If there are other adventuring parties, why haven't the low level dungeons all been looted?

[Sunseeker]

The same reason you'll find bugs and rats in a building after an exterminator has cleared them out.

There's now this big open space where creatures can go to build themselves a shelter or nest or base of operations. The same reason there's always some more deer to hunt for the little village. Life grows and reproduces and replenishes...until overfishing happens or something. I might imagine there are some dungeons that do "remain empty" because low-level adventurers keep clearing it out, but then you usually get one big monster moving in, who can then kill adventurers, and little monsters fill in around them.

AND THUS A DUNGEON WAS BORN!

 

[Doug McCrae]

And since the starting number of dungeons and adventure locations is a variable entirely up to the DM, you can set it wherever you like.

I have to keep it at a fairly small number because it's a sandbox game, I don't know which dungeons and other places the PCs will be interested in and I want to make sure the adventure locations are up to a certain level of quality - 20 orcs in a cave with a 4HD chief isn't going to cut it.

You might ask why I'm bothering with NPC parties at all. Well, I like them! I've always enjoyed the idea of peers or rivals to the PCs. Also it produces some interesting consequences for the players making their choices more meaningful and putting them under a bit of time pressure. If the PCs choose to pass up on dungeon X and raid dungeon Y then they might find that a NPC party clear out dungeon X while they are busy.

 

[Doug McCrae]

There's been some good discussion so far and lots of interesting ideas. Thanks, everyone! I actually hadn't even considered the idea that a new group of monsters could reoccupy a previously cleared site.

Here's some other thoughts I've come up with:
1. A simple explanation is to challenge one of the initial assumptions - that adventurers have existed for a long time. In D&D one can reasonably posit that human and demi-human civilisations have been recovering from a catastrophe that left the world monster infested and have only recently developed the capability and will to support adventuring parties.
2. A specific NPC adventuring party or parties might not have looted a dungeon because they are in league with the monsters.

The following explanations can all be summarised as changes to the dungeon and its environment or changes in the capabilities of adventurers.
3. 13th Age has the concept of Living Dungeons, highly magical entities, which bubble up from deep in the earth before breaking out on the surface. This is somewhat similar to, and probably influenced by, Philotomy Jurament's notion of the Mythic Underworld - a megadungeon with an evil intelligence and some level of supernatural control over its contents. I think, though I'm not sure, that the Mythic Underworld may be able to create more rooms and 'grow' inhabitants.
4. A recently crashed spaceship or skyrealm, or a vast beached sea monster.
5. New magic has been developed such as the ability to breathe underwater, fly or travel into space or to other planes, which opens up more adventure locations.
6. A new dungeon has simply been recently built, such as a fort or the lair of giant social insects.
7. A dungeon that somehow resets itself, after it has been 'cracked'. Perhaps there are hidden mechanisms, or an army of automatons. They could even mine more treasure.

 

[GMMichael]

If there are other adventuring parties, why haven't the low level dungeons all been looted?

Because magisters and princes keep filling them with captives?

 

[Jhaelen]

The following explanations can all be summarised as changes to the dungeon and its environment or changes in the capabilities of adventurers.
[...]

I think many of these go in the right direction, because, imho, you're not asking the right (or at least not the most important) question: What's the reason dungeons exist at all?

In finding a satisfying answer to this question, it will be at lot easier to answer the question you asked in this thread.

13th Age concept of Living Dungeons is one good answer.
Earthdawn also provided a good answer with the setting's magic cycles and the Scourge that required the people of the lands to hide in Caers and Citadels, which are now the 'dungeons' that Adepts or other aspiring adventurers explore.

 

[Morrus]

I dunno. PC adventuring parties tend to end up being massive heroes, even saving the world.

I'd argue that competent adventuring parties are rare, which is what makes the PCs stand out.

 

[amerigoV]

I dunno. PC adventuring parties tend to end up being massive heroes, even saving the world.

I'd argue that competent adventuring parties are rare, which is what makes the PCs stand out.

Heh - all those skeletons and zombie the PCs fight? The less than competent adventuring parties.

 

[Celebrim]

Perhaps I should've added some more assumptions. My reasoning is that the PCs are largely successful in their endeavours and that a PC adventurer of level X is roughly equivalent to a competent NPC adventurer of level X. If that's the case then the competent NPC adventurers should also be largely successful.

If NPC adventurers who go on adventures are never or rarely successful then they simply wouldn't exist at all. But my starting assumption is that they do exist.

Interesting. If you read what I wrote, you'll notice that one of my starting assumptions is that NPC adventurers basically didn't exist, at least in the same area at the same time as a group of PC adventures, or to the extent that they did exist they could be defined as "the bad guys". The PC are the only big darn heroes around.

Further, my assumption would be that if adventuring parties as successful as the average PC party are common, that there aren't enough monsters left in the world for them to kill. Monsters would quickly go extinct or at least be endangered species.

A corollary to this is something I observed back in the late '80s, which is that if the demographics of the monstrous demihumans like kobolds, goblins, and orcs as specified in the Monster Manual represented the entire range of such society, and if the world did in fact have a typical history of several thousands of years, then in fact kobolds, goblins, and orcs are all extinct because human, elf, and dwarf adventurers absolutely could exterminate them in just a few generations. Ergo, not only could average human, elf, and dwarf demographics not be too disparate from the demographics of their enemies, there had to exist small numbers of kobold, goblin, and orc 'adventurers' to balance against this threat and give some pause to the efforts of a group of say 10th level adventurers set on genocide.

 

[Celebrim]

3. 13th Age has the concept of Living Dungeons, highly magical entities, which bubble up from deep in the earth before breaking out on the surface. This is somewhat similar to, and probably influenced by, Philotomy Jurament's notion of the Mythic Underworld - a megadungeon with an evil intelligence and some level of supernatural control over its contents. I think, though I'm not sure, that the Mythic Underworld may be able to create more rooms and 'grow' inhabitants.
4. A recently crashed spaceship or skyrealm, or a vast beached sea monster.
5. New magic has been developed such as the ability to breathe underwater, fly or travel into space or to other planes, which opens up more adventure locations.
6. A new dungeon has simply been recently built, such as a fort or the lair of giant social insects.
7. A dungeon that somehow resets itself, after it has been 'cracked'. Perhaps there are hidden mechanisms, or an army of automatons. They could even mine more treasure.

Good point. I mentioned this in the context of old dungeons being uncovered by recent events (such as a landslide or erosion), but I didn't really delve into the idea nearly this deeply.

Yes, new 'dungeons' are springing up all the time. More to the point, new dungeons become old dungeons over time. So after those giant insects build their lair, and then some humans come along and exterminate them, a group of kobolds might move into the tunnels and take them over for their own purposes. Then an owlbear might come along and dig up some of the tunnels searching for kobold snacks, and the surviving kobolds might ward it off with stink bombs and brick over the tunnels leading to the owlbear lair. Later, a young dragon might drive off the owlbear, and kobolds might build a temple to the dragon and offer it sacrifices and treasure, so that the dragon tolerates its neighbors. The kobolds continue mining until the break into a natural cave located below the complex, at which point the troglodytes lairing their start warring with each other, and so forth.

Some other examples of the same idea:

8. A household experiences some evil tragedy and their dwelling becomes newly haunted.
9. A settlement is destroyed or abandoned after some disaster, and the ruins are colonized as a convenient lair by some monster.
10. A lich or similarly powerful figure commissions the construction of a new tomb, either as a lair or as a resting place for some treasure which the builder wants to take out of circulation.
11. A mine, quarry, catacomb, sewer, viaduct or other underground construction has to be abandoned after a monster decides to use it as a lair, or after the builders accidently break into an existing dungeon of a different sort releasing horrors into their workplace. Or, perhaps a city has extensive quarries underneath it built to support construction in the city, and at some point the city decides to repurpose the empty quarries as catacombs, but in result the catacombs are now haunted by the restless dead who are disturbed by the overly hasty disinterment and interment to new accommodations.

 

[Celebrim]

You could just as easily frame it the other way around:

Assuming that a reasonable number of dungeons exist, and that their inhabitants are reasonably competent, why haven't all the adventurers been killed and looted?

I've never heard that question put so directly and succinctly, but that is an equally good point.

My general answer is that there is by and large a stalemate between the 'black hats' and the 'white hats' and the two don't attempt to destroy the other very often. Although the two sides may not have absolute parity, they are close enough to parity that on their home terrain the defensive advantages that they have are enough to deter incursions most of the time. As such, most of the trouble between the two is on the 'borderland' between them and involves minor raids and skirmishes. Mostly though, the two sides try to stay out of each other's way out of healthy respect for the other's potential to wipe them out should it come to a pitched contest. 'Black hats' operating near the center of 'white hat' power will be particularly furtive. Members of a 'white hat' race operating near the center of 'black hat' power tend to be either furtive or particularly accommodating (meaning that they offer tribute or otherwise try to make themselves useful).

Note that this requires that the demographics of the two sides be not that far apart. The armies fielded by the two sides have to be in rough parity - one side can't be limited to 1 HD soldiery with poor weaponry while the other side fields 4 HD soldiery with excellent weaponry. Likewise, the heroes fielded by the two sides have to be in rough parity. One side can't be limited to 4HD leaders while the other side has 20HD leaders. So if say human leadership is frequently 10th or 12th level, then their orc rivals at the least need leadership of 8th or 10th level. You can make up some of the difference with 'breeding rates' but not nearly as much as some settings seem to think, because breeding rates depend on economic activity and productive capacity and rarely does a setting actually give the 'black hats' economic activity suitable to sustaining a high breeding rate or even the culture as presented. Rarely does a dungeon of orcs or goblins have mines, workshops, forges, farms, mills, butcheries, smokehouses, and so forth suggestive of enough economic activity to support the inhabitants of the dungeon. Often there isn't even a nod toward this, resulting in a goblin lair that is filled with dozens of rooms containing traps and defenses but not one single workshop to build or maintain such devices.

I don't think that a world like Forgotten Realms with its hundreds or if not thousands of adventuring parties operating all the time and so common as to be a recognized profession, sucking up XP by wiping out monsters by the hundreds and thousands, and profiting thereby to become even better at sucking up XP is remotely sustainable. To make that work requires you invent all sorts of mechanisms for producing vast numbers of new monsters without the need for biology, such as monsters that magically make monsters or all sorts of portals to 'monster world'. My problem with that is that you tend to end up with this weirdness where there are all sorts of portals to 'monster world' flooding the world with monsters, but never a portal in sight to 'white hat world' flooding the world with monster slayers. Hence, I've never felt that was a particular good solution to the asymmetry.