The Lost Art of Dungeon-Crawling

There is a certain type of adventure that in recent years seems to have fallen out of popularity: dungeons.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

"I Look Up!"​

The release of several old D&D modules got me looking at some of these old original adventures, and they are quite eye-opening on the subject of dungeon design. These are the first games of D&D we played and while some are a little dated, it's easy to see why they kept us playing. While almost everything in those adventures was dangerous, there was magic and mystery in the rooms you found. There were rooms with strange orbs suspended from the ceiling; mysterious indoor gardens full of medicinal plants, poison and monsters; ghostly feasts that share a tragic history; and mysterious keys guarded with fiendish traps.

I think I know why dungeons fell out of vogue. Way back in the early 80s we discovered city adventuring. Modules then became quests or investigations across a cityscape full of NPCs and role-play opportunities with all manner of details and cultures. This new way of gaming outside a maze opened a whole new sandbox. This change in adventure design opened new vistas for adventurers, but crowded out the traditional dungeon crawl as a result.

A Return to Form​

Luckily, in recent years we have seen a more interesting return to dungeons. More designers are coming back to them and trying to break the myth. Mork Borg has its share and a other ‘old school’ games have sought to blow the dust off the idea of raiding underground facilities. Its fun to dive into these lairs once again, and a simple diversion from what has become the usual kind of game. While I’m certainly more on the side of narrative play and character interaction, sometimes it is nice to know that you just need to pick a door rather than work out the villain’s plot and craft an elegant plan (that one of the players may just ignore anyway).

If you are thinking of crafting a dungeon of your own, here's a few pointers.

Give the Place A Reason​

Whether it is an old ruin or an underground laboratory, make sure the dungeon has a reason to exist and some sort of history. A hole in the ground isn’t very interesting so give it a back-story, even just a small one. It might be a tomb, an old ruin creatures have taken over or a lab where magic went wrong. It need not be especially clever, just as long as you can place it in your setting.

A Dungeon Need Not Be an Actual Dungeon​

What you are creating is a place full of rooms linked with doors and corridors, so it need not be underground. A house or a castle is basically the same, as is a sky city, large airship, underwater citadel or even a walled in town (put a roof on real world Venice and you have an epic dungeon).

Don’t Construct It with Only One Path​

When you are making a lot of cool stuff it is very tempting to make sure none of it gets missed. But you should avoid the temptation for having only one path through the dungeon that takes in every room. If the player characters miss out rooms 34-48, you can use them in the next adventure. Nothing is wasted. But if you insist they follow one path you are ruining the fun of exploring a dungeon and taking away the agency of choice. If you offer several different paths, when they enter the room of certain death you can point out with a clear conscience that they didn’t have to open the black door with the skull on the front.

Corridors Are Rooms Too​

Don’t reserve encounters just for rooms. They can happen anywhere in the dungeon, in corridors, on stairwells; anywhere the player characters don’t expect one.

Add Some Mystery Not Just Monsters​

While you will need a few monsters to fight to gain some treasure, put in traps and just weird stuff too. Not everything need be deadly, just something weird to make the player characters think can be fun too, if only to cross a room (the Crystal Maze will be a big help here). With magic in the world you can put some very odd places in a dungeon. Just imagine something that would look strange and enticing when they open the door and then figure out what it does. It might be a room full of glass spheres, a garden with odd looking plants, a table set for a feast with only statues as guests. The weirder the room the more the player characters will be intrigued.

Make Sure There Are A Variety of Encounters​

This relates to the above; don’t rely on one sort of encounter. Make sure you have a mixture of traps, monsters, weird rooms and role play encounters. Try to avoid having the same type of room twice in a row if you can.

Don’t Skimp on the Role-Play​

Even dragons might chat; just because it is a dungeon doesn't mean there are opportunities to role play. Trapped creatures, intelligent monsters under a curse or a contract and even the odd guard might be talked to as easily as fought. You can let the player character make this decision, by who they choose to attack on sight. But remind them that they can talk their way out of situations as well.

Make Every Door Worth Opening​

If you do the job right, each door the player characters come across will fill them with a mixture of fear and anticipation. What lies beyond this door, a trap, a fearful death, untold riches or wild magic? If a room or encounter doesn’t’ feel that interesting to you, cut it from your dungeon. Maybe consider it a little and use it later on when you’ve made it work better. A dungeon need not be a sprawl, and a shorter one has the advantage of potentially allowing the player characters to escape and try another one some other day.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Dungeon campaigns are also very player driven by nature. The PCs need motivations and goals in their explorations, and they need to be willing to make forays, do research, search for allies and information, and so on. I can see why some folks think dungeons are just boring combat slogs if no thought is ever put into anything beyond "clear the next room." You don't clear the mega-dungeon, you adventure in it.

What's weird is how that seems to seem novel. No one would ever expect that you would "clear" The Dark Forest. It's perfectly natural that you would go into The Dark Forest and contend with it's strange and malevolent inhabitants in order to recover the Star Crossed Lovers who fled their imperious houses. Certainly no one would expect you kill every thing in the Forest. The dungeon is no different than that mythical wood in this regard, but there is this mistaken yet firmly held belief that it is a place to be wholly and completely conquered.

It's all come down to degree within the kind. As you correctly assess, there is no difference between the two kinds so what is lacking is degree. Why? Answer why? and the riddle is solved though the way forward has been strewn with obstacles. Perhaps the proclivity of younger RPG generations to take the easy route through combat in such has unintentionally provoked such a reaction. The good that came from it--learning to engage tactically, group cooperation, matstering the rules for classes, spells, etc,--maybe that had an additional backlash effect? The way is clear. Folks like you must continue the battle to clear the air and set things right! There is also the problem, btw, that a good published DC, as you understand it, has to be designed to fit all, and I deem that the largest obstacle since each campaign is different. It would have to be so campaign neutral that additional work would have to be done to graft it; and is that other than a minority view of doing things these days in this plug-n-play, instant gratification-oriented environment? In any case keep designing!

 

[transmission89]

Sure it can be. It's a total cop-out and outright demonstrably wrong to pretend it can't be.

Well-written adventures of the kind you're describing will often have some kind of advice and ideas on reactivity, and indeed, there are plenty that do. I read countless adventures like that in Dungeon, even, for example. There's an incredibly elaborate heist adventure for 4E for example which has a lot of stuff on that and also invents Blades in the Dark before Blades in the Dark did. Or Dragon Mountain, which is a huge dungeon which is entirely built on anticipating that there will be tons of events and reactivity.

The problem is that a lot of dungeons aren't designed with "events" or "reactivity" in mind at all, rather the designer sees them as something largely static, and indeed there are some where pretty much any reactivity will break them or trivialize them.

There are others which work decently - but it's highly variable, and it is something you can write/design for.

The full context of that quote snippet: "The DM's responsibility... is to dynamically create responses and events based on the player's actions, using the adventure as a guide. This isn't something that can be conveyed in a written module as of course, the author has no idea what your players do."

Indeed, a well written module will incorporate events and basic reactions, but it can't anticipate every action or chain reaction from your players, which is what I was saying...

 

[Reynard]

The full context of that quote snippet: "The DM's responsibility... is to dynamically create responses and events based on the player's actions, using the adventure as a guide. This isn't something that can be conveyed in a written module as of course, the author has no idea what your players do."

Indeed, a well written module will incorporate events and basic reactions, but it can't anticipate every action or chain reaction from your players, which is what I was saying...

Right. A module says something like, "The Blind Newt morlocks are distrustful of outsiders and consider interloper a threat. They can be bribed by tasty morsels from the surface world, especially wine and sweet rolls, and will trade for such items. They will also accept aid against and provide intelligence on their enemies, the duergar contingent on level 3." And all that gives the DM enough of a sketch of them so that when other events happen-- say my example above about the cult leader fleeing to the dungeon -- the DM can determine how the setting element (the morlocks) interacts with the adventure (stop the ritual). The dungeon designer shouldn't try and anticipate what role the morlocks will play. The designer should give the DM enough information to integrate the morlocks into whatever adventure/events are happening.

 

[transmission89]

That is partially true. It's more true to say that the DM is a player and it's the responsibility of all the players to ensure a good time is had by all...but the DM has a drastically more important role and drastically more responsibility in that equation. To deny that fact is to fail to understand what RPGs are. The work involved to ensure everyone has a good time is not equally shared. The players have to make characters and prep a backstory. The DM has to make or buy content and do all the necessary prep work to run that content. To say the players put in equal work and have equal responsibility is where the entitlement comes in. It sounds like handing out participation trophies for just showing up. Sorry, but saying the DM and players are on equal footing is bollocks.

Indeed it is. Good job I never said it!

 

[Hussar]

When it comes to addressing the three pillars in a dungeon setting, many DM's seem to think that the three pillars will sort of take care of themselves. And, they wind up with dungeons that are 90% combat.

Take exploration. Ok, fine, you send the rogue forward to scout and "unfog" the map. But, that's not exploration, or rather, it's extremely basic exploration. The players have no real choices here. Faced with a T junction, they can go left or right, but, since they lack any information, either choice is equally valid.

GIVE INFORMATION TO THE PLAYERS. It's something that many modules lack. Have prisoners provide two truths and a lie about where things are. Drop maps. If the players know that the Macguffin they are looking for is in the north east, near the underground stream, then they have things to look out for and a direction to head.

Same goes for interaction. Far too many DM's make the NPC's 100% hostile and 100% uncooperative. I remember a recent adventure where we captured a drow. We let the drow go, after a bit of interrogation, with the message for her fellows that we were not interested in them, had no real beef with them and please, just stay out of our way and everything will be fine. The DM then had the Drow immediately attack us on sight, and we wound up having to grind our way through multiple, frankly pointless encounters. All the while, my character is saying, "We don't want to fight you, just let us through, and we'll be on our way." To me, this was a perfect opportunity for interaction missed. ((Honestly, looking back on it, I realize I was out of step with at least half the group who was just there to throw dice and kill stuff, talky bits be damned.))

It's not difficult to balance the three pillars in a dungeon, but, the DM has to be willing to engage with the PC's in ways other than combat.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

When it comes to addressing the three pillars in a dungeon setting, many DM's seem to think that the three pillars will sort of take care of themselves. And, they wind up with dungeons that are 90% combat.

Take exploration. Ok, fine, you send the rogue forward to scout and "unfog" the map. But, that's not exploration, or rather, it's extremely basic exploration. The players have no real choices here. Faced with a T junction, they can go left or right, but, since they lack any information, either choice is equally valid.

GIVE INFORMATION TO THE PLAYERS. It's something that many modules lack. Have prisoners provide two truths and a lie about where things are. Drop maps. If the players know that the Macguffin they are looking for is in the north east, near the underground stream, then they have things to look out for and a direction to head.

Same goes for interaction. Far too many DM's make the NPC's 100% hostile and 100% uncooperative. I remember a recent adventure where we captured a drow. We let the drow go, after a bit of interrogation, with the message for her fellows that we were not interested in them, had no real beef with them and please, just stay out of our way and everything will be fine. The DM then had the Drow immediately attack us on sight, and we wound up having to grind our way through multiple, frankly pointless encounters. All the while, my character is saying, "We don't want to fight you, just let us through, and we'll be on our way." To me, this was a perfect opportunity for interaction missed. ((Honestly, looking back on it, I realize I was out of step with at least half the group who was just there to throw dice and kill stuff, talky bits be damned.))

It's not difficult to balance the three pillars in a dungeon, but, the DM has to be willing to engage with the PC's in ways other than combat.

Never trust a Drow that you had to capture in the first place. Kinda like the Greman prisoner set free in Saving Private Ryan.

 

[jasper]

Question to op.
1. Is okay to low crawl through the dungeon, and is still called dungeon crawling if I stand up?
2. Would a tiger crawl be okay?
3. I have bad knees, can I just say I crawling through the dungeon?

 

[overgeeked]

I think you are making a distinction that doesn't necessarily exist. The Dark Forest has paths and lairs and streams and caves and clearings and so on. It's a dungeon, just not one made of stone.

That said, I shouldn't really be trying to convince you of anything. I see it differently, that's all.

Unless the characters can walk through walls, they can't pick a random direction and start walking in a dungeon. You can pick a random direction and start walking in a forest or desert. The enclosed nature of the dungeon limits options. It also happens to focus play through those limited options. Which would be great, if those limited options weren't almost always combat focused. There's also the question of what makes sense in a dungeon vs what makes sense in a wilderness. A wandering merchant could make sense in a wilderness, a wandering merchant would be a lot harder to make sense in a dungeon. Monster ecology and all that.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Question to op.
1. Is okay to low crawl through the dungeon, and is still called dungeon crawling if I stand up?
2. Would a tiger crawl be okay?
3. I have bad knees, can I just say I crawling through the dungeon?

DING DING DING
Jasper is the winner of the 3D C contest and has won:
1) A guided tour of his own basement
2) A stuffed tiger toy
3) A pair of Nike knee pads

Congrats Jasper!!!

 

[Reynard]

Unless the characters can walk through walls, they can't pick a random direction and start walking in a dungeon. You can pick a random direction and start walking in a forest or desert. The enclosed nature of the dungeon limits options. It also happens to focus play through those limited options. Which would be great, if those limited options weren't almost always combat focused. There's also the question of what makes sense in a dungeon vs what makes sense in a wilderness. A wandering merchant could make sense in a wilderness, a wandering merchant would be a lot harder to make sense in a dungeon. Monster ecology and all that.

Emphasis mine. You keep asserting that, yet multiple people have said repeatedly that isn't necessarily the case.

As to the issue of a merchant in the dungeon: you don't think actors in the dungeon environment need stuff? You don't think there is trade between the factions and important/powerful monsters?

You have a very specific image of a dungeon that seems to be a static environment where monsters wait in rooms to be killed by the PCs. If that is based on your experience, i am going to reiterate that your experience is one of badly designed and/or run dungeons and are not reflective of other peoples' experiences or the potential of dungeons as settings for D&D play.