this is why i do theatre of the mind
And now I want to play Dwarf Fortress again.
: ) now i want to replicate that dungeon in dwarf fortress
I’d watch a video of someone with architectural experience analyzing these old dungeons and ranting about how impossible to construct and functionally useless they are for anything other than dungeon delving.
For starters, just ask your DM three questions (assuming enemies are sentient and civilized beings, not just “wildlife”) and watch him sweat nervously:
- Where do the enemies sleep?
- Where do they cook, eat and store food?
- Where are the toilets?
In a lot of modern guides on dungeon design, they stress thinking this stuff out. Yeah you should definitely have some idea why the inhabitants are here and not elsewhere, where their supplies come from, and how they interact with whatever else calls this place home.
They should have a place to sleep, eat, maybe recreation even. While the PCs poke around, the dungeon denizens shouldn’t just be waiting around in preset rooms, fully ready to fight like MMO mobs. They could be on patrol, raiding their neighbors, sleeping, arguing, partying, whatever.
There’s even fun things you can do with this like inter-faction conflicts between floors or other regions. Do the Orcs fear the dragon at the bottom of the dungeon?
Do the bandits have an uneasy non-aggression pact with a lich? Or are they constantly embattled with seemingly limitless undead because they’re struggling for a legendary artifact?
Somebody’s gotta reset all those traps, too.
Players should definitely feel like trespassers in a living place. Few people enjoy that ancient style of dungeon delving anymore, where you slay a band of kobolds, answer a sphinx’s riddle, then bust in on a vampire who’s as confused about why they’re there as you are!
Where are the toilets?
Maybe the hallway but the local gelatinous cube roombas it up. (Eeeeeww) … Or a room has holes dug dropping into an underground river. Or just a really deep pit, or a convenient portal to the Abyss LOL.
You can have fun with this stuff.
DM sweats profusely, starts searching for books on underground ecosystems.
I ran a bitd game with a civil engineer playing a leech. ‘Where does the poop go’ got a lot of people killed.
My DM would burst out laughing at those questions and respond with:
YOU’RE the adventurers, aren’t ya? So:
- explore and find out
- explore and find out
- explore and find out
Make the enemies coprophages and all the problems sort themselves out.
Someone should make a 100% science-based dungeons game.
It’s short, but it’s a start:
Lindybeige! Haven’t seen that guy in ages! And he’s still active!
In the back of the 2014 DMG is a set of tables for generating random dungeons. I thought it would be fun to see how that goes. After spending maybe 6 hours on it across a few days, the abomination I created ended up making DungeonScrawl crash in my browser and be unable to work on it further, but if it hadn’t it probably would’ve ended up like roughly 1/4 of this.
1/10 do not recommend
I feel called out.
Ha! Level 1 of 23
