The great big ‘ how to build a dungeon’ post.
Alright @thedrunkdm , @dmplague, @youwakeupinadungeon and @dungeoncrawlersltd, lets get this circus on the road.
This started off as a private project with me wanting to compile all the tips and tricks I’ve learned creating interesting dungeons as well as asking the advice of a bunch of other DMs so I could add their expertise to my own. Then I figured I should do this in an open format to get a great big ‘market place of ideas’ type dynamic going, and here we are.
On to the topic of the day; Dungeons. Since the very first iteration of the games we love, dungeons have been a key component. Most if not all of tabletop’s grand adventures involve dungeons in some way, and it’s nearly impossible to separate any hallmark of the RPG genre from their subterranean roots ( leveling up, loot drops, bossfights, all that Jazz.)
However, the the actual process of crafting a dungeon has gone wildly undeserved. While book after book, edition after edition and system after system has explored different ways to adjudicate player actions, social dynamics and over all campaign flow, very little attention has been paid to giving the dungeonmaster the tools they need to build a truly memorable dungeon.
“ Imagine a space and populate it with interesting monsters, scenery and traps”, “ it doesn’t always have to be in a tomb or cave”, and “ make the dungeon feel like place things actually live in”, can all be very good advice for those that are new to the hobby, but by the third or forth time I’d seen someone else reiterating these tips, I got the feeling that we were all talking around a gap in our knowledge, and that was how to make a dungeon session both memorable and fun.
The simplest way to make a character memorable and fun? Give them a life outside of their stats.
The simplest way to make a campaign memorable and fun? Make the players care about their actions, giving them weight and agency.
The simplest way to make a dungeon memorable and fun? In my experiance it’s always been to have the players feel as if they’re pressing their luck.. and at any time their number might come up and bring the roof crashing down on their heads.
The trick then for you as a dungeon mater is to design a scenario where players feel like they’re willing to wager their character’s safety against the promise of reward and then play their greed against their fear as the ante grows ever larger.
We’ll get to such things as brainstorming and layout tips in later posts, but for my inaugural entries I’d like to share how to bring this element of risk to your dungeons.
Lighting and awareness.
For as long as I’ve been a DM I’ve always had a problem with dungeon lighting. Torches and lamps and the like provided what seemed like an arbitrary window of perception and combined with a party’s myriad forms of detection ( varying levels of lowlight and dark vision, sent, magic detection and whathave you) I ended up ignoring light for the most part and just describing my dungeon as is.
Atleast, until I realised that most parties tended to function in only one of three modes, either ‘loud(breaking in doors, keeping torches blaring), quiet ( keeping light and noise to a minimum) or a neutral mode between the two, not making any effort either way.
This then provided a perfect framework to build on. When the party is being ‘ loud’ they’re putting their ability to discover new information above their sense of safety. They more easily spot traps, lurking monsters, and environmental details but are far more likely to alert creatures to their presence ( more on that later). When a party is being ‘ quiet’ their desire to act cautiously is overruling their ability to act decisively, and moving through the shadows methodically will negate risk but will cost them precious time.
Bringing it back to the ‘gambling, theme of before, when we design with both the ‘ loud’ and the ‘ quiet’ party in mind, we can make the players feel as if we are both rewarding and chastising them for their actions no matter which route
Designing for quiet players means allowing them to circumvent dangers while playing on their paranoia. Let them hear an enemy coming from far off, while at the same time injecting details into the scenery to make them question ‘ what was that?’. Include traps and other dangers that would have been clearly obvious had they only been bolder. Give them the opportunity to ambush and plan while letting them know that their caution gives their foes a head start.
Designing for loud players means indulging the desire for discovery while making sure that recklessness is punished. Let players avoid pitfalls while letting them stumble into ambushes. Let fearful enemies shrink from them while more prepared ones summon reinforcements and fortify their defences. When the party is being loud, be sure to denote lots of details in the environment, so many infact that they will be unsure which are clues to further danger.
Creatures with stealthy tactics will generally operate opposite to the party. Acting boldly while the players are sneaking but retreating back while they are alert. Creatures that have numbers on their side however will act like player characters themselves, often acting cautiously at first before raising an alarm and causing a panic.
Players making mistakes
One of the things that’s always bugged me about most modern tabletop systems is that failure is an ‘ all or nothing’ problem. Either your attempt succeeds, it has absolutely no affect, or things are now so disastrous that you might as well have not have tried. Bad rolls and bad decisions happen, and it’s your liberty as a DM to take advantage of these.
If a player rolls low on their search check, don’t just have them find nothing, have them obliviously wander away from the group and have them attacked by a ( relatively easy) wandering monster. If the players tip off the enemy scout, don’t just have the next group of foes ready to fight them, have reinforcements arrive, let the traps be set… Have the cultists start their ritual early. Failure in these cases gives weight to the player’s actions, which is what creates memorable experiences down the line.
Tempo.
When I speak about the tempo of a dungeon, I refer to the pace at which the players are forced to move and make risky decisions. A low tempo dungeon ( like say, a tomb, where everything is mostly dead) has a very different feel from one with high tempo ( like a fortress full of enemy troops). High tempo dungeons lend themselves very well to big dynamic setpieces where as low tempo dungeons are great for secrets and mysteries.
The greatest way to design for tempo is to include elements of both and slowly modulate it throughout play as a result of player actions or even external circumstance. Weather might force the fortress guards to change their patrol routes unexpectedly, or the beast that lives in the dungeon’s heart might wake up because the players made too much noise. Perhaps one of the best setpieces you can have is to rapidly turn the tempo on it’s head, going from slow to fast ( having the mansion catch fire, or the tomb begin to cave in) or fast to slow ( the party’s raid on an enemy camp is thrown awry when the hostage turns out to be gravely injured, forcing the party to sneak or fight their way out the long way.)
Here are some of my own thoughts on crafting dungeons.
Making them seem real: As was said above, many things like to throw out there advice like. Make them seem like real places, but few actually go about it in a way that explains the HOW involved in that. So how do you make them seem real? Well it involved asking yourself two questions.
1. What was it built for? The answer to this question usually determines its location, what kind of traps you might find. How many rooms and what lives there. If it was built to house an ancient artifact so no one could get there it probably has all kinds of summoning circles to draw in monsters and traps that can’t be avoided as well as self locking, reinforced doors. Whereas if someone lives there and they’re protecting their home then any traps they have should be simple to turn off if faced from the correct direction or they’ll have little side paths that make avoiding certain traps a breeze. Any doors with traps probably have a button or don’t go off if you use the lock normally (even picking it). If people live there then either they themselves are the encounters or they have summoning circles or they keep pets. Does it make sense for those pets to be in certain places?
2. Does this room make sense here? Often enough, dungeons are crafted to be a series of hallways and rooms. One of the biggest problems with this design type is that you end up with nonsensical places. Why would anyone make their person lair a maze? Doesn’t that just make it more painful for them? They could have a good reason sure, but you need to make sure that you know it. Ask yourself as you make each individual room and when you break symmetry (which most architects would be using for their ease of construction) does this make sense here? What kind of rooms are needed in your average dungeon? If this is where wizard lives they probably have a library, study, food prep area, sleeping quarters, living/eating area, laboratory, and storage chambers. None of your rooms should be empty and pointless! Another thing. Chances are your average foe doesn’t keep expensive to feed and house monsters around 24/7. So perhaps keep an explanation in your back pocket about why there’s so many encounters and such!
Have a theme! One of the big ways to make a dungeon memorable is to have a theme to the dungeon. Think back to your video game days. Do you remember a fire temple? One in particular? Why? Probably because the problem solving there might have been a little different? Even simple things can help draw everything together for you. An underwater ruin, a holy temple inside a volcano, or even the sewer lair of some thugs. All of them play out quite differently and can help you build the encounter type.
Be clever with your traps and encounters! As everyone who has played these games for a while knows, eventually players will be checking most everything for traps and dangers. That’s fine! Use that to your advantage! Most of the time traps don’t show all their pieces anyway. Have them discover it in bits and pieces and see if they can figure it out before they trigger it. Don’t forget in most locales there’ll be an easy way to turn off or go around a specific trap. They could see pieces of that trick too and then they have to decide what’s the trap and what’s not. This goes back to agency and letting the player think about things. Encounters should be approached in the same way. If you want a monster in a specific room, why is it there and how does it normally feed itself and what are its behaviors? When the party does certain things it should interact accordingly.
Anyway, might have more to say later, but the biggest thing when making a dungeon is to know your party and what they like to do. :)
