What is an Above-Ground Dungeon?
Header Image: Dragon #329 - Ecology of the Kenku by Wizards of the Coast
Dungeons can take place in a wide variety of locations, like underground… or deeper underground… or perhaps even deeper underground. Of course, that’s only if you have a very close mind when it comes to what dungeons look like. Many think of dungeons as dark, dreary, and largely underground or in some sort of confining structure to keep those pesky adventurers going in the direction you want.
But dungeons don’t have to be in confined tunnels, underground, or even look remotely like a dungeon. Dungeons, as a concept, are all about moving adventurers from one ‘room’ to the next ‘room’ as they deal with monsters and walk down ‘hallways’. Anything can be a dungeon, from a city to a forest and from the skies above to the deep oceans below. None of these locales appear as dungeons, but they are indeed dungeons.
What is a Dungeon?
When you think about what exactly a dungeon is, there are a handful of things that can quickly come to mind:
Rooms
Hallways
Encounters
Semi/Linear flow
Those four concepts can be translated anywhere though, they aren’t just for underground labyrinths where the party has no choice but to walk down the hallway. Not only can this be helpful for GMs that find it hard to get all their encounters in a day for an ‘adventuring’ day, but to broaden your options when it comes to dungeon design.
Dungeons act as a way to guide your players through pre-planned encounters and as a way for you to have them use up their resources for appropriate fights without skipping all of them or wandering off to do something else. Literal dungeons offer only a few pre-planned paths that the party can choose from, taking them to pre-made encounters with puzzles, traps, and monsters to slay.
Rooms
The simplest definition of a room is that it is a place where encounters take place. Within the context of a traditional dungeon, it is any location where an encounter takes place. They are often physical rooms with doors, hallways leading to them, and monsters within them.
In our above-ground dungeons, rooms can be any place you are looking to place an encounter or encounters. In a forest, they might be a glade or a portion of the trail where goblins are lying in wait. In a city, they could be an outpost or building that is overrun by the thieves’ guild and so there are multiple encounters within the same building. In the sky, it could be a cloud of random encounters that comes barreling towards the party. Any place where you have an encounter is a room and encounters aren’t only restricted to combat, but puzzles, roleplaying, and traps. In addition, rooms act as set pieces, providing an environment that could make life harder for the combatants or add to the atmosphere.
Hallways
A hallway is simply an area that is used for traveling from encounter to encounter. In a traditional dungeon, they link rooms (encounters) together and provide the only way to traverse the dungeon. They might be trapped, they could be home to traveling monsters, but by and large, they are simply used as a point of egress.
In above-ground dungeons, hallways take on a huge variety of forms. Since they are responsible for moving the adventuring party from one encounter to the next, they could be the literal streets that the party walks upon from building to building, or they could be lines of dialogue that bring the party to a decision of attacking or working with the thief guild. A hallway is simply the tool you, the GM, use to guide your players to the next encounter, they are the transition scenes from one room to the next.
Encounters
Encounters within a dungeon often take place in rooms, though certain situations can occur where the players think they are in a hallway and get attacked. At that point though, the hallway transforms into a room and is no longer the safe confines of a hallway. This most often happens with traps, surprise betrayals, or getting ambushed.
Encounters can be anything from puzzles, traps, social maneuvering, exploration, and fighting for your life. Encounters are used to stock rooms and a room can have more than a single encounter in it like if there are traps set up in a room with a monster to fight or there is a puzzle and social encounter with the puzzle giver. Encounters are the action within a room and the main focus of the party, everything else is the set dressing for the room.
Semi/Linear Flow
Traditional dungeons are often fairly linear, or if it has multiple options, often end with the party in the same place as before. Choices are often limited in a dungeon, and that’s by design. You want to funnel them into a few encounters over and over so that you can drain resources and make the final encounter in the final room a fun and memorable fight. Not just something they steamroll over and then ask if that’s it.
Above-ground dungeons offer the same restrictions but provide those restrictions in different ways. If the city was attacked by an invading army and the players are rooting them out, they might move from one building to bring down a captain and then quickly navigate the streets to head over where they heard of a large patrol in the streets they need to take care of. They are just as confined as they would be in a dungeon, but they are confined by invisible walls. These invisible walls are the understanding that shops aren’t going to be open while the city is under attack, that while they can go to the other side of the city and hang out in the park, it won’t push them towards their next goals but rather they’ll stumble into roving monster hordes (the same you might find in an actual dungeon).
These invisible walls guide players through your dungeon, and they don’t have to be as extreme as a city under siege. They could be time pressures in that they only have a few hours or days to stop an assassination plot, which means they are moving down ‘hallways’ to ‘rooms’ quickly without getting sidetracked by side quests of pulling cats out of trees. Time can keep players moving through your above-ground dungeon, ensuring that the hallways they choose to travel down actually lead them to the rooms you designed.
Other invisible walls that can be used are player buy-in (are the players invested in what happens next in the story?), literal walls (does the city have specific portions of it walled off like an area for undead or to keep the wilderness out?), social encounters (the party can’t get past a certain point because the guards won’t let them or the shopkeeper won’t show them where the secret passage is that the thieves’ guild uses), high CR monsters (the horde of monsters attacking the city are too strong for the players to take on, so they are forced to take other paths through the forest or city or whatever in order to avoid dying), and more.
There are many ways that you can put up invisible walls to guide your players from a room to a hallway and from a hallway to a room.
Example in Play
The party has just got back from delving into an ancient tomb and has some money to spend. They head back to their favorite tavern and order their favorite drinks, telling the bar about their previous exploits. Unfortunately, the thieves’ guild hears about their new wealth and hatches a plan in the dead of night, they are going to kidnap the party’s friends and hold them for ransom until the party pays up.
Rooms
The first room the party ‘enters’ is actually in the morning when they wake up and see a note slid under their bedroom door that informs them that those they care about will be killed unless they bring the items they found to the docks at night - and no funny business or else the gnome bartender gets it. In this encounter, the party has to talk and decide amongst themselves what they want to do. The rogue might investigate the letter to realize it is the same ink and paper that the thieves’ guild uses or maybe you had the letter written in thieves’ cant as a clearer sign to the party who they are dealing with. At this point, the party makes a few checks to remember where a thieves’ guild outpost is and they decide to storm the nearby outpost and see if they can rescue their friends.
Hallway
The party leaving their room, where they encountered the letter, now begin traveling down the ‘hallway’ from the tavern they are in to the thieves’ guild outpost. Along this hallway, they can see signs of struggle in the tavern where Frotz, their favorite bard, was attacked, their instrument lying broken on the ground. As they continue this hallway, they are free to ‘exit’ it and pick up supplies, but they decide against it. They are on a time crunch and need to free their friends. This, they are guided by invisible walls to continue on to the next room in the above-ground dungeon.
Encounters
The party arrives at the outpost and this two-story building acts as a ‘room’ of encounters. The party charges in, the rogue complaining about how they never stealth for a surprise attack, and the wizard lets loose a fireball to get the combat encounter inside the room started. As the party clears out this outpost, they fight thieves, they deal with a false-step trap in the stairway, and eventually face off against a thief captain who laughs at them as they reveal their friends aren’t here. The party can attempt to trick the captain into revealing their presence, but if they go straight to fighting, there are a few loose notes that the party can puzzle out together to realize their friends are being kept in a sewer base.
Semi/Linear Flow
It is at this point they decide they need to take a 1-hour rest to recover their stamina. They then leave the thief outpost and head for the sewers. Again, they follow the invisible walls of social pressure (their friends are in danger), time pressure (they will be killed by the end of the day), and player buy-in (they hate that someone would try to steal what they earned). This causes them to follow your above-ground dungeon, allowing the invisible walls to guide them down hallways from room to room as they slowly hunt down the sewer outpost, fighting off horrible sewer monsters, before tracking down the thieves’ guilds real headquarters where their friends are being held.
Throughout this, they have propelled themselves down hallways, rooms, encounters, and more. While there were no dungeon walls to stop them from picking up flowers along the side of the road, there were pressures that kept them focused and moving.
Other Dungeons
While cities make great setpieces, so can jungles, grasslands, mountain tops, and more. In jungles, the hallways are game trails that make for easier navigation. Thick underbrush creates walls that guide the party to specific forest glades that act as the rooms of your dungeon, and hunting traps can act as the puzzles and traps that you stock your encounters with.
This can even be applied to large expanses, like traveling from one kingdom to the next. To do so, the party must travel along the king’s road (a hallway) and deal with a monster eating travelers (an encounter) in a small cave just a few dozen feet of the road (a room). They are quickly traveling down the road as they are hoping to set up peace between the two warring nations and they only have days to do so (the invisible walls guiding them to their objective).
The Above-Ground Dungeon
Dungeons can take place anywhere in the world, not just deep underground. They are made up of many components but the biggest four are Rooms, Hallways, Encounters, and Semi/Linear Flow. These basic concepts can be applied anywhere and work to ensure that your party acts in a guided way without wandering off from the dungeon you created. Above-Ground dungeons are the same as underground dungeons, but the walls they provide are not as easy to see and often they take place in more disparate locations and across greater distances.
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