Layout of the dungeon matters and that invovles a wee bit of metadungeoning:

- What has this dungeon been dug under?
- Who dug it out and for what purpose?

From there you can decide that some crazy wizard dug under a mountain to hide and perform experiments so it's twisty and random with rooms of all sizes holding a nutty variety of monsters.

or

A Robber Baron completed an expansion under his castle to hid his ill-gotten loot, just before a dangerous plague wiped them out so there are orderly and discrete hallways/rooms complete with trick traps, statue golems, and secret doors to protect the really good stuff. And the plague? Still under there, waiting.

Quote from: JamesVLayout of the dungeon matters and that invovles a wee bit of metadungeoning:

- What has this dungeon been dug under?
- Who dug it out and for what purpose?

Actually, that is similar to a process of reverse-engineering a dungeon that a friend and I are doing.  

Inspired by the recent Post a Cool Gaming Map thread, we are taking a dungeon map from Wizards' Map-a-Week page and writing an adventure around it, trying to figure out what it's purpose is.  For example, we are thinking about using one called the "Dark Crypt", which has this weird chamber in the middle with a table and chairs.  It instantly looked like a meeting room to me...but who the hell has meetings in a dungeon hidden behind a mausoleum?  Necromancers?  Political subversives?  Poetry reading clubs?  Figuring out that backstory is part of the fun and will hopefully allow us to create a consistent adventure.


TGA

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!You know, I can just never draw a dungeon map that satisfies me.  Should rooms be strung along hallways like beads on a string, or should they be clumped together and connected by corridors?  Should the layout have a circular flow?  Linear?  Trident?

Say this to yourself three times: There's no wrong way to design a dungeon floorplan.



Done?  Good.  Now I will tell you the right way to design a dungeon floorplan.  It's all about flow, about limiting or allowing access, about traffic patterns.  How many routes are there to and from each level or each section fo the dungeon?  How easy is it for the dragon to escape, should it desire to flee the party?  There are no right or wrong answers to these sorts of questions and I do more than half my maps intuitively, but these are the big considerations.

For example, look at this map:


To the untrained eye it is a random jumble of rooms.  But look at the flow.  Those 3 big corridors (one north to south and two east-west) dictate the flow of the dungeon, in effect divvying up the level into six distinct sub-sections.  And look at room 51, near the top of the page.  It's a straight shot down the main north-south corridor.  I suggest that this level is ALL ABOUT room 51.  It looks easy to get there from the start of the level.  The contents of that room should be the first thing considered when stocking this map.

These things, Jeff, are the ones I never seem capable of thinking up.  Thanks for pointing them out.

Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with letting the dice dictate most of the layout.  One of my alltime best dungeons, which got a LOT of play, was mostly generated using the appendix in the back of the first edition DMG.

Ruins of Undermountain It was the first campaign I attempted to  run.
It had huge maps. Just HUGE. While there were room descriptions for a
few rooms, most of the map was left blank for the DM to fill in on their own.

If you can get your hands on a copy, physical or pdf,  there's good stuff in there
about filling a dungeon crawl. You can get the pdf from DriveThruRPG for $5.
(I'd get the boxed set if I could though)

Throw in a cabal of necromancers/warlocks/summoners who may or may not be
working with the cult of the Mad god/tentacled horror from beyond/cow god/ect

Throw in a few groups of the old standards that control certain areas. Orcs hold
this area, gnolls hold that. Write down a few simple view that the groups have
on each other. .e.g. 'The orcs hate the gnolls and would team up with the pcs
to wipe them out, may betray them if not given enough of the loot.'

Or even 'Both gnolls and orcs are beholden to the small group of ogres. Neither
will attack the other as long as the ogres remain in power.'

Throw in some low powered, single shot magic items for fun. I remember from
a Dragon article magic phials that started out empty, but had 3 command
words. They worked once and filled the  phials with either holy water, oil, or
acid. These could then be easily thrown at adversarys , as they shattered on
impact. Found in groups of 3-12.

Let us know how it goes and I'm sure we can help fine tune it with you.

That's quite a few suggestions and a lot of good help there, haha!  I'll have to get started applying some of this.

You know, I've always wanted to run a game in a world like Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, or Exile/Avernum.  That is, an entire cave-system as the environment.  It's like a nation-sized dungeon, with cities built in it, and sub-dungeons scattered about.  Fun stuff!

Hmmm... with Wild Talent's rules for magic and foci for magic items... I could use that to run a good dungeon crawl I think.

Quote from: CodexArcanumThat's quite a few suggestions and a lot of good help there, haha!  I'll have to get started applying some of this.

You know, I've always wanted to run a game in a world like Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, or Exile/Avernum.  That is, an entire cave-system as the environment.  It's like a nation-sized dungeon, with cities built in it, and sub-dungeons scattered about.  Fun stuff!

I don't know Ultima, Arx, etc... but I've run that 8 years ago! It was a lot of fun but not all players liked it. I eventually split the players into two groups and ran two campaigns, one taking place exclusively in this "underworld". Some players just find the visuals depressing while others love it.

Like most worlds that have a heavy focus (ice world, desert world etc...) it's likely some people won't like it. I suggest talking to your players about it.

Personally, I found it was a kickass experience but kind of a once-in-a-lifetime deal. All those who lasted the entire 14 months said they loved it (me included as the DM) but none would do it again. I regret some of the elements/adventures I created and would do it differently today but none of us want to go through that again. So my advice is to prepare well for it or if it doesn't work, to scrap it early and start anew.

Don't forget traps. I've been designing a dungeoncrawl for some PCs that takes place in the cone of dead volcano that's inhabited by machine-worker monks, so I've been doing a lot of thinking about traps.

When designing a trap, the best traps tend to involve traps-within-traps. You don't just want a poison needle to shoot out of the lock when the PCs try and open the door.

One particularly nasty thing to do is leave an obvious looking exit that the PCs dash for without taking care. The obvious exit is itself trapped, of course. The walls start to close in, they dash for the door and fling it open, only to find have a needle coated in paralytic poison shoot out of the handle. Or maybe they need to jump a pit, only to have blades swing out as soon as you hit the other side, slicing the PCs up and knocking them back into the pit.

Take simple ideas - pits, crushing things, cutting things, burning things, things that hold you still, debuffs, and monsters, and combine them to create really nefarious traps. You want to push characters to act as quickly as possible, then catch them being careless.

Quote from: Dr Rotwang!These things, Jeff, are the ones I never seem capable of thinking up.  Thanks for pointing them out.

I'm learning this business myself, but some stuff I've observed that you might find informational:

Think about flow: As the robo-wizard said, traffic flow is important.  Think also about how the PCs will approach the dungeon.  About the worst way to do a dungeon is one that's entirely linear.  You don't want a straight line through with connected side-rooms like your "beads on a string" analogy, because that gives PCs very little choice or ability to explore.  And exploration is what site-based (dungeon-crawling) games are all about.  Instead, think in these two terms:

Branching
Branching dungeons have multiple "corridoors" that go off in entirely different directions, which neatly segment the dungeon as shown in the Vampire Queen's Palace above.  PCs get to choose where to go first, what sections to explore at what time.  This is nice, and usually easy to design for as it naturally lends itself to the "themed areas" bit, where you have undead controlling one area and the goblin kingdom in another.

Circular
In circular dungeons, there's a single corridoor that loops back on itself.  There's no real beginning or end, and every area of the dungeon is accessable from that single loop.  It's somewhat similar to a linear dungeon, but it gives PCs a choice of left or right, and "feels" much more complicated and open-ended in play.

I'd combine the two, personally where possible.  Pick one of the two to use as your main floorplan and then add the other to sections.  So you'd either have a circular path with branches leading off of it, or you'd have branching corridoors, some of which are circular loops.

Choke Points: Traditionally, a choke point is the stairs or pathway into the next level of the dungeon.  Choke points are places in the site that the PCs must pass through to further the plot or finish the quest.  As such, whenever you need them to do something (confront the Liche King, discover the Cursed Statue of Eva Gardner, whatever) you should put it at a choke point.
The more choke points, the more linear and railroady your adventure is going to seem.  The fewer of them, the more open and free-wheeling it'll be.

Secret and Superfluous Shit: Exploration is key in a dungeon, so put in lots of secret shit for players to find.  Make sure that most of it is completely unnecessary for your adventure's purpose.  Even if it's just a hidden room with lots of musty books or the lizard queen's private scrying chamber, the PCs will feel all sorts of awesome when the panel slides open and they get to discover something new.  It's even better if there's hidden treasures or encounters in these side areas.  I'm working on a dungeon for my next session and there's a side area that requires a three-step quest and a puzzle to be overcome just to get into it.
The downside of course is that it's a lot of prepwork.  The upside is that if they never find that shit, you can sometimes just transplant it into your next dungeon.  

Room Purpose: A room can be anything, from a chamber, to a 20' x 20' dungeon space to an open-air cathedral.  Think about room purposes and make sure you have enough to cover any inhabitants' needs.  Or if you don't, what effect that'll have on the denizens (overcrowding and such is always great for causing interesting encounters).  I think the DMG has a decent list of dungeon room types that boils down into Lairs, Guard Areas, Living Space, and Storage or the like.  You can add all sorts of esoterica to that, of course. And rooms change purpose over time.  In some situations they might have no purpose at all (empty cavern chambers, for instance).

Quote from: RedFoxThe downside of course is that it's a lot of prepwork.  The upside is that if they never find that shit, you can sometimes just transplant it into your next dungeon.  

So. Fucking. True. :cool:

If you need a rationale for your dungeon crawl the concept of a "tell" is a nice real world one. The term is Middle Eastern but I'm pretty sure it's not limited to just there.

Think Troy. Multiple layers of habitation on top of each other, the current dwellers usually razing most of the layer before and building on top of what's cleared away. Some sites are never razed, some still used, and in a fantasy world some dwellers remain while others take over the old layers from beneath.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell

Tekumel's dungeons are mostly due to this, most cities raze and/or relocate every couple of hundred years. Sacred sites are still sacred, caches become hidden or forgotten, and so forth. Add in ye olde Apocalypse, barbarian invasion, monster reclamation drive, the rise and fall of empires...