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.

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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.
 

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Andrew Peregrine

Andrew Peregrine

Sure. But we're talking about the procedures of dungeoncrawling, not how something like picking a lock or searching for traps is resolved. I get that they feel differently when it's a 1-in-6 vs a roll under % vs a skill check, not saying they feel the same at all, but that isn't the procedure for moving through a dungeon.
I don't see how one can really separate these things from an experiential point of view. The mechanics used to resolve the tasks, if any, are part of the procedure. D&D 5e's core resolution mechanic is just smoother than OSE with all of its various dice and tables. So while the procedure I use for D&D 5e dungeon crawling is similar, the experience is different as a result of the resolution mechanics.
 

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I don't see how one can really separate these things from an experiential point of view. The mechanics used to resolve the tasks, if any, are part of the procedure. D&D 5e's core resolution mechanic is just smoother than OSE with all of its various dice and tables. So while the procedure I use for D&D 5e dungeon crawling is similar, the experience is different as a result of the resolution mechanics.
They're part of the procedure for you, but the identical procedure could be used with a different resolution mechanic, say in a B/X game, for example. Likewise, the B/X procedure could be used in a 5E game. So while your experience of them is informed by both the procedure and the resolution mechanic, they're clearly not the same thing and are separable.
 

Yes, heaven forfend a DM must do more than simply read and blindly carry out what is in an adventure without thought.
Necro'ing this point, but: if I'm paying $30 or whatever for someone to do some of the prep work for me, it should reduce the amount of prep work I need to do. If It takes 6 hours to figure out what the book contains well enough to use it - that's not really better than just making it up myself. Possibly worse.

Which is probably more a stab at how the books are laid out than the idea of using published adventures, though.
 

Necro'ing this point, but: if I'm paying $30 or whatever for someone to do some of the prep work for me, it should reduce the amount of prep work I need to do. If It takes 6 hours to figure out what the book contains well enough to use it - that's not really better than just making it up myself. Possibly worse.

Which is probably more a stab at how the books are laid out than the idea of using published adventures, though.
But you aren't paying someone to do the prep work. You are paying someone to design the adventure, the story around it, draw the maps and so on. Most of those things are necessary to some degree or another for you to do the prep work, but they aren't themselves the prep work. The reason it is often more work to prep a pre-written adventure is because you don't already hold the context in your head. You have to discover the context and then prep it. When you create your own adventures, you already hold the context in your head.

Add to this the fact that you are not only trying to get the context into your head, to do so you first have to parse how the originator of the context decided to present it (often for the purpose of it being entertaining in and of itself). That adventures are mean to be "read and enjoyed" means that context is often obfuscated by prose and unnecessary detail compared to adventures created in an earlier era. So yes, while it is about presentation, it is equally about the creative intent from inception.

The best "old" adventures presented a bunch of context (background, etc...) separately, followed by a list of what was where in the adventure locale. They weren't trying to entertain the reader, they were trying to provide the GM with the information necessary in order to entertain the players.
 

But you aren't paying someone to do the prep work. You are paying someone to design the adventure, the story around it, draw the maps and so on. Most of those things are necessary to some degree or another for you to do the prep work, but they aren't themselves the prep work. The reason it is often more work to prep a pre-written adventure is because you don't already hold the context in your head. You have to discover the context and then prep it. When you create your own adventures, you already hold the context in your head.

Add to this the fact that you are not only trying to get the context into your head, to do so you first have to parse how the originator of the context decided to present it (often for the purpose of it being entertaining in and of itself). That adventures are mean to be "read and enjoyed" means that context is often obfuscated by prose and unnecessary detail compared to adventures created in an earlier era. So yes, while it is about presentation, it is equally about the creative intent from inception.

The best "old" adventures presented a bunch of context (background, etc...) separately, followed by a list of what was where in the adventure locale. They weren't trying to entertain the reader, they were trying to provide the GM with the information necessary in order to entertain the players.
I agree with all of this, but I'll say again what I mentioned in another thread recently: WotC's style of organizing adventures falls woefully short of what the OSR community is able to do. They could learn a few lessons from them.
 

I agree with all of this, but I'll say again what I mentioned in another thread recently: WotC's style of organizing adventures falls woefully short of what the OSR community is able to do. They could learn a few lessons from them.
Can you point me to a really great example of that OSR organization?
 



Can you point me to a really great example of that OSR organization?
The adventures for OSE by Necrotic Gnome are fantastic. We’re only done Winter’s Daughter, but I have the others, and they’re all well-keyed. I’m planning on adding them to my hexcrawl somewhere.
 

The adventures for OSE by Necrotic Gnome are fantastic. We’re only done Winter’s Daughter, but I have the others, and they’re all well-keyed. I’m planning on adding them to my hexcrawl somewhere.

It turns out there's a good preview of an example encounter key for Winter's Daughter on the Necrotic Gnome website. It's really good! It actually acts on a lot of the advice I've read from Justin Alexander's blog about encounter keys.
 

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