10 Rules for Creating a Dungeon
Header Art: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014) by Wizards of the Coast
Today is the first post for Dungeon December! For the next month, my posts here will just be about dungeons, how to run them, stock them, and make them. Today’s post is focused on the top ten things to think about when it comes to creating and running a dungeon. You don’t need to include all 10 things in every dungeon you create, but they should at least be on your mind to ensure a cohesive and fun dungeon dive for the table.
Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, 2021 Wizards of the Coast
1) Create a Theme
Every book, movie, tv show, board game, and more is created around a theme that ties the various elements within it together. A theme ensures cohesion within the story and its elements. If you want the party to dive into a wizard tower, your theme would then tie the wizard with the encounters the party would face. If the wizard creates strange magical monsters, you’d ensure that flesh golems showed up along with chimeras and other amalgamated monsters - what you wouldn’t do is just have tons of skeletons and zombies as that goes against the theme of an experimental wizard that likes to hack monsters together.
Other themes could include a mental horror while exploring an elder evil’s corpse floating in the Astral Plane, a delightful romp through a land of candy as you invade the dreams of a killer clown, or delving into the crypt of a long-dead necromancer. In each dungeon, the monsters the party faces, the traps they almost die from, and the puzzles they must ponder out should all go into reinforcing the theme of the dungeon.
2) Include Voices
While everyone knows that a dungeon requires monsters to fight, not everyone knows to include something to talk to. While not every goblin needs a name and detailed backstory, it’s important to include something within the dungeon that is willing to chat, be it creatures, sentient magic items, or talking doors. Your dungeon can quickly become a bore if there is no one to talk to, especially since part of playing an RPG is the Role-Playing portion of it. Players can play any number of hack-and-slash games, something to make your dungeon unique and entertaining is including NPCs, monsters, and more for your players to talk to and side with.
Of course, just because the players found an NPC that is willing to talk to them, doesn’t mean that they can’t fight them. A kobold who asks the party to side with them might have no problem stabbing them in the back once the last of the goblins are defeated and the party is out of spells and hit points from a hard fight. The voices in the dungeon should be memorable and have strong personalities that the party can quickly get to know.
3) Attack the Party
Everything in a dungeon is trying to attack the party, but I don’t mean the passive defense that the monsters put up when the party storms into their barracks. Instead, the dungeon should be proactive at removing the party. The party is like an infection entering the dungeon and the monsters within are the white blood cells that should, upon realizing that they have a problem, be trying to remove the said infection. They might send out a squad to deal with the problem or have powerful pets that hunt through the dungeon, trying to find the party.
This gives you a chance to try and cause problems for the party, interrupting their rest and ensuring that your dungeon feels alive.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
4) Different Routes
In your dungeon, offer different routes that the party can take with different outcomes. While the party still has to get to the end of the dungeon, and every path will take them there, if you only have a single path, you are forcing the party to follow a pre-determined path that you created. When you offer them choices, like heading through the sewer as opposed to heading into the barracks, they get to decide what challenges they want to take on, even if they don’t know all the details and it shows that they have a say over the game.
This is the main difference between good railroading and bad. Bad railroading means that the player’s choices don’t matter and they have no say in what challenges they face. Good railroading, on the other hand, means the party gets a say in how they proceed, even if it will still take them to the same place at the end of it all. The key is giving the players a choice and making it feel like their choice actually has an impact on the table, on their adventures, and on what encounters they face.
5) A Diverting Challenge
While the party is exploring the dungeon, offer them something off the beaten path. This something should require some resources to retrieve, an encounter to overcome, or something valuable for them to depart with. This could include a holy relic that would benefit the cleric, extra gold, information on the BBEG’s vulnerabilities, or something else you know would be tempting to the table.
This should create some tension at the table and break up the dungeon, forcing the players to decide if they wish to take on extra risk for a greater reward.
6) A Reward
Every dungeon needs a reason why the party is within it, otherwise, they are just killing monsters and destroying a dungeon’s ecosystem for the fun of watching goblins scream in terror - which probably isn’t going to happen unless the players just hate goblins, in which case, killing goblins is the reward they are looking for. A reward is motivation to the party and should be something the party is given at the end of the dungeon, be it defeating the BBEG, finding a large pile of gold under the dragon, or grabbing one of the four elemental orbs that they need to defeat the BBEG.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
This reward should be something the party earns at the end of the dungeon, with no tricks. If you have tempted the party with a reward at the end of their dive, but don’t give it to them and instead tell them that someone else stole it - sure, now the party is upset and wants to find whoever stole it but now they can’t ever trust that you won’t take their reward from them if they head into a dungeon again. If you pull their reward too many times, you are now telling the table that they will have to go through a lot of work, a lot of fights, traps, puzzles, and monsters… and at the end of it all, they will get nothing. Always reward your player’s efforts and give them their reward. They earned it.
Of course, that isn’t to say that you can’t pull tricks like the above example on the party, it just requires a lot of foreshadowing. Perhaps at the end of a haunted crypt, you have a magic item you want the players to find - during the party’s journey, they should find destroyed skeletons, already wounded zombies, perhaps blood from a trap, and more. And again, this should be very limited in its use.
7) Unwinnable Fights
While most fights in a dungeon the party is expected to win, not every fight has to be made with the idea it is winnable by just the party showing up in the room. By using foreshadowing, heavy hints, and prompts throughout the dungeon, you can create deadly fights that the party has little chance of winning if they just take it on like they normally do for all other fights. Instead, they must use clever ploys to make the fight unfair to the uber-deadly monster, find McGuffins to create a vulnerability in the monster, or work hard to avoid actually fighting the monster.
The key to including a monster that constitutes an unwinnable fight is to telegraph to the party that there is something that they can’t win. This might be blatantly telling the party that the monster is far too powerful for them, especially if this is something new to the table. Simply tell them that, as seasoned adventurers, their characters can spot an unwinnable fight when they see it and that they need to come up with a plan that will ensure they don’t fight fair, that they avoid the monster, or that they will have to come back in a few levels to bring it down. Once you have done this once or twice, you won’t have to be so blatant about telling the table, but you still have to include clues and hints as to which fights in a dungeon will require more skill from the players than from their characters.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
8) Hidden Secrets
Everyone loves secrets, though, you are probably like me. If I hide something in the dungeon, I want the party to find it, so is it really hidden at that point? If you are going to let the party find it, no matter what they do, then it isn’t hidden and what I’m telling you to do is to actually hide things. Of course, don’t hide key campaign items that the party needs, but small things like extra treasure, a minor magic item, or simply some candy that you hand the players.
These hidden secrets shouldn’t be major things, but rather just fun little things that you thought of while building the dungeon that extra-observant or curious players at the table might find. You might hide an actual treasure chest behind a wall painting of a treasure chest (and when they find it, you share a laugh at the table and give the players extra gold), place a magical ring as a link in a chain shirt a zombie is wearing (encourages the wizard to cast detect magic more often), or hide a dead, unlucky adventurer at the bottom of a pit trap that your rogue is very likely to defeat with ease and never look in the pit (which pushes the party to explore things they thought they had ‘defeated’ more thoroughly).
9) Variety
It isn’t enough to have monsters in a dungeon, you need to include things that break up the progression of a dungeon. Not only is fighting the same monster non-stop rather easy, but it is also boring. By including traps, puzzles, monsters to talk to, different types of monsters to fight, tricks, and more - you get to create different experiences that keep the players at the table engaged.
I recommend looking at the theme of your dungeon and having half a dozen different monster types for the party to fight, a number of traps equal to 10-25% of the total encounters in a dungeon, and one or two puzzles to provide plenty of variety. Variety is the spice of life and ensures that players aren’t checking out at the table as they go into yet another room full of goblins that screech about how the party of longshanks will die.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
10) Factions
Every dungeon should be home to an inner strife that the party can uncover and begin taking sides on. Dungeons are places full of dangerous monsters, so it only makes sense that they are constantly at odds with one another and that everyone is just waiting for a chance to backstab their friends and allies, and claim control over the dungeon. This might be warring factions in a goblin tribe, kobolds and goblins fighting for ultimate control over the dungeon, goblins defending their home from outside beasts, and more.
In every dungeon, have two or more factions struggling to take over the dungeon and throw the party into the situation. Each faction is trying to get the party to destroy their enemies, maybe promising the party plenty of gold to go kill the kobold clan chief, all the while the party is trying to decide if they should team up with Team Goblin, Team Kobold, or Team Flumph. By providing various factions that the party can work with, the party has unique ways that they can take on the dungeon, which ties into providing various paths for the party to take on.
Like what we are doing here?
Support us on Patreon!
You’ll get early access to deep dives, the Homebrew Hoard featuring 500+ monsters, Monster Thursdays, ad-free articles, and more!
Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date on everything we talk about!
