[poll] Do your dungeons make logical sense?

[seasong]

Of course, how many are going to vote "My dungeons don't make sense"? That said, there's some cool stuff to consider being posted here.

Personally, I have a sliding scale of how much detail I go into, based on how much time I have to compose it. I use rules of thumb a lot, and I work more to make sure that my rules of thumb are good, than that a particular dungeon has exactly X biomass for Y predators.

The most recent dungeon I ran was the long-lost temple of a mystery cult of a sun goddess, that had been attacked by infernal spiders at the behest of a powerful necromancer. The mystery cult, rather than allow the spiders to spread, had sealed off the small cavern and left it, in order to wreak havoc on the necromancer.

The spiders, immortal as they were, remained trapped until the modern day, when the sun goddess decided it was time for an artifact in the temple to be rediscovered and arranged for some adventurers to find it, open it, and clear out the spiders.

The temple, when it was open, had a water supply (nearby river, and an underground spring), sufficient earth for a small garden (with sunlight provided by the goddess), and sufficient room for most facilities. Most of that was ruined by the spiders, of course .

 

[megamania]

I try to keep them making sense but with my limited kmowledge, the dungeons would all appear to be the same. So some times I wing it.

In my world, I also have it that one of the ancient builders of "dungeons" was quite insane. Henseforth- many of his dungeons made no sense (but to him).

The thing I find most difficult is giving a racial/cultural feel to them. A dwarven dungeon should be different from a human one. A mage's one different from a rogue's and so on.

About then I give up planning it out as I am "overthinking" it then.

 

[MerakSpielman]

The fascinating thing I have discovered is that, every time I think I have finally figured it out, gotten everything I need into, say, my castle, I find a layout map of a real, historical castle and realize how much of what I added was extranious.

The problem I often run into is I try to make every castle, every temple, and every other large structure totally self sufficient. The maps in Deities and Demigods for temples truly astounded me, especially the Olympian one. It was two rooms in a building surrounded by pillars. Not even so much as a closet or priests quarters.

I opened up my old map for the Main Secret Temple of Vecna - a sprawling mini-city of slaves and acolytes. It occurred to me that there shouldn't be a wing devoted to classrooms and lecture halls for the teaching of arcane lore. At most there'd be one such room, and different groups would take turns using it. More likely, they would just hold classes in the library itself, where all the arcane books are kept.

Speaking of libraries, my great mistake there is trying to make them too large. I want them to be as impressive as a large modern public libary, when they are more likely to be a small (no larger than 20' square) room. There's a library at my RL church that has most of the greatest works of religion and philosophy (pretty much any religion and any philosophy you could name) in a room that would look insignificant on a D&D one-square-equals-ten-feet map. I mean, the room must be 10' by 16' at most, and there's still room for a small table and several chairs in reasonable comfort. Do the wizards and clerics of D&D need tens of thousands of tomes to do their research? Or hundreds? Or, more likely, a few dozen? It seems reasonable to me that an evil wizards' demonology library might consist of only a handful of books carefully locked away in a chest.

As a matter of fact, looking over several of my maps, I'm tempted to go Freudian and talk about my obsession with Size. Yes, most of them would work in a "realistic" sense, but you don't need so many storerooms. Really. You don't need a 50' x 60' kitchen, even if you're cooking for hundreds of people (the restaurant I used to work at would serve hundreds of people a night - and do caterings at the same time - out of a room I would judge to be 20' x 30'. Maybe smaller. And 1/4 of it was for the dishwasher). How much office space do you really need? I had my temple of Vecna have a huge administrative wing - but what do they really need to keep records for? Supplies? Income? Do you need more than a couple small offices for this stuff, with a couple full-time folks on the job?

Another thing I always make Too Big: the barracks. Sure, you got guards and fighters around. But do you realize how many double bunks you can actually fit in a 20'x20' room? LOTS. you only need a couple feet between them, and they're only three feet wide. You could squeeze 50 people in there if you want - since all they're doing is sleeping. If your guards sleep in shifts, suddenly your 20' room can support 150 soldiers. At any given time 50 are on active duty, 50 are sleeping, and 50 are eating/training (probably in a dual-purpose room).

In a real structure, there is rarely call for any room larger than 30' square. Most rooms would not even be 20' square - incuding armories and smithies. Most bedrooms (if you're lucky enough to have your own) wouldn't be larger than 10' square.

In a real, occupied structure (cave network, castle, whatever) most rooms would have 2 or 3 purposes. The main audience hall might also be the dining room, ballroom, and main ceremonial chamber. The library is also the office of several scholars, the workplace of several scribes, a museum, and a classroom. Etc...

A reasonably well-fortified castle could take up a total of less than 50' to 70' square and still be a major location during wartime.

These are techniques I am trying to get my mind around properly. Construction is expensive. People build as little as they can and still get by. There is rarely such a thing as an "empty room." Every room had at least one purpose, and the purpose should show, even years later.

 

[Tonguez]

IMHO 'Dungeons' need to be intergrated into the surrounding ecology becoming one more part of it rather than some kind of abberation. My Current Campaign set in Mythic Polynesia relies mainly on 'natural' dungeons so this becomes a bit easier to do.

SO for instance I used the Spider Caves map from WOTC which then required consideration of what Giant Spiders actually eat - Wild Pigs of course, the Spiders emerge from the Caves at night and go a hunting. Within the caves is also a small desperate group of Goblins - they used an alternate tunnel entrance to access the red ore of the Caves but became trapped after their tunnel collapsed and now can't get past the spiders. They survive on fungus and vermin meat. The Caves themselves are in a mountain valley near the center of the Island surrounded on three sides by cliffs. Few spiders range outside this valley but the few that do are generally killed by the local people (which includes a family of ogres)

In the past however I've done built 'ruined' dungeons in which the traps are old and no longer work - the PCs sprang an acid trap but instead of the acid spurting out in a jet it dripped out and glooped on the floor. However other traps - like the pit trap -did still work (the PCs then had the added worry of determining which traps didn't work and which did).

 

[MarauderX]

Hey Merak, feel like I need to reply to some of your excellent points.

As I am in the architectural design industry, I know that things have evolved through the different time periods. Even in recently history one can tell when a home was built by how big the kitchens and bathrooms are. Location is another factor, and in DC (I work there) the construction was often dependent on the how taxes were collected.

You are certainly right; I wouldn't make any castle or keep self-sufficient, as most of the inhabitants seldom lived there. There weren't servants quarters, but there was plenty of room for food. But this is D&D, so do what you want. In any random town, I usually have plenty of outlying buildings where the majority of the people live and one manor/keep that the other buildings surround, and the market is usually just outside the main entrance. It really depends on how much you want to 'stick with reality', but magic and skilled thieves throw things askew with having traditional buildings.

I am big into making all buildings and dungeons functional as living quarters for humanoids, as it would most likely be humanoids that would be constructing their own environment. The problem I have with players (and some DMs) is the need to make the structure completely defensible and stores enough to house an army during a prolonged seige.

I like to make buildings in my homebrews rather elegant with function following form to keep my players on their toes when it comes to defending. So when it came to the players taking over a duchy from a good fallen NPC, they abandoned a really ornate tower to build their own bunker on the other side of the city. They were tired of defending buildings made of wood with too many windows and tapestries. Then they lived in a dark, damp, stinky 'castle' and had no visitors or guests, so they gave up the leadership role and moved on to other things since the region was no longer at war.

Your suggestions are really accurate, and when it all comes down to it, it's often about how much money was spent. If the town was rather wealthy, the structures there tend to reflect the amount of money they had - on the flip side, a cheap town might have poorly constructed walls erected by unskilled craftsmen. Poor towns also reused as much as possible and had cramped quarters for most everyone.

And when it comes to DMs, we just need to take the time to think it out, check it against what the PCs may do, and have the settings work with the NPCs, plots and battles.

 

[s/LaSH]

Hm. It's just occurred to me that I rarely give undead creators, but I always give them a reason to be there and dead. I allow undead to rise of their own volition, which makes some of them pretty freaky. (See my comic, where the adventurers trigger a massive pit trap and find themselves down amongst a horde of decaying corpses moaning things like, "Stay with us forever!" and "You don't need your skin..." These dead were other people who'd triggered the trap in the past. Nobody nearby was powerful enough to raise undead, but there they were anyway.)

I always found that more sinister than some villain commanding undead... "There are undead here because I wanted undead here." What about "There are undead here because some lonely soul died unhallowed and must roam the Earth seeking the oblivion of release"?

 

[blackshirt5]

Ya know, I think of undead the same way S/lash, but the way you say it sounds a lot cooler.

 

[s/LaSH]

Ya know, I think of undead the same way S/lash, but the way you say it sounds a lot cooler.

That's my job.

If I knew how to code in huge throbbing gothic letters, you'd be looking at them right now, but it doesn't seem to be available in the above menu... where's a good spooky font when you need one?