Our group has been batting around the idea of maybe, finally, just for something different--to do a dungeon crawl. Map. Little figures. The works.
In the realm of dungeon adventuring I am a complete newbie. I've never run one, never played in a good one, and don't really know where to start. I've done lots of dungeonmastering mind you--just not any of the old school kind.
So as I start the process of making a dungeon for my players to explore I would like to pick your brains as to what makes a dungeon crawl a memorable, great dungeon crawl...and also what things to avoid either because they're cliche or because you just don't like them for one reason or another.
I'd really appreciate your guys' feedback!
Our group has been batting around the idea of maybe, finally, just for something different--to do a dungeon crawl. Map. Little figures. The works.
In the realm of dungeon adventuring I am a complete newbie. I've never run one, never played in a good one, and don't really know where to start. I've done lots of dungeonmastering mind you--just not any of the old school kind.
So as I start the process of making a dungeon for my players to explore I would like to pick your brains as to what makes a dungeon crawl a memorable, great dungeon crawl...and also what things to avoid either because they're cliche or because you just don't like them for one reason or another.
I'd really appreciate your guys' feedback!
One place to look at is montecook.com. There is a recent article on the features of real caves that is, though short, full of good information and advice.
As far as what is cliche, anything can be, depending on who you ask. I've been in many adventures recently where hords and hords of orcs and home brew daemons assaulted us, so anything green or abysal is cliched to me, where someone who might have just fineshed off the Age of Worms adventure path would be chomping at the bit to fight a group of orcs rather than more undead. Things I would recomend using, as I don't see them often in published adventures or hear about when people talk about their own works, are natural animals. Badgers, snakes, and bears all live in caves. Vermin are a good choice too, though they might be a little over used. Basic humanoids are always a good choice. Make a particular section of maze like dungeon/cavern the lair of a group of bandits, or deep gnome merchants not too keen on the idea of adventurers snooping arround their camp sight. This might seem obvious, but remember that caves are DARK. Not just walking arround your town at night dark, but pitch bloody black. As in unless you have darkvision your hosed. They play tricks with sound aswell. Echoes can be very disorienting, and comonplace sounds like a boot steping on rock can sound very VERY different when your hundreds of feet underground cowering in a damp dark cavern complex. I've never seen actual stats on claustrophobia, but playing arround underground in tight places can and will screw with your head. Panic attacks can happen to the most stable/with it person when their inching their way through a space bearly big enough for their shoulders and they get hung up on something. Small creatures are a PAIN in the rump to deal with when your in tight confining caves. A few kobolds with reach weapons can be devistating to a party when they find themselves stuck in a bottleneck cave.
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Make a monster. Something scary and stealthy and powerful (Think monsters from Pitch Dark/Vin Diesel mixed with Alien). A "mother" and her lesser powered children stalking the party for a few days through a cavern complex/nest, slowly picking apart and ambushing the party. Give the monsters a burrow speed and the ambushes could come from anywhere and could be traps like dugout pits with a few inches of hard-packed earth concealing it or the creatures drop the ceiling on the characters then burrow out to assault them. I suggest watching Pitch Black and the Alien movies for a general feel of how the game should feel. Play with the lights off. Give the creatures 1 weakness to exploit (vulnerability to cold, sonic, or acid) and allow the characters to find the means to exploit that weakness (old cache of weapons and gear left by the last explorers trying to get to the whatever that has a limited amount of whatever is useful against the creatures like Thunderstones or vials of Flashfrost (like alc.fire but cold damage)). Instead of slaying tons of creatures leave the number finite so as they slay the creatures they have less encounters and can build up more tension as they move towards the Mother creature. If you change up some fundamental things then you can avoid too much cliche'. If you have ever run something like this then scrap this whole idea.
FH
and also what things to avoid either because they're cliche or because you just don't like them for one reason or another.
Surely, if you're going for an old-skool dungeon crawl, avoiding things because they're cliche is rather defeating the point? :-)
So as I start the process of making a dungeon for my players to explore I would like to pick your brains as to what makes a dungeon crawl a memorable, great dungeon crawl...
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently. I think, perhaps, some of the following:
1) Not everything in the dungeon needs to make obvious sense. There should be reasons for everything, but sometimes those reasons don't have to be apparent to the PCs - so, that magical foutain they've just found seems to just 'be there' (sense of wonder). The PCs have no way of knowing, but it was actually hidden there by the Goddess of Fate in her ancient struggle against the God of Luck in an age past, because it was being used to empower his fate-breaking heroes excessively.
2) Traps, puzzles, and 'gotchas'. An old-style dungeon crawl should challenge the PCs, that much is obvious. But a really good one needs to challenge the players, too. Of course, doing so in a manner that makes sense, and doesn't have them walking out in frustration, or accusing you of being unfair... that's the real trick.
3) Lethality. Normally, you would want your PCs to have a better than even chance of surviving an adventure, and a good chance of success. Not so in a dungeon crawl. For it to be memorable, you want it to be lethal. But make the deaths... inventive. (Oh, and don't make them certain death, since that just sucks. But if death is near-certain, and the players sweat over every round of combat, they'll talk about it for years to come.)
You should check out the Castle Maure adventures in dungeon, that is what dungeon crawls are all about!
Hearing Gary Gygax, Rob Kuntz and other 1st Edition dungeon crawl creators/fans talk about the genre, the major idea is to reward caution and creative thinking, but punish impulsiveness and greed. For example, you may have a whole pile of treasure lying right before a tremendous statue. If the character just rushes in and starts grabbing stuff, he should perhaps trip a flagstone trap and be crushed by the giant fist of the vengeful guardian. But if the characters are smart enough to look at the statue throughly first, maybe read a small, hidden inscription, there may be a clue as to what would have happened if they had just rushed in and it may tell them that there is a way around such a disaster (like a switch, or special method of deactivating the trap).
Of course, animating statues are also a big cliche. But that's okay, as long as it's a trap and not a golem.
If you can, track down a copy of Dragon #303 (it has a minotaur gladiator on the cover). There is a good article on underdark survival in it that includes a bunch of different hazards (fungis, slimes, etc.)Used sparingly, these are great things to throw in a dungeon crawl as a diversion and really help bring it to life.
Taking Delericho's third point a step or two further, one idea might be to make the point of the game lethality. Depending on the temperment of your group, as well as how long you plan on running this dungeon crawl, you might set up the dungeon to inevitable kill the party. Yes, this sounds like a horrible idea, and probably not what your looking for at all, but hear me out.
Explain the idea beforehand to your players, and guage their reaction. Tell them "For this campaign I want to do something a little different. Your characters are going to go through a dungeon, but the objective isn't to see how much loot and exp you can walk out with. The objective is to see how far into the complex you make it before you die, and yes, you WILL die." Make things seem more like a board game than a traditional D&D adventure and you might get them to go for it. Things I would suggest are premade characters, as in my experience people are a lot more ok with loosing a character when they haven't spent an hour or two going through the creation process. Also use a lot of weird and screwing monsters your party doesn't see much if ever. Just an idea anyways.
For FakeHealer's idea I would suggest the weird Alienish monsters out of the Book of Vile Darkness if you have access to it. Their called kyton or kython, or something like that. The name is very close to the chain daemon out of the monster manual.
As a DM, it's pretty easy to come up with anything for a dungeon that's fun enough to DM, but from a players perspective I'd say the bits that make it most fun are:
1) interesting situations, e.g. a combination of terain and monsters (archers picking the party off as they try to negotiate a choke-point like a bridge or chasm; a lake with only a few ledges around and a black dragon in the water; etc), interesting traps, etc.
2) a point - simply adventuring to see what's in the dungeon gets pretty boring for a lot of players, especially after the first session ("why are we here again?")
For example, the group I play in just finished Forge of Fury, which was a well designed dungeon crawl, with lots of item #1, but unfortunately only one PC had any real motivation to be there (to find an ancient dwarven clan), and pretty early on it was obvious they were not here anymore so for my character it was a pretty pointless dungeon crawl especially when it was kill orcs on sight not even try and talk to them. So between us as players, and the DM, we failed on item #2.
Aside from the great feedback thus far, the dungeon crawls I remember best also had the most interesting and unique chambers. I can still see them fresh in my imagination, thirty years later. Passages leading to chambers leading to passages got so old so quickly, but it all facilitated a flowchart leading from monster A to monster Z, providing a controlled pathway. There were always locked doors for the thief and one exit rooms in which the party could rest after spiking the doors shut.
But sometimes the rooms were so well described, so unique, so out there, that the architecture or feel of the place roots itself down permanently in memory.
Whether it's the Tomb Of Horros, the step pyramid of Zargon's temple, that multi tiered room in White Plume mountain, chess table rooms filled with statuary, underground topiaries (Zork 2 anyone?)... I could go on.
For example, the group I play in just finished Forge of Fury, which was a well designed dungeon crawl, with lots of item #1, but unfortunately only one PC had any real motivation to be there
My group had exactly the same problem with that adventure. Sadly, they decided to abandon the place about three rooms before encountering the beastie on the cover.
Pacing is real important in running a memorable dungeon crawl. When I designed dungeons to use in my games, I rarely designed every room or passage. I created 10-15 key encounter areas and detailed them out, had plenty of data on who lived there and why, and I had the motivations and goals of the various factions in the dungeon plotted out.
I then basically "created" the dungeon on the fly. I knew what the key things were that I wanted the players to run into and if they weren't having fun exploring the dungeon and slaying the minons, then I speeded up the timeline to get them to the meat of the dungeon more rapidly.
I used a lot of background material to help me detail the areas I hadn't fully developed. I would describe the rooms based on the purpose they had in the dungeon's former or current life (armories, barracks, kitchens, prisons, beast lairs, etc.) and would often "recycle" dungeon designs. Players would recognize certain repeating features and associate them with certain "architects" in my campaign world.
If you look at a dungeon as a "flowchart" instead of a rigid place where you have to slog through encounter areas 1 through 63 before you can get to 64 and fight the BBEG, then they can be a blast....but don't let your players know that you only have about 25% of the place detailed ahead of time.
Random dungeon generators can be a great help with this, but I just used lists of stuff like "room types" and "furnishings" and "list of 1000 odd smells" and such to quickly give my brains ammunition to describe the place quickly, all the while giving the players the illusion that they were exploring a huge pre-prepared area as opposed to me just making it up as they went along.
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The place where I've noticed the most phobia, the most mania,amongst pc's is the entrance to the dungeon. Two orc guards can become the most menacing image to a group of pc's, because it's unknown how many more they can summon.
I suggest the indoctrination into fear begins there. Only no guards. No traps. No nothing. Let the tension build. From the very first room. Over describe EVERYTHING, like an old Hanna/Barbara cartoon where you can see what is about to move because it is outlined overly so and thus differentiated from the static background.
Then hit them with a swarm of bats; try to make them think they're stirges. Get them asking, "can I roll initiative?"
And when you walk into an underground cavern, it can be chilly. Overly describe that. Is it a magical effect? Why is the dungeonmaster dwelling on that?
If you do it right, a pair of kobolds in the 3rd room they hit becomes a thing of utter fascination.
Generally, dungeon crawls are great because you can create any type of scenario in them. You aren't restricted to one type of race/culture, storyline, etc. A dungeon crawl can branch off in any direction with relative ease, which is why they are so versatile. It runs the risk of becoming a "Disneyland dungeon" but if its fun at the time, who cares?
My all-time favorite: Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.
The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth kicked butt. The introduction of the Behir scared the bejeebus out of my players....23 years ago...my God where has the time gone?
The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth kicked butt. The introduction of the Behir scared the bejeebus out of my players....23 years ago...my God where has the time gone?
Not only the behir, but the bodak, the formorian giants (with an awesome pic by Jeff Easley), the gorgimera...the list goes on not to mention all the demon princes. Just a great module. I'd love to see it updated and/or expanded in Dungeon.
It was just this kick ass adventure, with an extra massive booklet crammed with an amazing new assortment of great monsters. I don't think there will ever be an adventure like it again.
So true. The whole package was just top notch. I gotta say again Jeff Easley's artwork in that module really brought it to life. All the illustrations (the clay golem, the dracolisk and especially the last chamber with Drelnza) were I think some of the best artwork I've ever seen in a published module.
Never has a chasme demon looked sooooo ugly!
I even liked the journey across the mountains to get to the caverns. The patrols...the hippogriff chicks and the hunters....the valley of the gnomes....classic, classic stuff.
If any of you out there have never read The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth or played 1e, I highly recommend picking up the PDF here at Paizo, because I believe it was Gary Gygax's peak of adventure writing. Just read it for pleasure and marvel at the short stat blocks, LOL.
What makes a great Dungeon Crawl? Hmm... Many things;
Goals. I say when there is a clear, outlined goal as to why the characters are there. It could be to retrieve an Artifact, to slay the dungeon's master, or just to escape it. The more specific, the better. A clear start and a clear end to the dungeon is always good.
Danger. It always raises the bar when it's a one-shot deal, when the players know they can't exit the dungeon to rest. Then every spell, every ressource is conserved 'just in case we REALLY need it'.
Challenge. Nothing, and I mean nothing, beats those good old puzzle-rooms and riddles that are just itching to be solved. There's something really satisfying about solving even the smallest brain-teaser. But there has to be a reason to put those puzzles there... I mean, the DM just doesn't put puzzles just for the sake of putting puzzles, there has to be a good reason.
Surprise. I make it a point to use a monster I never used before every so often to throw off the party's tactics. With all the Monster Manuals out there, there's no excuse for not finding something new to throw at your players. You know, thoses monsters you thought were ridiculous before, until someone in a Dungeon Magazine adventure used (or described) one in an intelligent way that made you say "yeah, that IS cool!". Along with new monsters, new situations are in order as well. Those pesky walls the characters have to repell down, those underwater passages, those chasms that characters have to litterally build a bridge over. Finding ways to use those skill checks in new ways always stimulates those players.
Visualizations. Notice how the most memorable dungeon crawls had very intricate illustrations of most rooms. Some even had illustration booklets that came with the module. Of course, good descriptions can sometimes replace visuals, but if you can get your hands on pictures to show the players what their characters see, they'll remember that adventure for a long time.
Ultradan
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A lot of very good advice sofar, really!!!
One of the best Dungeon Crawls I remember has been the RAVENLOFT module from AD&D.
Now, EXPEDITION TO CASTLE RAVNELOFT is available and this module rocks. It would help you in that respect, that the dungeon (the castle itself) only comes later in the adventure and you have some time to get used to the ravenloft feel!
Check it out!!!
Traps are also good, but don't overdo it with them. Rather have one memorable trap then a couple of them which are just nerving...
The best dungeon crawls to me had a few key qualities:
1) Remoteness - Start the PCs in a smaller town near a mine, for example. Idea being that even if they high-tail it out of the dungeon all the way from level five, they're still not going to be able to garner massive resources to deal with the awful things that will come chasing out after them. Example, a high cliff-top village of herding dwarves whose above-ground population is pretty small, and only really set up to provide the livestock and minor farming needs that aid the larger population that lives in the caverns nearby.
2) Abruptness - What the dungeon appears to be at the start suddenly shifts into something else. Example, those caverns nearby are indeed full of a somewhat larger population of dwarves, and their large mine (the start of the dungeon), but something has been assaulting dwarven miners and the occasional person in the cavern town, and all signs point towards the mines. After a few levels of exploring the mine, there's a shift - the mine breaks into what appears to be a large ruins of a very un-dwarven nature. And a lot of dwarf bits.
3) Darkness - The only light is that you bring with you, the only sound is you, and hard-to-make-out noises that echo from all over, and everything but you is perfectly fine with this. Example, these ruins are full of aberrations, from the carrion crawlers that first were assaulting the dwarves up on the top levels, to gricks and grells and worse, and at the bottom, the depths become harder and harder to see.
4) A birthing place - Some central position that is the source of all badness, all the better if glimpsed once, and then a forced retreat allows for planning for a second assault. Example, at the bottom-most layer of the ruins are the cracked remains of what was once a seal on a particularly vicious gate to the Far Realm, and amongst the few surviving humanoid (degenerated) camps and tribes, the snippits of just how to re-seal the gate can be gleaned. Especially since the gate is getting stronger, and the seal weaker.
And so forth. :)
By "great ideas", do you mean "great ideas for the DM" or "great ideas for the players"?
My "great ideas" usually end up in TPKs. :/
Or lost PCs.
DMing hint: Don't make a hand-on-the-wall-proof maze.
Left... left... left... left... left... left... left... Okay, the ranger spots tracks. They're yours. GO RIGHT WHEN YOU REACH THE SMOOTH MASONRY TUNNEL. THE LICH IS BORED. HE NEEDS VISITORS.
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Our group has been batting around the idea of maybe, finally, just for something different--to do a dungeon crawl.
In the realm of dungeon adventuring I am a complete newbie. I've never run one, never played in a good one, and don't really know where to start. I've done lots of dungeonmastering mind you--just not any of the old school kind.
So as I start the process of making a dungeon for my players to explore I would like to pick your brains as to what makes a dungeon crawl a memorable, great dungeon crawl...and also what things to avoid either because they're cliche or because you just don't like them for one reason or another.
I'd really appreciate your guys' feedback!
We need to get Tom Hanks in here. He really knows how to build a dungeon for his players.
The best dungeon crawl I've ever been in was when I (a warmage with a fascination with spells that go boom) was magically transported with my friend, a ranger, into an unkown dungeon by my god who I'd hacked off somewhat. After fighting our way through many different encounters (including incinterating a spiked chain wielding vampire with an empowered fireball and then also incinerating a room full of zombies and skeletons with a maximised empowered fireball, we found these three unamed items; a suit of exquisit armour, a huge sword and what looked like a lump of coal.
Hmm, said I, that lump of rock must be something important. Which as it turned out it was.
However, as I was reaching for it, my ranger "friend" leapt forward and grabbed the nice shiny armour, activating multiple force cages and prismatic fields making it subseqeuntly impossible to get to either of the remaining items which, thanks to magical lables that had also materialised, were a sword of the solars and a philosophers stone (which is doulby powerful in my friends homebrew as it grants effective immortality (the whole coming back to life in 10d10 days time thing which is handy) when mixed with a healing potion as well as providing a heck of a lot of gold. You can imagine I was rather irritated at this point and was just readying an orb or force when another small army of nasties burst in and incapacitated the ranger meaning that I had to blast my way out, whilst dragging said person with me.
However, I did find a rather nice book which made up for it, detaling the Gods in such great details that at present we are plotting a revolution.
MWA HAA HAA HAA HA! DIVINITY IS MINE!!!!!
Er..em...did I say that out loud....
There was a lot of dullness in the old Temple of Elemental Evil, but there were some really cool and interesting rooms to explore, too. I liked the final dungeon in the Slavers series, where the PCs start with nothing and have to improvise their escape from the seismically active dungeon or die trying.
F2K's idea about how to move quickly through the fluff when it gets dull is a good one.
AOW/WHISPERING CAIRN SPOILERS FOLLOW
I think if we're looking for examples of great dungeon crawls, several really superior ones have been published in the pages of Dungeon recently. The Whispering Cairn is, in my mind, a classic--partly because it fits in so seemlessly with the nearby town, but mostly because it restores that "teenagers exploring an old mine" sense of wonder and anticipation. There's a puzzle, some deadly traps, a couple of really tough encounters, a mystery of the dungeon's history that can be partially solved by the PCs, a quest/plot that develops part way through the exploration, and some cool (but mysterious) treasures at the end. And everyone who played it will be talking about the broken elevator and the acid beetle swarm twenty years from now.
So, when you're making your classic crawl, put something in it that your players will remember. And don't be afraid to make a non-dungeony dungeon. I ran a long crawl once that started in the underdark and ended with the discovery of ancient ruins on the surface. Parts of the dungeon could not be tackled by the PCs, by design--the sleeping red dragon who was obviously very large and very powerful, the secret door leading to a powerful artifact protected by a trap using mindfog, suggestion, and a memory altering spell to make PCs leave the secret chamber and forget that it exists. All the while, the PCs were trying to evade a virtual army of hobgoblins, who finally caught up with them as they were waiting for an NPC to ferry them back across the subterranean lake to safety. An epic all-night battle, ending in the PCs being rescued and escaping only by a hair's breadth. The point of the dungeon wasn't to defeat everything, it was to rescue a prisoner from the hobgoblins and to retrieve an item that would reveal an important NPC's whereabouts.
So, it was a huge dungeon crawl, but it had a plot, some important milestones, and the PCs had to be smart and selective about when to fight and when to run.