The Gaming Den

So Undermountain and Wizardry have mega dungeons because an eccentric wizard did it and said wizard doesn’t really venture out so no government army has decided to cleanse it.

Dark Souls, the whole world is dead so really everywhere is a monster infested dungeon. Bloodborne has a plague abandoned city and ancient ruins being delved into by organizations. Mordheim has a ruined abandoned radiactive city, I guess Stalker is like that too. Niheis Blame is a megacity dyson sphere so massively nobody knows it’s extent.

What other dungeon premises do you recall? What kinda world setting does it fit into?

In Earthdawn and Fallout dungeons are former bunkers used to survive the apocalypse. Some didn't quite work and are now filled with riches and wonders from the old world (and probably some weird/dangerous stuff as well)

The Elder Scrolls and other settings have dungeons that are remains of an ancient advanced race that disappeared for some reason.

In the "Dungeon" comic books series, the Dungeon is, at least for a time, a business establishment that lures adventurers with treasures and princesses in order to kill and loot them.

Deathtrap Dungeon is set up just to challenge people for its own sake, or maybe to attract tourists. Makes as much sense as anything.

Blade wrote:In Earthdawn and Fallout dungeons are former bunkers used to survive the apocalypse. Some didn't quite work and are now filled with riches and wonders from the old world (and probably some weird/dangerous stuff as well)

I was surprised to learn Fallout could have been Earthdawn: the PC game. They also looked at GURPs and Vampire:the Masquerade:The Game.

Although you can see some or GURPs and Earthdawn in the first 2 Fallouts.

In the original Might and Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum, the explanation for why the cities were underground were to protect against dragons.


On this statue of a blue dragon a plaque reads...
In honor of a time long ago...
Before the days when the towns moved underground, dragons were few and far between

There's also the Underdark: If subterranean energy sources are plenty enough to keep large underground ecosystems, then you can have subterranean civilizations and sometimes "the dungeons" are just the cities/roads of people who happen to live deep underground.

It's hackneyed, but I like it:
places of power either attract or outright summon monsters, which are creatures of inherent magical power
OR
places of power "mutate" normal animals (and maybe people) into dangerous monsters, which then wander around messing shit up

Admittedly, these conceits are more common in video games which want to explain why you're playing Dungeons and Dragons than they are in tabletop.

Master of Magic has this conceit to an extent, as does Ultima (where the dungeons are physical manifestations of moral evil), and so does... Ys and it's derivatives? https://legendofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/ ... _Of_Heroes

--DrP

The dungeon in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was a spaceship. Sky realms of Jorune dungeons were Earth-Tec caches, filled with robots and bio-creatures or the underground bunkers of the native sapients. All three reasons I’ve liked since I first understood Arthur C Clark’s observation about magic and technology.

The Giant Ground Sloth never went extinct, so they're still around making random tunnels.

It's a supplemental source of dungeons; you're not going to get megadungeons out of giant ground sloths, but it can pad out the low end. It's easy to slot into a wide variety of campaigns, but appeal to ground sloth is most appropriate if part of your style is doing environmental storytelling.

Eberron is lousy with deceased empires. Their ruined fortresses / temples / banks make for dungeons. Also useful manifest zones are one more reason to keep building on the same site, I forget how many layers Sharn was supposed to have.

There's any number of urban fantasies where the 'dungeons' are just the places where non-humans live hidden from humans.

Tolkien's Moria was a dwarven city where they dug deep enough to disturb a fallen angel, and the angel said "Nice city. I'll take it." before inviting in goblins and others who would worship it.

Natural cave systems are also used as dungeons a whole lot. They can accumulate loot if monsters live there, assuming the monsters drag bag humans to eat and leave the metal crap they're carrying alone to sit in a pile on the floor.

In the "Fantasy Historical Earth" setting that sorta... randomly came to be my main one shot D&D setting, I decided that dungeons "naturally" generated around the items of great power, or the remains of important, powerful people.

So a warchief who wielded great power in life is laid to rest, and the place of his burial just becomes a dungeon. Cuz magic.

Prak wrote:In the "Fantasy Historical Earth" setting that sorta... randomly came to be my main one shot D&D setting, I decided that dungeons "naturally" generated around the items of great power, or the remains of important, powerful people.

So a warchief who wielded great power in life is laid to rest, and the place of his burial just becomes a dungeon. Cuz magic.

Why do you need "natural magic"? Plenty of real world civilizations already built giant tombs for important people, often filled with treasure and sometimes even traps. Because supposedly the riches would help the dead in the afterlife and desecrating the corpse would screw them.

And in D&D we know the afterlife is real so who knows, keeping the body safe and surrounded by riches will actually help the warchief ascend higher in the afterlife.

Because the dungeon in question is in northern Europe. The Slavs and Norse weren't exactly running around building ten-story deep death traps for their dead kings.

Also, I like the idea that at least some dungeons spontaneously generate. Weirder shit happens in D&D.

That has an internal logic to it, like the old ideas of spontaneous generation, miasma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

Prak wrote:Because the dungeon in question is in northern Europe. The Slavs and Norse weren't exactly running around building ten-story deep death traps for their dead kings.

Also, I like the idea that at least some dungeons spontaneously generate. Weirder shit happens in D&D.

Like undead spontaneously rising.

Maybe the northern ten-story deep death trap is meant to keep angry warchiefs and their retinues from rampaging around? That was kinda the idea I got from Skyrim's dungeons filled with draughs.

Although if it's natural, then I guess one could exploit it to farm treasure and exp. Can you just partially loot the "natural" dungeon and it'll automatically refill after some time?

In The Nightmares Underneath dungeons 'spontaneously' generate because they're infections your world got from the Nightmare Realm. If you don't go clear them out to collapse them, the swelling will just keep getting bigger until your world is part of the Nightmare Realm.

I've always liked the idea of dungeons being abandoned sections of a city or castle- so you get dungeons modeled on Books of New Sun, Pools of Radiance, Gormenghast, Lords of Dus, etc. It works nicely in that you not only have shitty rotten parts where monsters and animals have moved in, or atavistic stragglers still occupying parts, but also a good reason to have other adventurers, soldiers, merchants, etc. since the location is still relatively convenient to civilization. Why hasn't it been looted and cleared already? I dunno. There's probably a drawback to every approach.

Oh yeah I love the idea of space hulks, or setting appropriate equivalents. Lost dereklicks that accrue spooks along the way then crash somewhere or are sought out for lost knowledge

In the Dungenomicon, I suggested that they should block teleport. Wizards would make them to prevent scry-and-die by rivals.

In the core rules of DnD, you can easily just assume that a relatively powerful wizard can dig a dungeon out of solid rock in a relatively short time with a small handful of spells like disintegrate, decorate and shape it with spells like stone shape, and shore up walls with spells like wall of stone. Honestly, building an underground fortress ten minutes a day over six months is not a lot of work for a big payoff.

Prak wrote:Because the dungeon in question is in northern Europe. The Slavs and Norse weren't exactly running around building ten-story deep death traps for their dead kings.

Also, I like the idea that at least some dungeons spontaneously generate. Weirder shit happens in D&D.

I've always liked that idea as well, places where famous figures are entombed, powerful magic items are hidden away or strongly magical locations transforming. Heck, if your badass enough, just hanging around an area long enough could possibly transform it into a Dungeon (yes, with a capital "D", people are aware of the phenomenon and can even exploit it). Monsters can form in somewhat similar manners as well.

I sort of like the idea that the dungeon is a literal dungeon, a hole where the authorities dump political prisoners that they can't just execute. And they've been using it as an oubliette for so long that the political prisoners have spawned a race of heavily inbred sightless cannibals.

I was also going to mention for variety's sake that in the current version of my long-suffering project Castle on the Edge of the Moon, dungeons etc. are the ruined remnants of a worldwide game/reality show created by long-absent precursors. So your participation in a dungeon is actually you making your way through the gauntlet that leads to VIP areas, or fighting other parties (human or otherwise) in a massive gladiatorial arena complex, or trying to get out of a ludicrously large escape room, or even exploring the defunct "behind the scenes" maintenance areas. Along with that, in a bit of a Saberhagen riff, the "gods" of the setting are busted-ass AIs that were in charge of various parts of the game- first aid, prize inventory, guest relations, security, etc.

Honestly the whole thing is a bit precious, but as it continues to make me chuckle and answers the old dungeon "WHY?" question ("Because ratings!") then I'm running with it.

In any setting that has giant flying lizard has the apex predators and compulsively taking magical items and treasures for their hoard, building underground complex to hide into and store said magical items and treasures would seem like a good idea.

Not that dragons cannot enter said underground complex (at least if you want them to act as the final boss in some) but it still makes it harder for them to spot the place just by flying around.

Dragons are also unable to strafe in a dungeon, which removes one of the biggest impediments to killing them with a large number of tiny men.