Skipping that would make what little there is to like about dungeons disappear.

I think combat as sport is part of the problem. Combat as war at least relies on the players' creativity to overcome and/or avoid some fights. Combat as sport makes every fight a stand-up brawl to the death and turns things tedious and dull rather quickly.

People have kept answering saying that good dungeons are not just linear combat fests yet you keep using that line.

It’s like you saying you can do anything you want in town, and everyone else in response just going , “well towns are just boring places to shop”.

It’s becoming increasingly frustrating to read when you ask what can be done in a dungeon, you get a response, then just ignore it and repeat that they are boring combat fests.

Jacquaying the dungeon doesn’t obviate the resource mechanic at all. It enhances it! You are forced to pay more attention to your surroundings, your mapping, exploring the unknown (adding to the exploration factor which you don’t get in towns. Towns are known territory, the dungeon is a true frontier). This adds to the freedom of where to go, that’s the whole point of Jacquaying the dungeon!! You get that freedom and choice.

Another advantage of a dungeon, is that you can have a variety of biomes and ecologists in a relatively small space, which is difficult to do naturally in a town or wilderness.

Check out the Holmes sample dungeon. You have elements of a lost city, smugglers in a Sandy cove, goblin warrens and crypts.

I’m building a dungeon now for example that has a space ship that has crashed into a mountain many years ago and is covered now.

The mountain used to hold a dwarven city (this is now bisected by the ship.
The dwarven city was only recently uncovered by a nearby town’s mining operation. As the towns people have disappeared (that ship is bad news), orcs have made a lair in the lower parts of the mine... so I have several unique biomes in that alone, plus multiple routes into the ship/dwarven city and throughout the ship itself.
You are right though about combat as sport really denting a dungeon. Along with the increasing xp for monsters and removing xp for gold. The purpose of the dungeon was to explore, get treasure, minimise bloody and costly combat. Install those elements into the game, the dungeon suddenly becomes a lot more interesting.

 

[Schmoe]

Random pick. Temple of Elemental Evil. Quick skim of the first floor only. There are 52 keyed rooms. For those there are 43 combat stat blocks. So 82%. The rest are empty rooms that might have something to find. One of those rooms has 13 prisoners. Their stat blocks include hit points and XP values for murdering them. The prisoners are all naked. Only the men are given stat blocks and only the men are chained up. It's not hard to guess that there's more combat and even less interaction the deeper in you go. And in case anyone objects to that particular dungeon it was a random pick from my pile of Top 30 Modules of All Time as voted by Dungeon Magazine back in 2004. Temple of Elemental Evil was voted #4 on that list of 30.

Yeah, it really wasn't meant to play that way. The stats are there for if they are needed, and for sure they often will be, but it's a distinct lack of imagination if the whole thing just becomes a kick-in-the-door slashfest.

I don't know if I can put my finger on what makes dungeons fun for me, and I certainly don't contend that they have some exclusive claim to fun, but the bounded nature of dungeons somehow makes the discoveries more satisfying. It's always a question of "how deep does it go?" and "what more am I missing?" The dungeon is a destination in and of itself that invites that exploration. I don't get that same feeling from journeying through, say a forest. A forest is a backdrop to an adventure. I rarely see the forest itself be the adventure.

 

[Schmoe]

<quote snipped>

I see that map and nearly pass out from boredom. That map will be filled with dozens of the same monsters in basically the same set up as they have been for the last 40 years. Your players with have to murder their way through a series of increasingly difficult monsters. Just as expected. They will face traps. Just as expected. They will have secret doors and portals that bypass content if found. Just as expected. They will learn of animosities between the factions and be able to play them off each other. Just as expected. Skip all the boring stuff and get to the good stuff. The new and different. You stock it with the same monsters and same traps and samey sameness for 75 rooms and tuck two rooms with new and novel encounters, I’ll still be bored to death long before we get to those two interesting rooms...if we ever even get to those two interesting rooms.

That’s not me attacking you, that’s me being bored to death with dungeons. They’re all the same. Five guys got together over 40 years ago and had a few good ideas. After all this time later and we’re still just regurgitating them with minor variations at best.

People can talk about mythic connections all they want. Until someone puts out a properly mythic dungeon, it’s still 2d6 goblins in room 4 repeated hundreds of times. That’s the trouble with making myth and magic mundane...it becomes mundane.

I'm sorry that you've lost the wonder. What kind of adventures do you like? What is it about dungeons that makes it so you can't have those adventures in a dungeon?

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

City adventures don't seem as interesting as Dungeons in my experience, usually they're bereft of spacial context in a way that renders the point moot, i can say that i'm walking east in a city, but what does that actually mean? Either there's a point of interest for me to interact with, or I'm just going to be meandering around in search of adventure. I've actually tried to run them, but cities and wilderness are just these massive places that can be monotonous to go through, unless you use something like a point crawl procedure, but then they just become dungeons with the serial numbers filed off-- individual areas become rooms, or sub-areas in the dungeon, you don't have hallways so you can go in any direction, but the directions are so abstract, thats not especially more meaningful, its like having four to eight hallways off of each area, based off what the GM has prepped, or is willing to improvise in that direction.

I feel that Combat as Sport gets a bad rap, and I find Combat as War largely boring because of the way that it emphasizes more arbitrary solutions to problems-- there's less room for the individual abilities of the players, and the individual abilities of the monsters to make a meaningful impact. Any party can create a fire to smoke creatures out of a room, any party can collapse a hallway, and once you've done those kinds of solutions once or twice, they begin to feel somewhat rote. Being able to alter or avoid fights, and solve problems in unique ways is still a key part of play, as far as I'm concerned, but squaring up and taking your foes using the character abilities you chose, expressing yourself in that way, and being able to engage in moment to moment combat tactics is just as important.

In that sense OSR games traditionally feel anemic to us, like they're made for people who don't like combat, or who are obsessed with green text style stories, where the ridiculousness is the point. They deny us fun fights in the name of encouraging creative thinking, whereas we do enjoy taking confrontations head on, much of the time. The OSR style is fine and all, but not really for me-- they also tend to to disrupt the narrative by demanding that you be weak enough to always have to game the situation somehow, even when not every good story is about gaming the situation, not every hero is a macguyver, or a guerilla.

I also feel like its easier to add combat as war elements to combat as sport, since it just means allowing players to disrupt or split up harder encounters though the use of their environment, and making some areas hard enough for them to want to consider that, than to add combat as sport elements to combat as war, since combat as war traditionally asserts itself by making combat as sport a doomed proposition on a systemic level. For an example of this, we ended up picking Starfinder over Stars Without Number, because after reading a combat example, my players noticed exactly how few hit points the player characters actually have, there's fundamentally no way to have a fight where the players can take it head on and be 'playing well' which just throws out so much narrative space we enjoy in our PF2e/5e/4e games.

 

[Reynard]

I like that the dungeon is a weird environment that invites not just strangeness but a deep variety of features and inhabitants. If you are exploring the deeps and you turn a corning and suddenly find yourself is a primeval forest, you won't throw your hands up in frustration. Instead you will wonder how it came to be and what it's doing there.

Perhaps you slipped through the veil and have entered into the Feywild. Maybe a powerful druid or fey creature decided to recreate a forest in the cavern because they missed their home in such a place. Is it all an illusion,or the body of one great mimic? What if the forest spills out from a long lost Staff of the Woodlands?

I think dungeons in particular are good at highlighting this kind of weirdness and giving players a reason to feel wonder.

 

[Lanefan]

Towns, by their very nature, are limited in the types of threats you can place in them.

While I largely agree with you, I think you're doing towns a bit of a disservice here.

Sure you can't really put giants and dragons and purple worms in towns, instead you can have slavers and doppelgangers and vampires: human - or human-ish - monsters and opponents.

Same goes for most above ground locations. You don't expect a dragon to keep his hoard in a big pile in a clearing in the forest do you?

Truth be told, that's pretty much exactly what I'd expect of a green dragon. It'd be camouflaged six ways from Sunday, of course, and well-defended...

And think, wow, I could do SO MUCH with this. To the point where I am beginning to stat this beast out (although, not quite all of it).

That is one hella fine map, I must say.