Quote from: Dumarest;970260King Kong + piracy + jungles + lost tribes = SOLD!

Although I'd rather use Daredevils or Justice Inc. and probably set it in the 1890s or 1930s...

Heh... I hope you like it after all. But if you are prepared to tweak it a bit then it can really shine as an adventure. And would very much work in the 1890s or 1930. What system are you thinking of using?

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;970273There seems to be the standard assumption here, that most dungeons don't make sense, while I find the opposite to be true. Most of them have a good reason to exist around which the adventure usually revolves.
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Hmm... I don't know.  Most of the dungeon modules and adventures that I have stretch reality pretty hard or don't bother to explain why there is dungeon there in the first place.  I recently bought Stonehell for example, and though the author goes to great length to explain the ginormous excavation, it's a pretty darn flimsy excuse for a campaign.  It's more like "suspend your disbelief like this."  

You know, it would be interesting to list classic modules and rate them on the plausibility of their dungeons.

I pretty much agree with Brady as well.  And if we look at the real world the places suitable for a "dungeon" are pretty darn sparse.  In North America there are 3 or 4 cave complexes and some mines, mostly dug with industrial machinery. There are tombs throughout the world, but they're small - even the pyramids only have a few rooms.  There are sewers, and there were in the ancient world, but these are rarely the subject of dungeon crawls. There are ancient cities built atop older cities, but even these are rarely interconnected and/or sprawling.  There are some true dungeons beneath castles, but these are are exceptions rather than the norm.  In D&D, it seems every castle or tower has dungeon.

I kinda like dungeons and the phantasmagorical otherness of leaving the world of light and the living, but I find them much more compelling if they are small, rare, and plausible.

Of course, they don't have to make sense in real world terms.  It is fantasy after all, but it is a good starting point.

QuoteThen again, "making sense" is quite elastic

...ain't that the truth.

Quote from: daniel_ream;970295I can't speak for anyone else, but I find actual ancient temples, catacombs, ruined walled settlements and abandoned border forts a lot more interesting than the usual artificial dungeon maps.

Yes, that's what I much prefer. Structures that had a reason for existing. But I also don't play fantasy that much and when I do, magic is relatively uncommon, so "a mad wizard did it because he was MAAAAD!" doesn't interest me much.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;970261I think I just found my next Savage Worlds game...

Thank you, Exploited and Dumarest.

Indeed, I'm thinking about working up something now based on just Exploited's description without actually acquiring the module. I've got Daredevils, Justice Inc., and the Indiana Jones RPG...anyone actually play "Hollow Earth Expedition"? The character templates I saw kind of turned me off as being "pulp types by people who never actually read pulps but based their ideas on modern interpretations of pulps," but I don't know much about the actual game and its usefulness in creating a game in the mode of The Hollow Earth, The Lost World, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and things like that which were not really pulps at all.

Quote from: The Exploited.;970315That's a great supplement and dead easy to convert to another fantasy system.

How about for non-fantasy? I'm thinking more along the lines of Professor Challenger and The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...

Quote from: Madprofessor;970326if we look at the real world the places suitable for a "dungeon" are pretty darn sparse.  In North America there are 3 or 4 cave complexes and some mines, mostly dug with industrial machinery. There are tombs throughout the world, but they're small - even the pyramids only have a few rooms.  There are sewers, and there were in the ancient world, but these are rarely the subject of dungeon crawls. There are ancient cities built atop older cities, but even these are rarely interconnected and/or sprawling.  There are some true dungeons beneath castles, but these are are exceptions rather than the norm.  In D&D, it seems every castle or tower has dungeon.

And castles-as-dungeons never work the same in games as they would in real life. The real world is inconvenient to lots of different needs. I recently re-watched Princess Bride, and the two Wizards of the Lost Kingdom movies (as reframed by MST3K) and was thinking, "castles in 1980s movies must have been about 40 feet wide (with literally no sight lines to the outside world for the heroes to sneak up to them), yet a raucous sword fight one room away cannot be heard." So it's not just TTRPGs.

Dungeon crawls are convenient to a certain type of gaming in that they constrain the boundaries of action (you can't go north or west, because you are in the northwest corner of the dungeon... unless there's a secret door). In the real world, you rarely have to do that, because people rarely need to be constrained--they are going to go where the relevant action is. If the real-world dungeon is instead a hill-fort* or hedge-maze or city bizarre, that's fine, because anyone who goes outside the constraints of the area are likely irrelevant. To a DM, however, they aren't because you know some PC is going to dash off to random place and then they have to figure out what happens.

*I was thinking about this recently. A hill fort is a difficult landscape to model in most games. The difference in elevation, plus the challenge of hoisting oneself up 3-4 feet while being attacked, makes them really defensively beneficial. But in game terms it would often boil down to "oh, they have a +1 on their attacks against me, and I halve my move going up" or something.

I have no idea where I'm going with this. My groups took many breaks from dungeon crawling, but also keep coming back. We're very much in the "what's old is new, and gotten old again, and will be new again in 2-3 years" category.

Quote from: Dumarest;970344How about for non-fantasy? I'm thinking more along the lines of Professor Challenger and The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...

Absolutely... Especially, if the Pirates are trapped there too (there on a small Island beside it I think). So you'll have an interesting mix of players vs some old-time Pirates. I forgot to mention that there's also dinosaurs on the island too. So it's pretty much perfect for a pulp lost world game.

And anything that is fantasy (there's very little if I remember correctly) you can easily adapt it to a more modern setting.

Quote from: The Exploited.;970346Absolutely... Especially, if the Pirates are trapped there too (there on a small Island beside it I think). So you'll have an interesting mix of players vs some old-time Pirates. I forgot to mention that there's also dinosaurs on the island too. So it's pretty much perfect for a pulp lost world game.

And anything that is fantasy (there's very little if I remember correctly) you can easily adapt it to a more modern setting.

Yeah, that would be an awesome game. Fight the pirates? Team up with the pirates? Fight the lost tribes? Team up with a lost tribe? Fight the pirates and the lost tribes? Ride a dinosaur? Eat a dinosaur? Trick the pirates into being dinosaur food? Romance the hot native girl? Discover the lost temple and its treasures? So many possibilities.

Quote from: Dumarest;970355Yeah, that would be an awesome game. Fight the pirates? Team up with the pirates? Fight the lost tribes? Team up with a lost tribe? Fight the pirates and the lost tribes? Ride a dinosaur? Eat a dinosaur? Trick the pirates into being dinosaur food? Romance the hot native girl? Discover the lost temple and its treasures? So many possibilities.

Team up with the dinosaur.

Quote from: The Exploited.;970077I've been playing/GMing D&D since the Red Box in the 80's. We played it, and the expert set to death. I had many a fun summer bashing the shit out of monsters, leveling up and crawling through dungeons.

Ever since I started playing WFRP 1st edition though (and after the Isle of Dread to be fair). I never really wanted to go back to the traditional Dungeon Bash per se, or super high-powered games. Most of my games generally focus on urban or wilderness areas (with a load of CoC influence in there as well).



I'm interested in other people's thoughts on the subject. Do you still go through the basic dungeon bash? Or have you changed your style over the years?

Ta',

Rob.

I probably don't count as "old school gamer" where you are (though I'm among the first people in my country to get introduced to RPGs). Still, that's more or less how I feel, too:).
Though in my case, I started out feeling that way, and have lately grown more accepting to dungeons (probably because if you move beyond total refusal to engage, you can only move in the other direction;)).

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;970385Team up with the dinosaur.

:eek:

I like it.

Quote from: Dumarest;970389:eek:

I like it.

My group came back from Monkey Isle riding a troupe of brachycephalosauri... :cool:

I just finished Princes of the Apocalypse as a player, and it left me more than a little burnt out on dungeons. Combat after combat after combat just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Dungeons have a lot of attractive qualities for a game like D&D. They channel exploration. Provide for a high density of encounters in interesting locations. But D&D is best when there's around equal table-time given to the three pillars of the game: exploration, roleplaying, and combat. And very few dungeons manage to effectively present all three. There's rarely any reward for exploration - just a string of encounters that are presented one after the other. The settings are often mundane and lack colour. Opportunities for roleplaying with dungeon denizens, factions, rival NPCs, etc. are usually absent. And the combats often fail to make imaginative use of the dungeon environment.

In my experience, most dungeons become a tedious grind. You need both strong source material and a DM adept at running them to bring out the best qualities of dungeons, and that's not common.

Quote from: The Exploited.;970314Wow! Thanks... I would have never thought of that one.

Yeah, not nearly enough people think of fetching me a beer.

Quote from: Haffrung;970673I just finished Princes of the Apocalypse as a player, and it left me more than a little burnt out on dungeons. Combat after combat after combat just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Dungeons have a lot of attractive qualities for a game like D&D. They channel exploration. Provide for a high density of encounters in interesting locations. But D&D is best when there's around equal table-time given to the three pillars of the game: exploration, roleplaying, and combat. And very few dungeons manage to effectively present all three. There's rarely any reward for exploration - just a string of encounters that are presented one after the other. The settings are often mundane and lack colour. Opportunities for roleplaying with dungeon denizens, factions, rival NPCs, etc. are usually absent. And the combats often fail to make imaginative use of the dungeon environment.

In my experience, most dungeons become a tedious grind. You need both strong source material and a DM adept at running them to bring out the best qualities of dungeons, and that's not common.

Damn, I'm sorry you've had such a series of shitty referees with shitty dungeons.

For us dungeons were always where you got the weird, the wild, and the whacky.  Exploration was key; secret doors were there to hide treasures and whole sections of the dungeon from the lazy and the dullard.  NPCs would often be much higher level, so you had BETTER negotiate.  And woe to the players who don't watch behind them.