Those that came before: Builders / Ancients / Fore Fathers / Aliens, etc...

[Hand of Evil]

Looking for interesting background / backstory for a builder race, you know, the guys that came before and left all those dungeons and ruins for our parties to run amuck in.

Normally, I use the Dungeon Keeper (old computer game), dungeon heart story, where there is a weakness between the worlds (a crack) and a demon is able to reach across and influence creatures. It is based on plane alignment and stuff like that. At first it is small things but the demon uses the power to expand his power base by building a dungeon around that crack, the dungeon draws powers from the area. As the dungeon increases in size, so does the demons. Soon, the demon has a following and the crack becomes a doorway and the demon comes across. This leads to my campaign history of the Demon Wars.

Well, I have kicked that dead horse for some time and now looking for some new ideas. How due you explain the campaign setting? What races do you use?

 

[Janx]

the sort of obvious default explanation for Dungeons is that somebody built them long ago. Duh.

I think you're looking for some extra better fluff on top of that.

Let's assume the dungeons were built a REALLY long time ago. Perhaps as a fallout shelter. the design pattern was chambers and corridors connecting them. Over time, all the internal art, paint, etc has completely decayed (maybe it was plastic or biological). All that remained was the stone, and even some of that has collapsed, causing the remaining rooms and corridors to take on a random, meaningless configuration.

Something along this line justifies the stereotypical computer generated rooms connected by corridors, that don't make sense because they lack context to once being a working facility.

Design-wise, rooms and corridors makes sense because individual rooms don't have large ceilings to support. So there's an engineering reason to avoid building massive chambers, that in turn have to support the weight of all the rock above it.

I still haven't hit anything special. I've simply justified the standard Dungeon design.

Now let's suppose that a million years ago, an advanced race was experimenting with genetic manipulation. They needed secure facilities, underground, to avoid containment breaches.

So these labs and cells were built and the product was the forerunners of today's monster species. These labs did ultimately suffer a security lapse or containment breach (think Helix meets 12 Monkeys).

Some of these creatures reach the surface and destroy civilization. Others stay down there or move in.

The result is a hierarchy of danger/power as the deepest levels were for the most dangerous strains and experiments.

 

[Celebrim]

My justifications are typically of the form:

"In the real world, when people built a city out of stone, they tended to quarry that stone from beneath the city. The result was often massive quarry and mine complexes that vastly exceed the scale of the largest published dungeons. So in my fantasy world, where quarrying stone is typically a more refined art, which can be aided by magic, and where the technologies that allow for deep mining have been known back into prehistory, it's highly realistic that large underground complexes exist and that as in the real world these spaces are often repurposed after their original purpose as stone quarries is no longer necessary."

"In the real world, people built underground cities as a means of defense. So in my fantasy world, where quarrying stone is typically...."

The real difficulty in a realistic justification for dungeons isn't so much their existence, but that they are interesting. Real world abandoned structures are almost never interesting in the way that fantasy dungeons are on just about every level. It's at that point that I have to start referencing 'magic' as not only the primary explanation, but the sole explanation.