Reasons for going into the dungeon?

[Dioltach]

8. PC's own a dungeon. They might want to do an inventory.

Has anyone ever tried something along these lines? The characters are hailed as mighty heroes by the local populace, after some impressive feat, and as a reward the local lord grants them a small keep or some land. What the characters don't know is that their reward is the haunt of some form of monster, and the lord has given it to them because a) it's no use to him now anyway, and b) the characters, being great heroes and all, might exterminate the monsters or at least keep them in check.

I think it might make for an interesting adventure. Sadly, I think my players would storm out and pay the local lord a visit.

 

[Mallus]

Tradition?

Agoraphobia?

A desire to embrace cliché?

(I really don't have a good answer. I've only used one traditional dungeon in 3.5 years of play in the game I run. The best dungeon I've ever played through was this reverse-dungeoncrawl where a party of mid-level characters inadvertently got teleported into the center of an evil temple and desperately tried to find the way out.

 

[Merkuri]

8. PC's own a dungeon. They might want to do an inventory.

Has anyone ever tried something along these lines?

I haven't done it yet, but I was inspired by watching scattered episodes of Stargate: Atlantis to someday give a group of PCs a ruined castle from an ancient civilization to use as their base. The castle would be extremely magical and the PCs only know how to use some of it. There are parts of the castle that no one has ever been to because it's too dangerous and unknown. If the PCs stick to the safe parts they'll be fine, but if they ever want to do something during their "downtime" they could explore parts of their own castle and possibly learn to use more of the ancient technology/magic that permeates the castle.

Anyway, back on topic, in our current campaign the PCs are members of a government organization (we're in Eberron, and are members of the Brelish Citadel). We are often given orders, but we have a lot of leeway on how we complete those orders. A few real-life months ago our government got word of an army of warforged marching across a desert to our east and sent us to investigate. We managed to get to the army's destination just a short while after they did to find a previously unknown civilization tucked in the mountains.

The civilization had just made friendly contact with the army, whose leader had promised to protect them from the territory-hungry elves in the area (Valenar) in exchange for a chance to look at some ancient ruins in the area for unknown reasons. Much to our surprise, we discovered that the army was lead by a man we had seen vandalizing and terrorizing our home city a few months earlier. The leader of the new civilization forbade us from harming him, and we didn't want to get on anyone's bad side with a huge warforged army (not to mention the army of this new civ) all around us, so we couldn't attack our enemy, but we insisted on being allowed into the ancient ruin with him so that we could keep an eye on him and make sure he wasn't doing anything that would be against the wishes of our government.

So we went on a dungeon crawl not for anything in the dungeon, but just to keep an eye on one of our bitter enemies, who we had sworn not to harm and who had sworn not to harm us. That was an interesting trip. We had to maintain a truce of sorts while trying to make sure he wasn't pulling anything on us.

 

[roguerouge]

To rescue a waitress and a traveling gnome alchemist.

Because they needed to get directions. (They were lost at sea and the dungeon was a derelict which they hoped might have charts.)

Because they needed to get the final ingredient for a cure to a local plague outbreak.