Let’s Design a Dungeon! Part 1

Hey, All!

It’s an exciting week! To Save a Kingdom, an Advanced 5th Edition adventure I did content overview for, just launched on Kickstarter, and after many long years, we finally have a great D&D movie! 

To celebrate, I thought I’d interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to talk about dungeon design! 

A good dungeon is a marvel, able to transport your players to a tense and terrifying place that tests their ingenuity, their resolve, and, of course, their luck. A bad dungeon does the opposite, sucking the tension and fun out of your session.

While we often know a good dungeon when we see (or play) it, they can be challenging to get right, and even published adventures often miss the mark. 

But you’re in luck! 

Having designed hundreds of dungeons for both home games and published products, I’m happy to share some of what I’ve learned over the years!

As a note, I’d intended this to be a one-off post, but it quickly grew into a beast of what will likely be many parts. Part 1 will discuss some high-level concepts that will inform the part of the process.

For those of you who might not be familiar with tabletop roleplaying games (or ttrpgs, from here on out), the term ‘dungeon’ refers to an adventure location, usually full of danger and treasure, that characters venture into for a variety of noble (or ignoble) reasons. 

Some might be literal dungeons, as they often were in D&D’s early years, but there’s an endless variety. Monster lairs, wizards’ towers, treasure vaults, and haunted houses. A sleeping giant’s bedroom or the magical castle trapped inside an enchanted snow globe. The nightmare of an alien god. 

You get the idea.

The Concept

So let’s begin at the beginning. Before you start scribbling passageways on graph paper and filling them with monsters, you need to consider your dungeon’s concept. The concept is the overarching idea that frames everything inside.

 The list below can help you get off to the right start.

Themes: A good theme ties a whole dungeon together, transforming a disconnected series of challenges into a cohesive, unique, and memorable whole. A theme also helps to inform encounters, aesthetics, and other important design decisions. 

Your primary theme is usually the core concept. The abandoned lab of a mad scientist. A ruined golem factory. A prison in the astral sea housing the dangerous criminals in the multiverse. The tomb of a dead god. 

Whatever the theme, your dungeon should be self-contained, and walled off from the rest of the world, like, well, a dungeon.

Your dungeon’s inspiration can come from anywhere, particularly once you train yourself to start looking for It. Books, movies, cartoons, or a particularly spooky car park. Adventure lurks all around. 

These days, a part of my brain is always assessing whatever I see or read. 

Make sure potential primary themes map well to your setting and campaign, in terms of power scale and tone. Sending a low-level party expecting a whimsical romp through fairyland inside the mind of a Lovecraftian elder god probably isn’t a great fit (at least if you want them to survive), particularly if they have little choice in the matter. Either they’ll all die, or you’ll have to create encounters they can contend with at the cost of the dungeon’s concept. After all, is the nightmare dungeon inside Cthulhu’s mind really that epic if it’s on par with the last week’s kobold cave or next week’s Kuo-toa village?

You can also include secondary themes, which can be more abstract, like fear or darkness, elemental descriptors, or whatever else you’d like. These can be a great way to add texture and make your dungeon unique, even if they’re never explicitly spelled out to your players. A mad gnome engineer’s forgotten lab becomes a much different place when you add whimsy or fire as secondary themes. Try not to layer too many themes on top of one another though or they’ll get muddled together.

A Story: Building on the theme, a good dungeon needs a story. Who created it, and why?  What’s it been used for since its creation? Has it been damaged, renovated, expanded, or reoccupied at any point during its life? How have the setting’s major events shaped it? Who, or what, currently inhabits it, and why? Is it featured in any local legends or stories?

Like the primary theme, a dungeon’s story can provide you with great textual details that bring your dungeon to life. You don’t need to write a ten or even a two-page backstory, but jotting down some notes and a loose timeline can be really helpful, particularly if you consider how these factors shape how the players experience it.

Challenges: A good dungeon needs danger. Note that I didn’t say combat! Combat encounters are only one type of challenge your adventurers might face. In fact, packing a dungeon with combat encounters can really drain the narrative energy from both the dungeon and the game, particularly if they’re just filler. If the outcome isn’t really in doubt, what’s the point?

(I have lots of thoughts on this, but they’ll have to wait for another blog post.)

Instead, we want to include a range of challenges across a variety of domains. Traversal challenges where the party needs to navigate challenging terrain to move through the dungeon. Social encounters. Complex traps. Magical and lore-based encounters. Puzzles, of a sort.

This is a big topic, as encounters are the primary mechanism for how your players experience a dungeon, so I’ll talk a lot more about this in Part II.

A Clock: This is where many dungeons fail, even the ones in published adventures. The best dungeons have stakes that keep the party moving forward (or downward) toward whatever their end goals might be. Dramatic tension instantly drains out of a dungeon when players realize that they can simply walk out, make camp, and then roll back in after a rest.

When you’re cooking up the basics of your dungeon, think about the mechanisms or circumstances that keep the party moving. Maybe a monster well beyond the party’s capability goes hunting for a day once a week. Maybe a partially flooded dungeon is only accessible for several hours at low tide. Maybe the dungeon is only accessible from the prime material plane for a single day every year. Maybe the whole dungeon is dropped into the elemental plane of lava two hours after the front door is kicked in.  You get the idea.

In gritter, more survival-based games, even supplies like lantern oil or torches can be used to impel the party onward. Shadowdark, the new OSR rpg from Arcane Library, does a great job with this.

We’ll talk more about how you can make this work in a dungeon in a future post.

A Twist: A good dungeon has one (or more) things that defy a player’s expectations. These twists can come at the beginning, like discovering all of the bandits in a hideout have been turned into vampire spawn, in the middle, such as an ancient trap or ward going off that adds a new layer of danger to the dungeon, or at the end, like an alarm sounding that forces the party to get out before they’re overwhelmed.

You can even incorporate more than one twist, but be careful not to throw too much at your players.

A Map: Maps are an integral part of the process, both for you and the players. I tend to design most of my own maps using tools, but you can also pick a theme and find a map that fits, and sometimes a map will inspire a dungeon on its own!

Like Challenges, maps are a big topic. We’ll talk more about maps in a future section.

Seeeeecrets: A good dungeon has secrets. When a character steps beyond its threshold, they’re venturing into the mysterious and the unknown. Secrets are more than just hidden doors and treasure. They’re pieces of lore. History hidden by time that could, perhaps, impact the present or the future. They can also connect the dungeon to other characters, locations, or events within the world.

A Narrative Hook: To engage the players, you’ll need to hook them. Even in the most old-school-style campaigns, players still want some basic motivation for their characters to risk life and limb in whatever darkened hellscape your demented imagination has dreamed up.

The best dungeons have pull factors that make players want to venture into them, particularly if your dungeon isn’t central to your plot.  As we’ll discuss later, I often seed dungeons into my campaign as additional content, which makes this particularly important.

Choices: For me, cooperative storytelling is the defining characteristic of ttrpgs. In my view, the Dungeon or Gamemaster isn’t a storyteller. They’re a story facilitator, creating situations and responding to player actions rather than writing a fixed narrative that players can’t deviate from. Again, I have a lot of thoughts on this, but they’ll have to wait for another blog post.

Within the context of building a dungeon, we want to make sure that players have meaningful choices that impact both their experience *and* the outcome.  After all, a choice with no consequence isn’t really a choice at all.

In the next post, in greater detail about weaving the above threads together into a cohesive whole. And when we do, we’ll get more than just a collection of rooms. The end result will be a get a place with history and personality that bursts off the page, nearly a character in its own right!

In our next post, we’ll use the above to create the concept for a dungeon, which we’ll then build as we move forward!

Stick around, and feel free to follow along via the social media links on my Contacts page!



Tags: New Dungeon Masters, DM Advice, Dungeons & Dragons