When to Use a Dungeon
When the players are trying to pursue some villain into their stronghold, such as the underground dungeon of a dark magic cult, the castle of a wicked king, or the lair of a behemoth, it can be fun to create a dungeon for the players to explore that represents this place.
The primary difference between players in a dungeon and players anywhere else in the world is that every inch of the dungeon is potentially dangerous, and so the players will want to have a very precise description of what is going on. For example, in a dungeon it is completely appropriate for the players to say “we go north through the hallway” and the game master to say “you go north until you come to a bend. You cannot see around the corner. What do you do?”, even though going into this level of detail in relatively safe place like a town would be unnecessary.
The contents of a dungeon, for this reason, must be at least somewhat well defined from the time they enter it. This makes it easier for the GM to describe what the players are doing in satisfactory detail.
This section contains information about how to build dungeons, by explaining how to build a “paragon dungeon” and describing its parts, and then explaining how to change up the “paragon dungeon” formula for ease of use or novelty.
The Paragon Dungeon
A paragon dungeon is laid out like this: a “long entryway” leading into a “magnificent foyer”, connected to a “vault”, three “side rooms”, and a “key room” travel to which is required to open the vault.
Paragon dungeons also have a “recurring detail” and a “recurring trap” that come up in virtually all of these rooms.
Designing Dungeon Rooms
The long entryway has little detail, and is easily omitted from a dungeon. It serves to separate the dungeon from the exterior world. There should be nothing in this entryway interesting enough to delay the players on their passage to the Magnificent Foyer, but you should have an idea of what it is (is it a tunnel? A hallway? A narrow passage up a mountain?) and when you describe it, include your recurring detail (see below).
The Magnificent Foyer is a large chamber linking most of the rooms in the dungeon. It contains exits to the entryway, the three side rooms, and the vault. However, the vault is inaccessible when the players enter. Here are the bare-bones details to consider when building your magnificent foyer.
The room itself should be a Fantastic Backdrop (page 45).
Have an idea of what the doorway/passage to the vault looks like, and what is preventing the players from entering it.
Remember that the magnificent foyer contains your recurring detail and your recurring trap.
If you want, there could be a monster waiting to fight the players in the Foyer when they arrive, but there need not be.
The three side rooms should have very little work put into them. Decide only the room’s function (Here are six! You can roll a dice to randomly determine this if you like - [1]Bedchambers, [2]Kitchen, [3]Ritual Chamber, [4]Archives, [5] Armoury, [6]Prison) Then when the players enter the side-room, you can improvise a description based on the function and the type of monster in the dungeon (What would a prison run by undead look like? What would an armoury for goblins look like?), and your recurring detail. Both side chambers contain your recurring trap, and if you like they might additionally contain a monster for the players to fight or trap the player/s inside once they enter. Remember that if players successfully search these rooms or do something else clever in them, they can be rewarded with one of your secrets (page 43) or with loot (page 52).
The Key Room is the room which the players must visit to unlock the vault. After the players have visited all three side rooms, searching any of them not yet searched (but usually the third one) reveals a secret passageway to the key room. Here are some example things behind which a secret passageway might be found: [1]A cellar door under a rug or furniture, [2]Pulling a book on a bookshelf causes the shelf to swing open [3]A portion of the wall is only an illusion [4]A magic amulet found in the room allows you to see and interact with a secret door [5] A candelabra is actually a lever, parting a section of the wall [6] A false bottom on a chest or dresser.
The key room itself needs two elements: the mechanism that allows the players to open a vault (it might be controls for the door, a way of getting rid of the magical barrier preventing use of the vault’s door, an actual key, or any number of things) and some dangerous thing preventing the players from getting at the mechanism. Remember to describe the recurring detail when the players enter as well.
Ordinarily, this will either be a monster, or a soup’d-up version of the recurring trap. Instead of the single ordinary trigger, there are dozens of them (dozens of tripwires or pressure plates, or etc. See recurring trap below) and the effect of the trap is magnified in a way that makes dodging it, while fundamentally a similar proposition to dodging the ordinary recurring traps, more dramatic and exciting.
The Vault is where the confrontation with the boss of the dungeon happens, and the chamber that contains the element that motivated the players to come to the dungeon in the first place. Sometimes, the boss and the motivating element will be the same thing, if for example the players entered the dungeon to hunt down the boss. The main considerations in creating the vault are its appearance, which like the magnificent foyer should be a fantastic backdrop (page 45), who or what the boss is, and how they will react to the presence of the players. The boss will usually be a monster who the players will fight, but their confrontation with the boss might involve lead-up or follow-through challenges that aren’t necessarily combat.
Designing a Recurring Detail
In a dungeon, decide a common detail which is present in every room, that you can easily vary between rooms. You don’t need to decide what is different between rooms in advance, just what the basic detail is. For example, there might be starfish clinging to the walls that vary in colour, or size, or number of legs between rooms. Or perhaps there are mushrooms in the corner that vary in the same way. Or perhaps the floors are littered with one particular bone, which bone in particular varying with the room.
This detail helps you, the game master, from having to re-describe similar features between rooms by giving you a single point of contrast to highlight. While the foyer necessarily has something interesting to look at in it (see foyer) the side rooms, key room, and entryway are bound to have a lot in common aesthetically. The recurring detail helps break this up.
Players may impart significance to these differences between recurring details which you did not intend, and this can only be a good thing. When they present you with a theory about what the variance means, you have the option of validating that theory. If you do validate it, not only did the player solve an interesting puzzle, but you didn’t have to design that puzzle ahead of time. However, if the player being right would mess up other plans you have, you don’t need to validate it.
Imagine, for example, that the players are exploring a network of seaside tunnels and caves. You describe the caves, in the entrance, as dark, damp, stinking of salt, and covered in orange starfish. They move further into the caves until they reach a fork. You say that at the fork, the starfish here are red. They turn right, and come to an empty chamber, which you have planned to contain a hidden door to the cellar of a smuggler in the nearby town. You say the starfish here are dry and dead. One of the players announces that she expects the starfish are dead because of the presence of dark magic, and wants to investigate. When you said the starfish were dead, you didn’t intend for it to indicate anything special at all about the room, but you now have the opportunity to have skeletons climb out of the sand and attack the players, or to have their search through the sand turn up an enchanted toxic longsword.
Designing a Recurring Trap
A recurring trap is a trap which is triggered by a non-obvious mechanism which is the same in every room where it occurs, and which springs the same sort of consequence for the players. In a paragon dungeon, the recurring trap should be in every room excepting the long entryway and the dungeon vault.
Having the trap be the same each time cuts down on work for you, and gives the players an interesting puzzle to solve in figuring out how to successfully spot or avoid the trap without putting themselves in danger, and how to successfully dodge the trap if they happen to trigger it.
There are two components to a recurring trap - a trigger and an effect. The trigger is shared in common by all traps in the dungeon, and has a trigger-indicator: a sensorially-detectable feature that marks it as the trigger. If the players know what this element is, they will be able to trivially avoid the trap (by asking “do I see [x]?” when they walk into a room, and then avoiding tripping it). For that reason, it can be fun to try and confuse players about what that trigger-indicator is. When the player asks you for a description of the mechanism that tripped the trap (the tripwire, the pressure plate, the statue with glass eyes) it is good to mix in plenty of “decoy” details about it in addition to the real trigger-indicator. For example, if the player asks what the pressure plate they stepped on looks like, you might describe it as a grey stone plate, slightly elevated above the ground, with a white diamond marking on it. Any of those three details could be the trigger-indicator of the pressure plate trap. If they like, they can make a skill check based on awareness or knowledge (depending on the situation) to discern what the trigger-indicator is.
As for the effect, it should also be the same trap to trap, or change between rooms in minor ways that reflect an overall theme. The effect might be physical: they might be falling into a pit, or attacked with arrows, or have the room they are in filled up with toxic gas. The effect might be magical: they might be afflicted by a curse, or set on fire. When the players trip a trap, tell them that as they activate the trigger, they have some immediate indication that something is wrong (typically, they hear a mechanical click) and ask them how they react. Based on the players reactions they might automatically avoid it, or get to make a skill check to avoid being harmed by the trap - either by getting out of the way of the harmful part of the trap, or by resisting its effects.
In this way, even if the players don’t figure out what the trick is, by learning what the trap is likely to do they’ll get better at reacting to it when they hear the click.
Changing Things Up - If you follow this trap system exactly in all of your dungeons things may get a bit formulaic and predictable for the players. In some dungeons, consider having each trap do something different, or having different trap triggering mechanisms in each room (it would be a bad idea to do both of those things however). Furthermore, if recurring traps are not fun for your players or not fun for you to design, feel free to omit recurring traps from your dungeons entirely, or include them only in some dungeons.
Deviation from Paragon Dungeons
There are plenty of ways of building dungeons fancier than this. Most of them involve adding more rooms. This dungeon format is designed to make it so the GM does not end up preparing anything that the players don’t end up benefiting from, while still not making the players feel as though they are not making meaningful choices in the game. If you’d like to build dungeons in the way this book prescribes, rather than by the conventional graph paper method, here are some ideas for simple deviations from the model presented above, to keep things fresh.
Instead of a vault, put the boss in the key chamber, and have the vault door lead to a long entryway for a new dungeon. In this way, the dungeon can have multiple floors or layers. This entryway might even fork into multiple lower dungeons, or provide a secret passage back to the surface in addition to a passageway to a lower level of the dungeon.
Instead of having many side rooms as spokes around a central foyer, have them chain into each other to form a sequence of rooms leading to the key. Or perhaps omit the key room entirely and have the sequence of side-rooms culminate in the vault.
Instead of having a key room, have each of the side rooms contain a piece of the key. Meaning, visiting each of the rooms contains something necessary for accessing the vault.
Instead of the side-rooms having functional purposes for the inhabitants of the dungeon, have them explicitly be chambers designed to trap and test the players. This will make more sense for certain dungeons and plots than the default method.
Take a pre-made dungeon from another tabletop system, and convert it to be compatible with these rules on the fly. Most dungeons are relatively system-agnostic. As long as you are changing out the proper nouns and some of the descriptions, you might be able to use different parts of the same dungeon at different times in your campaign. You can even layer the recurring detail and recurring trap systems from this game onto the pre-made dungeons, if you like.