Have we lost the dungeon?

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Count me in with the dungeoneers.

Actually I like a mixture. Settings for the last adventure I wrote included a farm (rescue), a village (whodunnit), then a farmhouse with cellars (cellars were a four-room "dungeon"), then a rural wilderness area (chase), then a shrine (rp encounter), then a mini-dungeon (comprising about 60 rooms spread across 2 levels). I'm presently working on a city adventure.

Of all these, the dungeon bits were certainly the easiest to write. I find town/city-based adventures much more challenging and time-consuming to prepare, and the results are much more variable... a good town/city/wilderness adventure is often more satisfying than a dungeon, but no dungeon I've ever written (including ones generated on the fly) is as bad as the worst town/city/wilderness.

And this is ultimately why dungeons are popular. They produce a structured and challenging game environment with a small amount of preparation time - and that's the whole point of them. Dungeons are, in a very real sense, Dave Arneson's largest single contribution to the D&D game because they allow DMs to have jobs and families rather than needing to be full-time world creators.

I agree that given the choice I would rather prepare adventures which include a smaller proportion of dungeons than is actually the case. However, I only have a certain amount of preparation time and I need to develop a certain quantity of content - therefore I have to salt my campaign world with dungeons.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

My world has plenty of dungeons, that's where all the prisoners are kept However, there is a general lack of underground, treasure laden zoos.

 

[Dark Jezter]

As a player, yes I have lost the dungeon. My characters keep looking for them. They go up to random NPCs in a town and ask,"Hey buddy. Where's the nearest abandoned castle built by a crazy wizard several centuries ago which is now overrun with strange and terrifying monsters but still full of treasures beyond the ken of mere mortals?". The NPCs give my character weird looks and walk away, then the DM throws a book at me and tells me to get back to writing my 15 page character backstory due by the end of the session.

Of course, I make up for that by putting lots of extra dungeons in my campaigns. The PCs in my campaign can barely walk around without tripping over or falling into a dungeon entrance.

Despite the fact that my players seem to really enjoy the dungeon-ful campaigns I run, they never seem to create the same type of campaign when they GM the games. IMO it's a culture thing. There's so much anti-dungeon prejudice out there that people who would otherwise hearken back to the good old days of 10x10 rooms choose not to because they're afraid the "real roleplayers" will mock them as unevolved, rollplaying boobs.

Terms like "mindless hack-n-slash" just prove my point.

The only "mindless" thing about the play in my campaign are the undead who will kill your character and eat his brains if you're not paying attention, playing smart and treating combat as a last resort option.

Good post! My FR group just finished a 3-session long dungeon crawl and we had an absolute blast. The "real roleplayers" may snicker and sneer at us from their ivory towers because our style of play apparantly isn't as mature and enlightened as theirs is, but if killing monsters and evading traps in a subterranian labyrith is wrong, then I definately don't wanna be right.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Lost the dungeon? No, I know right where I left it.

I do have dungeons in my game, but they are rare - perhaps three to five in a 15 level story arc. The most common are dwarfen mines/fortresses that are either abandoned or taken over by other creatures. (Dwarfs in my game live in the mines, nomadically following the seams and building living quarters into the galleries once they have played out. They fortify the entries and airshafts. When a mine plays out entirely they collapse the fortresses over the mine entrances, but sometimes they get dug out again.)

Cities and towns are where the action is.

The Auld Grump

 

[S'mon]

I guess a good 2/3 of my game takes place in dungeons, the rest in wilderness, villages & towns.

 

[RichGreen]

As a player, yes I have lost the dungeon. My characters keep looking for them. They go up to random NPCs in a town and ask,"Hey buddy. Where's the nearest abandoned castle built by a crazy wizard several centuries ago which is now overrun with strange and terrifying monsters but still full of treasures beyond the ken of mere mortals?". The NPCs give my character weird looks and walk away, then the DM throws a book at me and tells me to get back to writing my 15 page character backstory due by the end of the session.

LOL!

I still use dungeons but they tend to be small ones which are part of an adventure and the PCs will have a specific mission to achieve once inside -- rescuing someone or finding a long-lost magical widget said to have mysterious powers. They will also have a theme -- recent ones have included a Kosan orc (Nyambe) tomb occupied by yuan-ti cultists and the bottom two layers of Abysm (Demogorgon's palace).

I used to design huge mazes with many levels and many rooms, but we don't play often enough these days. I bought RttToE when it came out but haven't run it as we would still be playing it now! Oh, and it seemed a bit dull.

Cheers



Richard

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Well, I've ran in and played Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. We liked that quite a bit, and it's a giant dungeoncrawl. But I added a great deal of RP to it, so it felt purposeful, I suppose.

I had a chance to play in three sessions worth of World's Largest Dungeon before it fell apart. Alot of that had to do with player unhappiness. Just knowing it was "the world's largest dungeon" and that we were supposed to stay locked in there from 1st to 20th level ruined the idea of gaming for us, I think. The DM had prepared some "exits" so we could leave, but it didn't seem to be our bag so we let it die.

I'm currently prepping a one-shot game for next Tuesday that will involve a dungeon. Needed a map for a weird old temple, found something I liked in Wizard's old Map-a-Week archives ... edited it up a little. It'll be a "dungeon", but quite short, only fifteen real rooms ... interesting layout in that to get TO the temple they'll have to find and pass through three seperate secret doors, and the rest of the dungeon is just a ruse to trick invaders. I wanted to give it life, though, so all of the doors and traps are easily bypassed with total safety by people who use the area regularly, in fact the actual way into the temple is the shortest route from the front door. It's a lower-level game, though, so I'm going to reduce the DCs for finding the secret doors by 5 to reflect the fact that people go in and out of them all the time and seldom go down the false passages. I think it'll feel "Old Skool" and yet sensical at the same time, so I'm pleased. I seldom use "dungeons" in my own home games, but they come up from time to time. The odd cave complex housing a large predatory monster, etc.

--fje

 

[JamesDJarvis]

I'm a big fan of dungeons.

If there was ever a shift it was because DMs were trying to replicate modules in thier creative works. Modules were the stuff that was supposed to happen between runs in a campaigns big dungeon. Modules were generally discrete and small (in comparisson to a big dungeon) and there were lots of samples of modules for a DM to use to figure out how to design adventures. So it makes sense that a lot of folks ended up creatung games where the big dungeon faded away since they had no real experience with them at all.

Doesn't mean they are gone and certaily doesn't mean they don't work.

In any camapign where the usual MM mix of monsters exsists there is a huge amount of explination as to why there are dungeons: the underground dwelling races. How many such races are there? For each such race there is in a campaign there is then a 100% flawlessly practical reason for a dungeon per undreground species.

Here is an example dungeon - "Kazad Mol Korvor " once a great city of the Druegar that collapsed after a protracted conflict with the Drow during the age of sorrow who themslevs hed it as an outpost for many years until abandoning it for unkown reasons it then remained virtually abandonded for centures until it became the stringhold for a massive goblin tribe that would strike out from its depths against the dwarves of the Mithril Hills. It was these dwarves of cours that put an end to those goblins with a rlenetless campaign of raids that drove the goblins deeperanddeeper into the depths and scattered the goblins war beasts some of which still remain in those tunnels today preying on band of dwarven freebooters seeking gear and weapons ost on some reaids against the goblins.
So we got a city sized dungeon that had everything a small city should that was occupied by different underground dwelling races for centuries with plenty of reasons to construt new features, hide treasures and caches of weapons. A DM and his players are left to wonder why did the Drow abandon it? How did the goblins rise to become such a danger to those around them? What happened to the Dwarven lord Korlum Magnibold who tried to claim the tunnels as his own realm shortly after the goblins were defeated, why does history seem to have forgoten him?

There is enough material there to keep a campaign going for a year or more in that one location for me and that is just one dungeon.

Build a plausible dungeon with something to come back for and a dungeon becomes a regular feature of a campaign and not something folks run through once and never bother checking again.

But how do you do that? The same way the original dungeosn were built: With sub levels.
Sub levels don't have to be immediately obvious or easy to find.
Off on an adneture that has nothing to do with the Kazad Mol Korvor the party could discover a treasure map that one of the pcs recognizes as part of Kazad Mol Korvor the party had not dscovered is earlier sessions; "hey chums check this out there is a secret passage in the Hall of Wights on the third level of Kazad Mol Korvor that leads to something here the map maker was calling the third mithril armory". So bingo another reason to go back to the big dungeon that makes sense and uses the DMs labors.

dungeosn aren't gone maybe we just need to pay more attention to developing them.

 

[gizmo33]

That would have to be a pretty big pie if an orc can hide behind it!

The pie could be a mimmic, and it would throw the orc.

 

[Psion]

Preach it Brother Dyal!

I wonder if he realizes how much you get called that?