Dungeons. What makes them? What fills them? Why do they exist?
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It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
Dungeons. What makes them? What fills them? Why do they exist?
Dungeons. What makes them? What fills them? Why do they exist?
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
|
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
the world is ancient and home to ruins of kingdoms fallen ages ago, the possibilities are endless
or it could be another lich just farming adventurer souls with promises of money
Fpbp
Why are there pyramids? Why are they filled with gold? Because someone very rich left it there a long time ago.
All good setting are set on the bones of old civilisations (Tolkien has the first and second ages, Lovecraft has the ruins of cities founded by his Eldar Gods, Halo has the Flood and the Forerunners, I could go on). The players get to be Lara Croft/Indiana Jones type people who dig this shit up.
The explanation with the dungeons under cities in Tekumel was neat iirc. Had something to do with urban renewal and cthonic cults I think.
I have an answer in the 2nd draft of my dark elf book for the ACKS system in the House Rules section. Essentially, Dungeons are metaphysical reflections of the Platonic Dungeon and meant to make people stronger but also is an extremely dangerous environment where literally everything is trying to kill you. You should check it out.
(1)
>Essentially, Dungeons are metaphysical reflections of the Platonic Dungeon and meant to make people stronger but also is an extremely dangerous environment where literally everything is trying to kill you.
This sounds kind of cool, but I don't see it actually mentioned in the PDF.
(2) You didn't explain what actually creates Dungeons. The vanilla rules explain that "places of power" are created by special circumstances--cemeteries, altars of worship, dwelling places of powerful creatures, volcanoes, et cetera.
>The vanilla rules
(In ACKS 2, at least--I don't know about ACKS 1.)
They're organs.
Are you the guy that made the entire world some gigantic living being? I remember someone here mentioned they had created a setting like that.
>wizards
>wizards
>Because wizards are all antisocial nerds and the dungeons are how they protect themselves from socialization.
old buried trenches from a forgotten war
the sprits that died, released and trapped in this plane by their anger and vengeance roam them
Dragons. Treasure. To take the Treasure from the Dragons.
God OP. Were you paying attention at all in lecture?
Shattap.
It's the left behind infrastructure from a million+ year effort to terraform the planet with various labs, a massive underground ocean and size to accomodate beings of at least 15ft tall in some places.
Long before the rise of present day civilization there was a great, mighty elder race who ruled the whole world and wielded strange and terrible powers. Among their society were groups like guilds, called 'Unions,' and one of these must have been the dungeon building union, for every dungeon in the land bears their mark.
We hope someday to find the recipe for a sandwich sauce that they supposedly used for the great feasts that were held upon the completion of a dungeon.
legacy
>What makes them?
the GM
>What fills them?
treasure and monsters
> Why do they exist?
to explain why its layout is almost entirely indoors, composed of recurring squares, and so the GM can organize things easily
Usually subterranean races like dwarves, kobolds, and polish.
Think of them more like fortresses built by people that live on the other side of the surface.
I have this information on good authority.
>what makes them
Dragons.
>what fills them
Dragons.
>why do they exist
Dragons.
Fecund feudal families need lots of cellar space to house all of their failsons and their cheeto and hot pocket eating habits.
Our sages think that some of them are intrusions from another place (or perhaps another time). The architecture and artifacts found will be totally foreign and the beasts totally alien, but the treasures within are all too real...
mudflood
Dungeon Meshi has a nice setup to explain dungeons - fissures to another dimension of infinite energy through which "demons" leak through. The dungeons can contain the demons, for a time.
I make them, using randomly selected procedures, to play the game.
I fill them, using random tables and procedures, to play the game.
They exist because they are a major part of the game.
Now play the game, or go do something else.
>What makes them?
wizard
>What fills them?
wizard
Why do they exist?
wizard
>What makes them? What fills them? Why do they exist?
civilizations make them, and for various purposes. the common 'dungeon' is an epithet for derelict structures that have been repurposed for nefarious ends or in rarer cases forgotten completely and recently rediscovered. in each case it requires a group of adventurers to explore as it may be fraught with danger.
vacant manors, ancient castles, abandoned mines, hidden temples, all considered to be 'dungeons' until fully explored and cleared out.
could be bandits, could be traps and treasure, could be a lich, could be nothing but cobwebs and dust. even a particularly spooky thicket deep in uncharted wilderness could be considered a dungeon.
The God of Crafting and Architecture is secretly the God of Procrastination. As a result, in-between Divine Buildings there are dozens of half-finished castles, bridges, tunnels and dungeons. His clergy believe that there is a Goddess of Inspirarion that has an unsteady relantionship with him, but the truth is that he is a lazy frick. His chosen architects and blessed forgerers usually try to finish his works, but finding them is a tasking job. As a result, most of these unfinished WIPs become the home of vampires, kobolds, boogeymen, etc, etc.
Your questioning is a symptom of modern D&D not matching it's legacy. In original D&D the setting was actually post-apocalyptic, where civilization has fallen into a dark age and no longer is a large, civilized, magical world full of wonder. It's also why magical items used to be described as ancient and always very clean/free of rust/permanently. Now they're dime a dozen and every peasant is walking around with magical socks on.
I stole the idea from some webnovels I like, but essentially the Gods spawn in Dungeon Cores, crystalline spheres of magic, which are able to influence the environment around them to an extent, generating monsters, placing traps, hiding treasures, etc. Most Dungeon Cores do this automatically, and that's why a lot of low level Dungeons are basically the same. Here's some kobolds/goblins/skeletons and a small monetary reward. They're too young and weak to make anything better than the weakest of monsters. But, over centuries they become bigger and somewhat sentient, able to react to things around them more. Cities vie for control of these Dungeon Cores, as they represent a steady stream of resources and wealth. Adventurers still have a reason to go out and adventure, namely to find undiscovered Cores, which they can claim for themselves secretly, or sell the location of to a nearby city. All in all, it provides an explanation for why they're there, what they do, and how the players will interact with them in the setting.
>What makes them?
Ancient dwarves.
>What fills them?
The undying slaves, mutated pets, and shattered portals of ancient dwarves.
>Why do they exist?
Ancient dwarves didn't even know that the surface existed. They thought the only way to build more stuff was to carve it out from the earth.
Sir this is just Skyrim.
This thread is just a bot, anyway.
Well yeah look at the picture, it's clearly a robot.
Ran it one time that "Dungeon" was just in universe lingo for magical hotspots were monsters and magic items start to naturally form in the environment. Worked well in that allowed for what constituted a dungeon to be more board and I didn't need to try and autistically justify to myself what the purpose of each local was or how they functioned, if there was something weird and nonsensical about the area it was just magic fricking things up in weird ways.
They come from the inside, attempts of freedom and cries for help from one's children. All the dangers and rewards are both lures and trials. The prisoner requires a suitable vessel.
>checked
As for why do dungeons exist? People getting their shit and wanting to go somewhere "safer". Bad things happened, killed them and people or monsters moved in behind them.
If you found a perfectly good cave, that you were mostly sure won't collapse, wouldn't you wanna move in there and hide all your shinies in a crevice behind a rock?
>What makes them?
Time.
What fills them? Why do they exist?
You start with an old druid dying and being buried in cave with his magical stuff.
Centuries later a wizard cannibalizes the magic items and digs some rooms deeper for materials.
Wizard gets killed by a holy knight.
Some dwarves later think they can use the rooms to start a minery project, once they were done, they leave due lack of trading value of the place, leaving some long tunnels.
Now the place has Allips and Cloackers, and the equipment of some bandits trying to hide there just to find a terrible death by the cloackers.
A dungeon is basically any environment that is
>Mostly closed to the outside world
A few openings to the outside world are of course fine because the players need to get in somehow, but a forest wouldn't count as a dungeon because it's not its own isolated world since people and creatures go in and out and its ecosystem is deeply connected to those around it.
You want to make it so that generally speaking what happens in the dungeon stays in the dungeon and things outside the dungeon rarely influence it.
>Hostile to invaders
Be it in the form of environmental hazards, traps, monsters, a cabal of very bad evil dudes or anything similar.
It must be the sort of environment the players have to be cautious in and/or fight their way into.
So an abandoned system of mine shafts may be a dungeon, a big, empty corridor with no traps, enemies or any other threat is not
>Big enough that you would have to spend a long time exploring it.
"Long time" is of course relative but I think a minimum of half a day is a satisfying enough rule of thumb.
For example, Grandpa's shed satisfied the previous two points if he rigged a shotgun to fire when someone opens the door, but you wouldn't really call it a dungeon.
>It needs to stand between the players and a goal or some kind of reward
So a system of abandoned mine shafts wouldn't be a dungeon if there was nothing to get out of exploring it.
But if some kind of bad guy were to kidnap a player's waifu and hold her in these mines THEN it would become a dungeon.
It's also a good idea to have rewards outside of the main goal, so maybe while going to rescue the waifu you find some valuables, maybe some interesting scrolls were kept there because the place is dry.
The reward doesn't have to be in the dungeon, escaping it is an excellent dungeon reward.
So maybe the players got arrested and they're trying to escape, that's still a classic dungeon crawl.
Our modern world has many structures underground.
What if, in a post-apocalyps, our subways, basements, and sewers became home to a species of monster that avoids sunlight?
It's a fun thing to think about when travelling through the city and noticing all the infrastructure.