Original ideas for Dungeon origins


Advice


Short and sweet: I'm looking for ideas that are original or creative for the origin of an underground dungeon I want to run my players through.


No ideas?


A dungeon I'm working on; I don't know how original it is, is the following.
Its under a very old city. The city has burned, been destroyed by earthquakes conquest etc. many times. Each time the residents simply build a new city on top of the old. When the humans move out of the ruins, other things move in. Upper layers could contain vermin such as rats, goblins, cultists or maybe the thieves guild hq. Could be there that lower down are undead from a previous disaster or war.

One early iteration of the city down near the bottom of the heap contained powerful wizards, a technically advanced civilization or some such thing. When the city was razed to get rid of them, some survived beneath the rubble (or didn't stay dead). As layer after layer of new city is built on top, they are still there waiting for someone to open a way to their haunts.

The upshot of the thing is that there is a prosperous city on top of a huge mound of layers of ruins. Every now and again undesirable things come crawling up from below so an expedition has to be sent down below to take care of it.

Morag

Sovereign Court

There are many ideas, we can toss random stuffs out there, the first thing you should ask yourself is what is the dungeon for?

-Imprison a powerful being? It's a fairly common dungeon trope.

-Guarding treasures and/or challenging adventurers? Some people just do it for fun, usually crazy old wizard but very typical.

-A dungeon created by conflagration of various planes? Maybe the shadow and plane of fire converged at one point and now the creatures of fire and shadow are forging all kind of items with these special forges.

-A Lair: Dragon's Lair, Lich's castle/dungeon, Aboleth underwater secret lab, Vampire's Castle etc...

-A Mine? Maybe some dwarves or any other races were digging and ended up unleashing something that they didn't expect.


Something I thought of a long time ago.

In a forgetton age a powerful group of mages were bored. So they started to gamble. Soon the gambling got bigger and bigger then they hit on the mother of all ideas. A group of slave would be found and they would run them through a dungeon and bet on the outcomes.

Soon Mages all across the kingdom(s) were betting and it was one of the biggest of entertainment ever. Of course this mage kingdom fell to dust and history BUT the dungeon is till active. Finding new "slaves" to run throw the Dungeon.

It starts with the mother of all storms. The kind of stormy weather that heralds the end of time. The PCs are find the only refuge from this storm is a cave. Once they are safe from the storm they fall asleep and wake up trap in the dungeon.


I like the city and the mine ideas. I even like the betting mages, although that wouldn't work in our low magic campaign world.

Now that I think about, I like the idea of something imprisoned. But I would still want to think of something creative and different.

As for what I had planned, I hadn't had anything planned. My players went off in a very different direction than I expected last week, making me improvise. I made it till the end of the session without having to commit much to the dungeon area. But I'll need something by tonight

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