A dungeon in Dungeons and Dragons is normally seen as a festering hole in the ground, like you’d end up with in classic games. Instead it really is anything where there is an entry point and a goal where you go in and get something or defeat some boss, or to get to a certain location that only the exit can lead you to. Then there are challenges along the way.

You can see how this looser definition makes it much more useful for your game. Your “dungeon” could be going through a section of the underdark in search for another entrance to a “dungeon” on the surface that then the players will still have to go through. So your dungeon could literally be leading to another dungeon and that works well.

Your dungeon could be the gauntlet of challenges at the end of a campaign that lead up to the big bad monster who your party has been going after the whole time. Or it could be two rooms leading up to that big bad, but it’s a point of entry. I think something even as simple as a foyer in a manor and then two paths leading to two waiting rooms and then a waiting room to the main hall where the big bad Emperor of the Frozen Realm sits works for a dungeon. You’ve given yourself a chance for some combat, you’ve possibly, if you want one direction to be better, added in a riddle or a puzzle for the players to figure out.

I’ve given some examples of what different dungeons are, but that only shows what some dungeons might be, but not why you’d want to use a dungeon.

A dungeon is nice for the DM, because it gives you a fairly straight forward session or sessions to plan. Your players are always going to do something that you wouldn’t expect, always, but in a dungeon, because you’ve already planned it a fair amount, it’s not going to be as difficult to deal with those random things. This means that you’ll have less on your plate to come up with things on the fly, and have planned encounters in more detail than you normally would have. It also means, that if you’re partly in and the session comes to the end, you already have some plans for the next session.

Also, because of the planning you can do ahead of time, this is something that you can tweak slightly and move to another game at a later time. There are plenty of monsters in the monster manual that you can reskin it to. If the first game is more classic fighting goblins, looting treasure, kicking down doors, you can create a dungeon to put them in to get to the big bad. Maybe, now you are running an elemental campaign. Now you can swap out the goblins with elemental creatures, raise the challenge level of your game and raise the difficulty of your traps and use the exact same dungeon set-up. Just with reflavoring how you describe things and what monsters are in the dungeon, you now have a very different dungeon.

Beyond making things easier on the DM, they also offer a chance for variety and world building in your world. If you need to drop bits of history to the players and don’t want to just run a session where they are in the library getting talked at by the librarian, a dungeon is a great way to go. Now they are going to kick out some goblins, or so they think, but it’s going to be a chance for you as the DM to sprinkle in some knowledge of the ancient world that will matter for the players later, while they are still getting to do something.

It also allows for making really unique pieces for the players to play through. And I don’t mean setting up some big map with minis that the players get to look at and ooh and ah over, unless you can do that (I can’t). But it allows you to create the mad wizards tower that the players have to fight their way up. It allows you to do a crazy underdark/Mind Flayer story or the maze of a Beholder. These places are going to be places that will be remembered by players and a chance for cool and crazy moments to happen that players will talk about for a long time afterwards. For me, creating those moments is something that I want to get better at, and a dungeon and planning on dungeon are a good way to do that.

Finally, I think it’s a good time to use dungeons as benchmarks in your story. So, if you’re a player, you might suspect this, but most DM’s don’t have the whole story planned out before they get started. We have a beginning, maybe, and an end, most likely. If nothing else, we have a concept for the game and an idea of who the big bad is for the game. But sometimes we have ideas where we know we want, around level five, this thing to happen to move the story forward, and at level ten, this other thing. Making those benchmark spots into dungeons really lets you move the story from one spot to the next arc of your story as it leads up to your big bad. And when you don’t think of a dungeon as a festering hole in the ground, now all of a sudden you have a lot more options.

So what do you think? Do you think that there are good reasons to use dungeons? Do dungeons feel too focused for you or too much like a railroad for you?

This wraps up the Welcome to the Dungeon! series. Let me know what you thought about the series as a whole?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

So how can you start to add that into your Dungeons and Dragons game?

I do think it’s fun to use because you get more variety in your dungeon when using them. I also think that they can be tricky to use, so I have a few “rules” or suggestions when using puzzles in your dungeons.

1. Don’t Make it Block the Story
Puzzles are a tricky thing to do right, and the biggest issue with doing them right is that sometimes the players and the player characters get stuck on them. A simple color puzzle might seem easy to you based on the hints you were dropping earlier, but the players might have missed it completely. Now they need to get through the puzzle to face the boss of the dungeon, but now you’ve just spent two hours of them getting frustrated and you getting frustrated because they can’t figure out the puzzle. Now, if it was a room that they knew had cool treasure in it, but it was off to the side in the dungeon, they might try and get bored and finish the dungeon, but you didn’t block the story.

2. Don’t Make it Have a Single Solution
This one I’m borrowing from Nerdarchy and other places, but a good puzzle isn’t going to have a single solution. If you have a single solution and they can’t get it, again you’ve blocked the story and enjoyment for everyone in the game, including you. More so, it’s possible that your players are going to come up with a creative solution to the problem that you didn’t think of, and it might be a better one than yours, so let them go through and make that work. Nerdarchy has talked about how one of them doesn’t always have a solution at all to their puzzle. They’ll just make the puzzle and wait until they hear a solution that they like. Now that might be extreme for what you would want to do, but be open to other solutions.

3. Have Clues/Rolls For the Puzzle
Seems fairly obvious, but if you have an idea of what you want, come up with ideas of how you can lead the players to an answer. Come up with things that the characters can roll to find clues. Are they going to be able to discern what the first color is in a color puzzle based off of a really good arcana roll? However, don’t just give the answer. If they are just going to be rolling to find out that the answer to the color puzzle is that you push the colors in the order of ROYGBIV, there’s no need for that puzzle. But if you describe it as the first button is cracked slightly and if you investigate it, you might be able to see inside it to figure out what order that color button should be pushed, you could start giving them clues. Or even if you didn’t want to do that, you could make it an obvious reference back to something that they saw in a previous room that was supposed to be a clue so they could start puzzling it out the way you expected.

4. Put a Timer on it
This one might seem less obvious, but if the players are taking a long time figuring it out, give them a break by sending a Goblin or other patrol around that makes sense for your dungeon. This should just be one or two guys, but maybe while someone else is working on a roll or trying to rewire the puzzle so they can make it through, the rest are fighting. But give those moments that make it feel like the dungeon is a living and breathing thing. But beyond that also put a timer on it in your head how long they can be stuck at this. If it takes too long, there’s nothing wrong with a goblin who has figured it out, or the big bad of the dungeon even, opening it up, and coming out and attacking the players and short cutting it. But this means you don’t burn a whole session or more with your players being stuck.

5. A Wrong Answer Should Bring them Closer to the Right Answer
Going back to the color puzzle to explain what it is, say the players start out by pushing the green button, there should be something, probably a D6 of electrical damage to tell them that it was wrong, but when they push the red button first it shouldn’t give them any damage. So even if they have to piece together the order and don’t figure it out because of your awesome clues, they are still going to be getting closer and they only have to the potential of getting smashed with 20d6 damage total if they are really unlucky. But again, it might help them get closer to the right solution faster.

6. The Wrong Answer Should Have a Cost
To tie in with the previous one, the wrong answer should have a cost, no matter how big or how small. If there is a right answer, like with the ROYGBIV one that the players need to figure out, there should be a cost. However, the trap shouldn’t have a major cost, the person who created the puzzle likely wouldn’t want to actually kill themselves if they got it wrong. So a D6 of damage for a lower level party, that is pretty big, for a higher level party, it’s still using up some lower level resources that they might have wanted to save for the big bad.

Now, you can see how a few of these things might be hard to do at the same time. Only having one right solution might be the case for the ROYGBIV color puzzle, but that one you should set-up really easily so that the players with a tiny bit of experimentation can figure it out. And I’d really lean into doing everything else if the players don’t get it quickly. Send in a goblin who is wearing a red shirt and do that until they get it really obviously in there head that red might be important.

But having a puzzle is really about having fun, and letting the players figure something out more than the player characters. This is one time where meta gaming and table talking about what you as players are thinking is important. It’s going to make for more of a fun time than everyone thinking quietly or the person who is playing the 4 intelligence barbarian just sitting there twiddling there thumbs and not helping because there character is dumb, even if they are very smart.

Sometimes you will build the puzzle for the characters, but in that case, they should be extremely simple and should be something that you know that player knows. Maybe it’s for the player who has the Sword of 1000 Smites (or some other made up magic item), and they have to make the decision if they want to find what they hope is a better treasure or something about their long lost family member who went missing when they were ten, but lose the sword by sacrificing it. That’s less of a puzzle, though could be a worded as a puzzle, but the real game part there is for the player to decide what to do as their character versus figure out some riddle.

Have you used puzzles in your games? Have you ever made one that your players got stuck on?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

So instead you have to plan out your dungeon to make sense. Though, there is an easy way to make an old school dungeon, and that’s with four simple words: “A wizard did it.”. That will get you out of jail free when your dungeon doesn’t make sense. But that only works in some situations. A lot of the time you’re going to be building a dungeon for a specific reason. Maybe it’s an old abandoned temple that is hidden away in the jungle. Having ice monsters in there isn’t going to make sense. You’re going to want to have something like Yuan-ti in there, and they can be bossing around another race. Or maybe it’s in a volcano, well, then fire elementals are probably going to play a big roll in the dungeon.

But it could be boring to just have one type of monster in the dungeon, and I agree with that. If I was playing in a dungeon, I wouldn’t want to run into a fire elemental in one room, then two in the next room, and one after that, then an empty room, and so on and so forth until I reached my goal.

Instead, start by thinking about if there is a big bad in your dungeon? Is there a boss monster that your players are going to have to fight? If there is, who is that guy, is it a demon? Is it a Mind Flayer? Is it a mad wizard? All of those are going to have a different group of monsters working for them. You might, for example, run into lesser demons or even weaker creatures like goblins that the demon has conscripted to guard the upper levels. Then maybe the further in you go, you run across a demon who is in charge of the goblins and imps who is a mid point battle. From there on, you face a mixture of demons of various powers and a few goblins thrown in until you finally face the big boss demon at the end of the dungeon who is most likely doing some evil plot when you get there so you have to stop them from being able to do it.

Another example with the mind flayer, you’d be looking at Underdark creatures, such as Duegar and Drow who would be being controlled by the mind flayer. You might even run into a band of Githyanki or Githzerai who might want to stop the mind flayer as well, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be an encounter, just might not be combat. Eventually you’ll probably have a situation where you have to sneak around a bunch of mind flayers to get to the elder brain or the main mind flayer leading the charge to disband the other group. But since this is the underdark, which is almost a dungeon onto itself, you can also use natural monsters down there. Various oozes and slimes might be clinging to the wall. A cloaker might be off in the shadows waiting for the next unsuspecting drow or adventuring party to come by.

You can start to see how you can build out a dungeon that really has a theme and feel to it. In fact, that’s one good way to start with a mad wizard dungeon, what sort of theme would they have put in it. Maybe they have it elemental themed and each floor has a different type of elemental in it and the traps are built so that they aren’t an issue to the elemental type on that floor.

But there are also some dungeons that don’t have a big boss in them, or if they do, it isn’t because someone has set this up. The examples above, all of them are probably something that’s been tailored to the group in them. But what happens in the example of the abandoned temple? There isn’t some big bad Yuan-ti in there who set this up to be great for snake people? It was most likely a human or Elven temple from a long time ago. So you have to start to think about how they are going to be using the place. Maybe they’ve only cleared the first few levels of the dungeons because the traps later on are just too nasty. So you’re going to have to deal with them early, but eventually the dungeon will be “safer” or less monster filled, until maybe you get past those really bad traps.

In the example above, it’s possible that the ecology even changes part way through. Maybe the original owners of the temple left some construct monsters further down. Or maybe something is also coming up from the bottom (or down from the top) of the dungeon. Or maybe instead of constructs, there are a group of Drow who are using it for some dark ritual, but it’s easier for you to get to them by going down through the temple, through the Yuan-ti, through the traps, as compared to searching the underdark with it’s dangers and maybe finding what you’re looking for in time.

Hopefully it’s starting to make sense how you can use a dungeon in your game and have it be a part of a bigger story of the world and of your game. By having a more tightly built dungeon you don’t have to have it be a random wizard, but you can tailor it specifically to the spot in your world that you want the dungeon to be and build it to a specific theme, monster, or boss, whatever your game needs.

Have you made a dungeon with a really cool theme or some really cool monsters? Tell us about them in the comments below.

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Follow us on Twitter at @NerdologistCast
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.