Building Dungeons

My way

Being a distillation of my accumulated prejudices and experience of many years of doing this 

Preamble

I learned a lot form the advice articles published in the early role playing games I read particularly those by Greg Stafford then of Chaosisum for Runequest and Ed Simblast for Chivalry and Sorcery, as well as articles in the first edition AD&D Games Masters Guide most of this was about things other than directly dungeon design indeed much of it was about how best to run games and how to present believable monsters and NPC’s which where not pots of experience points to be claimed at the risk of character death. The stuff by Judges Guild for D&D was something I read a lot of and can even now recall it as a prime example of how I did not want to write adventures.

I ran and read even more modules and adventures mostly by TSR, Chaosisum and GDW but also by others who I can’t at this point recall the names of and magazines such as Dragon, White Dwarf, before it became what it later became, Imagine and others many of which where very short lived and I absorbed it all into the creative stew. To this I added influences from the how to articles in the story telling type games when Ars Magica first edition surfaced and in subsequent iterations and variations I like exalted and the first three editions of the world of Darkness (OWD). Though I do think you can take story telling style games too far which is why I am not a fan of such things as the burning wheel based ones and FATE & its derivatives

To all of this as I am an avid reader blended in the all sorts of influences from life and form literature  on how and how not to tell a story which draws you in and keeps you interested.

That however is more general how does it all boil down to how I write dungeons?

Well this is it

• The Dungeon should never be inescapably deadly.
• The Dungeon needs to tell a story even if the players don’t ever realise it or work out what it is
• The Dungeon needs to have a theme or themes to give it a feeling of verisimilitude  
• Dungeons should have a history and clues to this should be left for the players to find and puzzle over
• Dungeons and indeed every other element in the game must be believable with in the context of the game
• The Dungeon and its inhabitants should serve a specific role within the larger game and each encounter within the whole should be a part of that
• The Inhabitants should make sense and there needs to be reasons for them to be where they are and doing what they are doing they have a life beyond being sword & spell  fodder or at least seem to have
• The structural features of a Dungeon should also make sense, i.e. traps in inhabited or heavily travelled areas should be able to be turned off for the most part or have a way round them the inhabitants are aware of.
• They should not be too big even Mega dungeons I think are best built in smaller sections the same way you should I believe build a campaign world
• Big Dungeons should have relatively quiet sections the party can hole up in for a while when wounded or out of rechargeable assets such as spells or spell points.
• That said there should not be so many of these that the dungeon does not stretch the party’s abilities and resources.
• The Dungeon should challenge the characters in ways in keeping with the theme  and the story of the place
• The Dungeon should give the players a chance to role play their characters
• The Dungeon should generally should allow multiple bites at the cherry & normally players should not be trapped in them for prolonged periods
• The Dungeon may change if the party take multiple bites at the cherry as this is not a computer game and the inhabitants at least should get the chance to adapt to the limit of their abilities as much as the players do.

I hope that makes some sort of sense in the end