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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JamesDJarvis" data-source="post: 2250918" data-attributes="member: 2515">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.</blockquote>

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