For those of us who like dungeons, but not are not ready to assume they're there "just because," what are some logical justifications for the existences of dungeons? What should dungeons of any given type always or never have? How does one justify the individual features many dungeons have, such as traps, treasures, and monsters? What new features are necessary, but uncommon in dungeons, for the purpose of any justification.

Off the top of my head, dungeons may be...

Mines

Caverns

Tombs/Catacombs

Temples

Used for War

Planar

Stuff from my setting (Link is in my sig)-

Buried city.
City carved out of one piece of stone
Old transit (subway) network (post apocalyptic and/or Science Fantasy)
The inner working of a buried giant robot.

You can make a dungeon out of trenches and siege works on a battlefront.

Also, canyon networks, cracks in glaciers, buildings partially buried by volcanic eruption or mudslide.

I once had a planned dungeon that was going to be a recently abandoned monastery. It had been abandoned because a shift in a nearby river and falls system meant that in the upcoming rainy season, mudslides were going to submerge most of the building. The monks had left it, and the PCs needed to search the remains to find the location of a major NPC, but they'd arrived just as the first of the monsoons had come in. The campaign fell off before they got to it, unfortunately.

Abandoned cities. If you're running a sci-fantasy style game, it could include the subway system and underground path systems like we have in Toronto. In a mediaeval or ancient city, building can be built on top of other buildings, and over a long enough period of time, you could get parts of those complexes buried or covered over. (I see Aos beat me to the punch here. Damn you Aos!)

Underwater cave complexes.

Insect hives.

Body of a mummified giant (stolen from Exalted, admittedly).

Derelict ships as single units, or in multiple, fused together by seaweed or ice or something.

Quote from: Aos;310133Derelict ships as single units, or in multiple, fused together by seaweed or ice or something.

A ship graveyard, where rotting hulks have been gradually brought together by tides and currents and now float becalmed. I used one of these as the backdrop of a major combat in the first session of a campaign once after reading the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

- combat training

- gladitorial setup

- crashed spaceship

- unconscious (dreamland building)

- jails

I've posted this before, but:

In the same way that fish and other sea creatures move through a medium of water, we humans and other land creatures move through a medium of air. We derive our life mainly from the opposite element, earth: we grow crops, and live off those crops or animals who eat those crops.

So too do sea creatures derive their life ultimately from the opposite element of water, fire - by spontaneously generating due to the action of the sun, or by living off creatures who do.

Thus it is only logical that in a medium of earth, life should derive mainly from the opposite element, air. In other words, the creatures of the world under the surface are creatures of air - what we call caverns, caves, and so on.

Dungeons are rare and massive creatures of air - the equivalent of whales or elephants. Just as there may be hundreds of times more dogs than elephants, and hundreds of times more ants than dogs, so too we find air pockets and fissures more common than caves, and dungeons the rarest of all. Like all massive creatures dungeons are predators, taking the earth they require to live in the form of humans and other creatures.

However, they move far more slowly than ourselves, since they are a weak element (air) moving in a resistant one (earth), where we are the opposite. They are far too slow to catch creatures of earth, and can't pursue us into their natural element any more than a fisherman can dive into the deepest sea to catch a fish.

Thus, like a fisherman, they present lures to attract creatures of earth - the treasure and magic items which are to be found there.

Once we get there they may catch us by their own action: cave-ins for example. But, again, they find it as difficult to move the earth as we find it easy to move the air (for more on this, see part 2).

Ingeniously, they have developed an understanding with other creatures of earth. Much like a hunter who may tame a dog, and use it to catch wolves, keeping the loyalty of the dog by sharing the meat, so too dungeons have an understanding with the creatures who live there: help me kill the creatures who come, and you may take enough of them to live. And, like a dog kept safe in the house from those same wolves, so too monsters are safe in their dungeons from the humans who would otherwise hunt and destroy them.

However the partnership between dungeons and their monsters is even more intimate, more akin to that between bees and flowers. Monsters are the means by which dungeons reproduce. When a dungeon contains too many monsters for it to support, it disgorges some of them into the surface world, where they travel briefly (as briefly as they can, since they are vulnerable on the surface) until they can find a place to grow another dungeon.


2: why dungeons appear to make no sense.

In our world, anyone can labour, but only a few can use magic. Dungeons, being creatures of air rather than earth, are in the opposite situation. It would be a remarkable feat for a gust of air to move a boulder - but all dungeons are magical.

This explains many otherwise inexplicable features of dungeons. For example, that mutually hostile creatures can live next door to each other without one exterminating the other; that there can be a shop in the middle of a dungeon; that creatures with no need for treasure can still carry it - indeed that creatures without any means of carrying treasure can have it on them.

It finally explains the apparently illogical layout of dungeons. In fact, dungeons are generally laid out as magical runes, which spell out a series of relevant phrases in the language of the ancients: 'let orcs and fairies live peacefully next to each other', 'let wolves have gold pieces on them', 'let the traps re-set themselves' and so on.


(inspired by a thread on rpg.net)

From my last FtA! session: A half-sunken church, partially inhabited by a devil cult, partially by deep ones.
Inspiration for that came from the Vineta legends (and it's variants and an amusement park show on the same topic.

There are a couple of ideas I've always liked, and I'm taking inspiration somewhat from the 4th Editions 'Points of Light' meme which I like.

On one hand, you might have an abandoned city. If there were a huge war and it were sacked or used as a battleground before eventually being abandoned, that'd be a terrific dungeon. It'd explain a huge variety of monsters (settlers, riffraff, wandering monsters, remains of the citizenry, ect) dangerous architecture, traps (from new citizens and from when it was being fortified against attack), treasure (left over goods, attempted looting, 'hey, it's a city') and all kinds of cool stuff. Make the fight between a necromancer lord and whomever and -presto-, shambling zombies, vampires, skeletons left standing around without orders, shades, spooks, ghost and ghouls.

The other thing I was thinking of is that dungeons might be advance-fortresses for rival civilizations. If you want a heavily fortified area, you might build 'in' or 'down'. There are monsters because someone needs to guard it (or the position fell), there's traps because it needs to be defended, there's treasure because they need trade goods, they looted the countryside, or because it represented their wealth before the moved. It's fortified because it needed to be stable. Alternatively, it's used for war against an established city state and if you build down or in, that's easier to hide (if you can manage it) then a big honkin' tower five miles outside the city you hope to eventually sack.

I like abandon cities too; they are often harvested for resources, like building stone- this provides tow potetial dangers- building made unstable by the removal of structural components and the folks doing the harvesting.

I just finished watching a History channel documentary on the engineering and architecture behind a Roman gladitorial arena. The amount of stuff in and beneath that structure puts most module dungeon designs to shame.

There are entire neighborhoods under some European cities. One in france was profiled on Discovery last fall.

I'm told there's basically a Seattle 'underground' they give tours of, here. Just a bunch of buildings and streets that are buried. Dang if that wouldn't be a cool dungeon.

- Real historical underground cities - and proper cities, used for habitation, not mining or the like.

- Also, sewers. Think Paris or Moscow.

- Don't think anyone mentioned it so far: completely natural, expansive cave systems where people, monsters or something else have moved in without significant rebuilding. Great way to unleash evil cartography on the players, since natural caves don't restrict themselves to horizontal floors and discrete "levels".

someone's incomplete map of a real underground city
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybermacs/754612148/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybermacs/sets/72157600791602582/show/with/770599799/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/underground_city/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/articles/2005/11/22/underground_city_interactive_map_feature.shtml