Return to the Dungeon

I love me a good dungeon romp. I like checking for traps, running helter-skelter down a dark passage clamoring to be the first away from something unbeatable and the tactics required to fight and last in an enclosed space. I like how they allow for player freedom when designed right – even though you are “on the tracks” it’s hardly a railroad because it involves a lot of decision making as you go. I like the role-playing banter that happens between the party and hirelings and the occasional interaction with a monster or captive you’re surprised speaks your tongue. I like mapping and secret doors and close-quarter combat. At least I like it as the game master! However, I also hate me a bad dungeon, and surprisingly there are a lot of them (even a handful in the old days written when the writer had had a bit too many…Dungeonland anyone?). After the 12th room with kobolds when does it become tiresome and dull? Why are the traps so predictable in some cases or the choices of where to go so obvious it puts you right back on the railroad again? Worse, what about littering a dungeon with dozens of empty rooms, or an empty room with a great history given to the GM to read but will never get revealed in play. For some of you I can’t tell the hours of boredom and frustration I’ve saved you from by massively hacking apart maps and rewriting text to make some dungeons work within our style. Thank me later. Interestingly, you didn’t have much of that “back in the day”. In the 70’s and 80’s most of the dungeons were good dungeons, it seems. White Plume Mountain, The Slave Lords, Palace of the Silver Princess, Into the Unknown, etc. Every room was a treasure. I’ll call this the classic era, a time when every event didn’t have to have a complete rationalization or rules explanation. Mysterious phenomena, riddles and surprises were the norm. Monsters might be stronger or weaker without having to figure out why. For unknown reasons, flinds were the only creatures capable of wielding nunchaku. Piercers would wait most of their lives just to drop on adventurers and spend the next month crawling back up the wall after a miss. Skeletons always did 1d6 damage no matter what weapons they wielded. Orcs and gnolls would live next door to each other in what were essentially monster hotels and no one worried about why. In one of the classic modules by Judges Guild a single giant rat in a group of two dozen had 26 hit points because a typist made a mistake and that was okay – one of the rats was just really big. Luckily for all of us, there came a time in 1999 when some folks realized you could capture the classic era the right way even with the new rules, and make dungeons a little more believable than monster hotels. That was WotC’s “Return to the Dungeon” campaign for the launch of 3rd edition and ever so slowly the ‘new classics’ started showing themselves. The Forge of Fury, Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, Barrow of the Forgotten King and Shattered Gates of Slaughtergard. Bad dungeons still exist here and there, but the new challenge is how to keep the classic way of play alive in our age after a thousand, thousand 20×30 rooms have already been explored.When Paizo was running Dungeon Magazine they sometimes had to churn out big old dungeons filled with stuff to kill for space or XP reasons. But being the caretakers of our game they soon discovered what worked and what made a good dungeon fun again. Those same folks are now turning over the Pathfinder Society scenarios I’ve been running these past few years and the entire Shattered Star Adventure Path I’m about to begin. I get the distinct impression our caves of chaos are in damn good hands.