Therapeutic Dungeon Creation

Amongst my other vices, as I've approached, and passed, my 30th birthday, I've become a complete workaholic. Since Christmas I think I've worked every single day including weekends except for New Year's Day and one or two other days I can think of. You would never have guessed that I'd turn into that sort of person if you'd met me when I was 25. Just goes to show you never can tell.

So today I took the day off. And I spent almost all of it drawing up a dungeon - one called Sangmenzhang which I've been working on for a long time, and which has been through several iterations.

And it feels good. Along with its many other virtues, there is something therapeutic and stress-relieving about creating materials to use in a game. In a nice quiet room with paper, coloured pencils, dice and some music you can while away hours in a fugue-like, relaxing state, just keying in rooms and writing up random encounter tables. In this age of instant gratification there's something almost retro about it, and perhaps that's part of the charm - the idea that you're putting time and effort into something that won't see any "pay-off" for quite some time.

But also, just exercising your creative muscles is a tool for de-stressing, and in that regard there's really no difference between writing up dungeons and painting, playing an instrument or whatever. It's just that for some reason the former would be viewed as odd and aberrant whereas the latter two aren't. Strange. 

Microscope Dungeon Creation

For people who mostly play "trad" games, the immediately obvious use for Microscope is to spend a session or three creating a setting and history, both GM and players together, and then using that setting as the backdrop for 'ordinary' games of D&D, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulu, or whatever. This sort of thing is apparently already going on, all over the place, and lends itself to 'troupe play' with rotating GM-ships and adventuring parties, a la Ars Magica.

Now I learn that it's being taken a step further and people are creating dungeon histories using Microscope. To which I can only say, "Cool, or what?" ("What" is the wrong answer. "Cool" is the correct one.) I wouldn't want to do it all the time, because let's face it, discovering the history of a dungeon (that the DM has come up with by himself, in a darkened room) is part of the joy of dungeoneering Old School Style. But certainly I think there's room for it in the kind of 'troupe play' I mentioned above. This would see the dungeon as being, basically, a shared world, which people could GM and run games in on a casual basis.

The USP, of course, is that you know the broad sweep of the dungeon's history, so you could have different adventuring parties exploring it at different points in the timeline. You could even have groups of adventurers discovering things the aftermath of previous forays by other adventuring groups from decades or centuries earlier. To which I also can only say, "Cool, or what?"

It Begins

A boring Monday evening in, a glass of red wine, and a new megadungeon begins to take shape...

Three Dungeon Types

Richard asked in the comments to this post asks: "So now I want some background on what the nature of your underworld is". I thought this deserved elaboration in a blog post.

It seems to me that there are three basic philosophical approaches to dungeoneering and the underworld in D&D. (They are specific to D&D and its mythos, such as it is.) They are:

• The Philotomical Approach, better encapsulated in the phrase "dungeon as mythic underworld". Here, the dungeon is a kind of antithetical reality to the surface world, ruled by demons or other powerful and supernatural entities, akin in a way to hell or Hades. Far from being just a set of tunnels underground, it is rather a kind of grotesque mirror to our own reality - the yin to our yang, the place from which true evil comes. This is the most supernatural or fantastical perspective.
• The Salvatorean Approach, which is (probably) the one which Gary Gygax took, best encapsulated in one single phrase: the Underdark. Here, the dungeon is a vast underworld, just like in the Philotomical Approach, and not just a set of tunnels underground, but here, it is still natural (in the sense of being naturalistic). It is knowable and works along comprehensible lines: there may be mind flayers, kuo-toa and drow down there, but at least those things are understandable as actual real physical entities. It isn't a well of infinite evil; rather, just a very bad place for surface dwellers while still being a living and breathing world in its own right.
• The Piecemeal Approach, in which there is no underworld as such - only separate dungeons. Over here is an ancient volcano riddled with caves and tunnels; over there is an abandoned castle; yonder is a ruined temple: all of them are dungeons, but none of them are anything more than that. They have bottoms. They are finite. This is probably the most 'realistic' approach.

I have always tended towards the former in my gaming, although it usually appears as if it is the latter. Just by entering the first few levels of this or that dungeon, the players would be unaware of the supernatural nature of the underworld; they would not even suspect that an underworld exists. But it does - if they delve down far enough they will usually discover that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophies. It just lurks very, very deep, although its tendrils stretch up and up if you know where to look for them.

What this means is that I can, on the one hand, indulge in my banalifying instincts by talking about how trade can go on between dungeon denizens and surface dwellers, while on the other hand imagining that beneath it all there are devils, demons, and an entire mythical underworld representing hell itself.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals

I've been thinking some more about this idea of trade between dungeon dwellers and "topsiders". It's an element of the whole dungeon ecology subgenre that I find fascinating; it's also great shorthand for showing the players, look, this is a living, breathing environment that doesn't really care about you and would be going on very nicely indeed even if your characters had never existed.

What do dungeon dwellers have to trade? The answer to that is easy: precious metals and gemstones, which they have in relative abundance. They have more mundane and useful materials like iron too, but this is a society without the technology to transport large amounts of iron out of the depths of a dungeon and all the way back to civilization, and iron can be mined relatively easily anyway. No, outsiders are going to want to get their hands on stuff that is relatively light and unbulky and gives a lot of bang for buck in terms of weight. Gold, silver, rubies, diamonds.

But what do the dungeon dwellers want? What do they lack? This is a more interesting question and also more relevant, for two reasons: a) our focus is adventuring parties, who are going from top to bottom, so it were; and b) most dungeon-dwelling races have difficulties operating on the surface, so it strikes me that trade would most be one way, with peddlers venturing downwards from the surface rather than the other way round.

The obvious answer to this question is plant life and plant products. There are fungi in dungeons, this we know, but without sunlight there is no photosynthesis: most derro have probably never even seen a tree. So what deep dwellers will want are the kind of things that you can get growing on the surface but nowhere else. When you stop to think, the list of such goods is pretty extensive:

• Items made from wood, it seems, would be prized as luxuries. Particularly carved statuettes and other decorative objects. But weapons with wooden shafts would be valued highly too: wood is light, flexible and strong like no other material is. Spears, bows (and arrows) and the like would fetch considerably higher prices below than above.
• Dungeon dwellers with sweet-tooths would relish the opportunity to get their hands on fresh fruit, although this obviously has a very limited shelf life. Better is dried fruit, but honey would be best of all. I could imagine duergar chieftains handing over considerable amounts of gemstones for a pot of honey, just as the wealthy in our world will pay through the nose for rare cheeses, truffles, or caviar. Just to get a taste of something truly sweet for once in their lives.
• In our own world's history, trade in spices was of huge importance in linking the East with the West. All that fungus which dungeon dwelling races eat is pretty tasteless without a bit of pepper, ginger or turmeric, and we all know that you when it comes to mushrooms you can't beat a bit of tarragon, ideally with roasted garlic...
• By the same token, while you don't imagine dungeon dwellers being particularly interested in dyes, they'll certainly like a bit of incense. People in Europe would brave death, disease and dismemberment for the chance to ship incense from the shores of the Red Sea in ancient times, and I see no reason to believe the same wouldn't be true of dungeons.

Of course, one trade we haven't mentioned is one of the most lucrative of all: narcotics. This would work in both directions, with special fungal hallucinagenics akin to mescaline or peyote being trafficked from the depths of the earth to exchange for opiates grown from poppies on the surface - or heck, even tobacco. Once you get a derro hooked on opium you have a money train for life. If you can get all his gold back to the surface before you get waylaid by ogrillons.

The Dungeon Town

Roguelike games, like Angband, Nethack and the like, are dungeon crawls that are heavily influenced by D&D; actually, they are rather like what I imagine early wargame-esque D&D to have been: a primarily tactical exercise in which the player-character tries to explore a dungeon, survive, kill things, and take their stuff. The player is quite divorced from their own character and sees him/her more as a "piece" moving around the game world than as an actual person with hopes and fears and relationships. When the character dies, the player shrugs and starts over with a new one. "This time, I'll be a wizard."

One of the innovations that roguelikes have introduced is the Dungeon Town. In -band games (-bands, like Angband, Zangband, and ToME, are a subdivision of roguelikes stemming away from the (inferior, in my view) -hacks, like Nethack), dungeons are infinitely regenerating. Each time you enter level 1, it's a different level 1, created randomly. But every so often you come across a permanent fixture - a dungeon town. These are always generated randomly for their initial spawning, but after that they remain in place.

Dungeon towns are, as the name suggests, safe havens within the megadungeon where the player can rest, recuperate, and buy supplies. Often, they have rare shops selling specialist items at a high markup. They are always a boon to the player, as they allow him to get hold of essential emergency goods such as food and scrolls of word of recall if he has lost his supply.   

I like the idea of dungeon towns. Anything that suggests that the dungeon has a meaningful ecology, economy and political sphere is intrinsically interesting to me, and the dungeon town points to all of those things: there are intelligent things living in dungeons, and intelligent things both cooperate with each other and also show a natural predisposition towards trade. It stands to reason that there would be a considerable amount of the latter going on between dungeon towns, especially, but also with the outside world. In such an environment, the PCs, as outsiders, would be traders as well as adventurers - taking out what the dungeon has in great abundance but also bringing in items from the outside that are of great value to the dungeon dwellers. (Who knows what a dungeon dweller would pay for dried fruit, a donkey, spices?)

When we say "dungeon town", of course, we shouldn't be thinking of a load of houses and shops incongruously nestled between the Pit of Fire Drakes and the Lair of the Grell Queen. A dungeon town might be a set of tunnels a group of Duergar have made their fortress; a deep-gnome warren; an encampment of mongrelmen in a vast cavern; whatever - somewhere where trade can be carried out and (brief) respite found.

Old School Planebox and The Abyss as Megadungeon

When Planescape first came out, dungeon crawling was probably at its absolute nadir of popularity: this was the mid 90s, when the World of Darkness was in vogue and everything had to be edgy, story-driven (i.e., largely railroaded) and infused with angst, drama and meaning. So the idea that you could use it for old school dungeoneering was never made explicit in the published materials; I think the designers wanted the players to do more "mature" things with the setting, whatever that meant.

But dungeoneering is certainly implied in the Planescape if you look for it. Planes like Pandemonium and Baator basically are big dungeons, and Sigil is the start location for an old school-type D&D campaign par excellence - a place where you can buy and sell anything, go anywhere (if you know the right people and can find the right portal keys) and get involved in politicking and advancement. The pattern, I suppose, for this sort of campaign would be:

• Start in Sigil. Use it as a base for dungeoneering exploits throughout the multiverse.
• Make lots of money, gain levels.
• Get involved in politics and advancement, reach higher echelons of a faction if that's your thing, start branching out into the belief-oriented specifics of the setting.
• Create your own realm somewhere, except you can do it anywhere in the multiverse if that's what you fancy.

Which is really exactly the same pattern that a typical fantasy sandbox campaign takes, with a few bells and whistles. Call it Planebox, because, let's face it, it's fun to say.

The ultimate Planebox megadungeon is, of course, The Abyss. The Abyss is the Chaotic Evil plane, ruled by the Tanar'ri (okay, okay... "demons"), but absolutely infinite in scope: there are countless layers of The Abyss, each of which is infinite in its own way. There is literally no constraint on the imagination of the DM in coming up with whatever the hell he wants within this plane; it can be as fantastical or mundane as he desires, and there is no requirement whatsoever for any of it to make sense - listen, this place is infinite. Do you want an entire dungeon that is really a forest, but the branches of the trees are all actually snakes? Do you want a dungeon that is actually the digestive tract of a gargantuan whale swimming in an infinitely large ocean? Do you want a dungeon that is made out of mirrors and populated by glass golems? It's all there and more. Best of all, for the adventurer, anything that you could possible desire is in there somewhere: the only problem being that you have to negotiate an infinite amount of Chaotic Evil entities and an infinite amount of hostile environments to get it.

The City as Dungeon

When I first came up with the idea for the Yellow City, one of the two centerpieces of my Yoon-Suin setting, I wanted to come up with a nearby "dungeon" setting in which starting players could adventure and get their hands on loot. I decided early on that this should not take the form of an underground sewer system or out-of-town cave network or any of the other stalwarts. I wanted something that I hadn't done before.

So, the Yellow City's "megadungeon" is a part of the city itself: The Old Town. This is an area on the outskirts of the city which once, in ages past, was apparently its seat of government. It is a once-magnificent district of palaces, plazas, temples, towers and monuments, separated from the rest of the city by a moat; but it has long been abandoned and fallen into disrepair, and the jungle has begun to take over. (Indeed, if one moves right the way across to the other side, one finds that the Old Town effectively merges with the forest - all that remains of its huge buildings are mounds covered in vines and creepers and surrounded by mighty trees.) The locals believe it is haunted and there are innumerable stories and rumours about what lies within it and why people stopped living there. It is a lair of jungle creatures, ghosts, and outcasts from the Yellow City too strange, wicked or insane to be tolerated by the rest of society. But there may be ancient treasures hidden in its depths.

There are certain eccentricities of a city dungeon, mainly to do with mapping. The essential idea behind the Old Town is that it is set up into "zones" rather than levels, each being more dangerous than the first in rough correspondence to its distance from the rest of the city. Within each zone are a large number of buildings, which of course are also comprised of individual levels (basements and first, second, third stories, etc.), but these are not necessarily any more dangerous than the rest of the zone. Within this space, streets and alleyways become 'corridors' of a kind, with the occasional wandering hostile roaming through it.

I haven't run any games in the Old Town yet (I intend to run a Yoon-Suin campaign based in the Yellow City on ConstantCon at some point soon, though) but I expect there to be some issues involved with the city dungeon that I'm not anticipating. The ace-in-the-hole, or thorn-in-the-side, or red herring, or whatever, is the 3D element that being open-air brings. Characters will be able to climb trees and also buildings, to get a better look around and escape foes. They'll also be able to enter buildings through windows at upper levels if they want to try to climb. This will, I expect, create some difficulties in making sure everybody knows where they are and what is going on, and might also involve lots of map shuffling on the part of the DM.

What is interesting about a dungeon is that it is a world cut-off from the outside with its own ecology and, to an extent, politics. But what is compelling about a dungeon is that it is fundamentally quite a scary notion: an unknown and unmapped place full of hostile entities, which has no natural light and is very cramped. The aura of claustrophobia is something that I hope to emulate through allusion to some things that are equally scary in their own way: large open spaces apparently empty though not necessarily so, and the eerie feeling of being in a city that is ostensibly devoid of what makes a city a city (people, noise, warmth, food, shelter).

Heresy

There's been a heck of a lot of talk about dungeons around the blogosphere in recent months. Now, I like a dungeon as much as the next man, but I have to confess that I don't love them in the same way that others seem to. They're always part of my campaigns, but I tend to use them as small liars or underground areas scattered over a wide region: locations that can be explored and plundered relatively quickly. Megadungeons sound nice in theory, but I find it hard to imagine setting an entire campaign around one. Perhaps it's all the time I've spent playing roguelikes, and I'm all dungeon-ed out?

The type of campaigns that really get my pulse racing are wilderness adventures. Deep, thick, primeval forests where owlbears and manticores prowl and hidden kingdoms of myconids lurk. Massive mountain ranges, from whose peaks and glaciers dragons study from afar the affairs of men. Vast deserts dotted with hidden tombs. Mighty oceans swarming with kraken and tako. Mangrove swamps where invertebrate things slither through the mud. Volcanos and jungles and chasms and lakes, these are a few of my favourite things...

It is for this reason that I've long wanted to run a purely outdoorsman's kind of a game. A group of rangers and druids and the like protecting a huge wilderness from encroaching evildoers. A gang of egg-thieves raiding the nests of giant eagles and owlbears and selling their young at market. Intrepid bandeirantes setting off into impenetrable jungle to make their fortunes or die in the attempt. Or maybe a band of outlaws or exiles fleeing into the great empty, never to return...