Thoughts on Real World Dungeoneering

My house has a big and eccentrically designed cellar. The house was constructed around 1930 on a pretty steep hillside that once was riddled with drift mines (there is in fact a blocked-up entrance to a mine shaft in my back garden, which was revealed during excavations we did a few years ago - you can see the two concrete supports on either side of the filled-in opening in the picture below). And the cellar backs into the hill itself, so that for the rear two-thirds of it the floor is actually just the raw earth, sloping upwards from front to back of the house.  

We don't venture down there very often (the front third of the cellar has a proper concrete floor and we use it chiefly as an oubliette for the vast amounts of junk we've accumulated over the years; bicycle storage; stowing away gardening equipment, etc.). And it is a pretty spooky environment. It is divided into fairly sizeable chambers by brick walls which serve to support the floor of the house, and between these chambers are little crawlspaces through which you can wriggle if you need to - for instance, just off the top of my head - get rid of the corpse of a rat which has somehow found its way down there and is slowly decomposing and creating a stink in the summer heat. It is dark, dank, and oppressive, the domain of those annoyingly frail, gangly-legged spiders, and whenever I go down there I can never quite shake the feeling that I am going to encounter a witch, werewolf, or gremlin. 

I have made a number of observations during my explorations of this space over the time we've lived in the house that I think are useful to reflect on when imagining what dungeoneering would, quote-unquote, 'really be like'. Of course, it is impossible to really imagine what it would be like to explore an underground environment populated by orcs, black puddings, dragons and rats russet molds. But still, the experience has been helpful. Some lessons I have learned that I think would help to add to the verissimilitude of tabletop dungeoneering include:

• It is astonishing how disorienting and isolating an experience it is to be underground and away from daylight. Even if the cellar door is wide open on a sunny, breezy day and there is therefore plenty of natural light and air pouring in, as soon as there is a single wall between me and the door, I feel like I might as well be at the bottom of the ocean or on Mars. There is a vague awareness of distant noise - the far-off footsteps and shouts of the wife and kids; vehicles passing somewhere; the rumour of weather. But the world seems to close in to the immediate, small, boxed-off room which I occupy. And this is true within the cellar itself, wherein each little mini-room feels like its own universe. Before my adventures in my own cellar, I often thought that it was quite unrealistic in a dungeon environment to have neighbouring rooms with wildly varying content (why doesn't the tarantella in room 38 ever bother the tribe of orcs in room 37?). Now, I worry about that much less.
• By the same token, sounds and smells work very differently underground. It is not that when one is in a dungeon chamber one is hermetically sealed from all external stimuli. But it is the case that it is remarkably hard to pinpoint where sounds in particular are coming from. This, I think, is to do with the effect of echoes and also the fact that sounds emerge not through the walls themselves but through the gaps in the walls, which can fool the mind into thinking it 'knows' the sources of noise. I have often wanted to better systematise how sounds and smells travel underground. My experience in my cellar has indicated to me that this is a task requiring more work and thought than might first be realised. 
• Crawling about underground is a workout - far more tiring than walking around, and particularly if it involves forcing oneself through holes or gaps in walls. Even if one is able to stand and walk, if one has to bend one's head at all, one feels uncomfortable and tense essentially all the time. This takes a toll. Travel in a dungeon would be slow and would have to take place in small doses.
• Other inconveniences include general filth, scrapes and cuts, and the fact that one rapidly finds a layer of grime and dust coating one's nostrils and throat. 
• You are extremely vulnerable in cramped spaces. Stooped over, or - worse - crawling along on one's elbows, you would find it extremely difficult to even think about fighting, let alone do it. Your focus is on just avoiding pain (bumped heads or elbows or knees) and actually getting from A to B. Ambushes by subterranean natives would be incredibly easy to pull off on surface dwellers. 
• You do not quite realise this when you are down there, because you are mostly focused on the task at hand, but you rapidly become depressed, miserable, and nervous - as well as irritable and jumpy. When you emerge into the natural light it washes over you like a balm and you feel a vast sense of elation, and it is then that you notice you have spent the last half hour in a state of low-level tension. A day of dungeoneering would be unbearably oppressive - people (hirelings and henchmen, anyway) would with a reasonbale degree of frequency go mad, panic, or just quit. 
• There is a lot to be packed into a micro-environment underground. My cellar has, I would say, about eight distinct 'rooms', each of them just a few square metres in size. But each has its own 'feel' and its own content, and is relatively self-contained. There is a considerable amount of advnture down there, and that's without orcs and grey oozes and mimics (or treasure chests) to enliven the experience. As with hexmaps (see here, here, here, here and here), dungeons could contain a lot of stuff in small area. 

Not all of this is easily operationalised or systematised in play. But it can inform how things are thought about, designed, analysed and described. Just as actually travelling about in real wildernesses can inform how an overland campaign is executed, so actually crawling about in cellars can add depth and realism to a dungeoneering expedition.