Dungeon Designs

I have been looking at my own mission writing in a critical way lately.  As you might have seen, we are re-releasing the Endless Dungeon series and if it does well, we’ll be finishing it as well.  But I take far too practical an approach to dungeons.

I recall one of the famous trap books published decades ago had a corridor that was actually hinged, and as the party walked down it, it would tilt and become vertical instead of horizontal.  OK, at the age of 13, I absolutely would have used that trap, but I’m a bit older and more cynical today.  Why would someone create a building that looked like a corridor and then excavate enough room for it to be hinged and actually tilt.  Think about the dungeon excavation required for such a task.  It just doesn’t make sense to me.

You see, that’s the eye that I use when crafting dungeons.  Yes, when I was a tween, I drew out elaborate dungeons where elves, orcs, ogres, green slimes, traps and tricks all were contained in tight little boxes.  But I don’t any more.  I have a habit now (and I guess I did back in the 90s if you look at some of the Endless Dungeon missions) of keeping like with like.  Since it doesn’t make sense to me to have truly random monsters wandering around the same place, missions tend to have a limited number of monster or racial types.

Take Blood in the Slave Pits for example:  There are only goblins here.  Admittedly, there are two factions of goblins and one of them has dogs and a huge wolf, but really there are only goblins here.  That’s my style of mission writing.  One type of monster makes it vastly easier for the GM to concentrate on what these guys can actually do, as opposed to trying to remember the bonuses for elves and orcs and goblins and trolls and dragons and slimes, you get the picture.

This isn’t laziness, it’s practicality.  The players get to concentrate on their one guy and use him to his best abilities.  The GM is juggling multiple enemy characters.  If you want to both GM them correctly (as in without making blatant rules errors) as well as effectively, using their best abilities, you can’t be distracted by what type of creature they are.

So, while I do think about drawing out those crazy mixed up dungeons we use to play when we were kids, it isn’t going to happen.  There are ways to do it - if you give yourself enough room to play with - but it isn’t easy.  But I do think that this is OK too.  Not only do you as the GM get to focus your strategic thinking on one race, so too do the players get to focus on defeating this one type of enemy.