DMDC 06 - Dungeon Time

It's dungeon time! Now it's a show only about dungeons, never dragons, dragons are overrated everyone knows we only want dungeons and that's all we need and

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Hey! This is the DM Discourse, a podcast about D&D, focused on the experience at the table from behind the screen. I'm your host Darrell, and today I’m talking about dungeons, only dungeons no dragons come back later if that’s (cut to music)

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From the writings of Historical Enchantress Iprix. records located in the Academia de Capital, Year 88 of Prism Ascension. On the subject of the Fenskeep, specifically the colloquial Halls Under the Hill

There are countless wonders throughout the Drifting Isles, our neighboring marsh to the south that seems to ebb and flow different with each passing year. In no other place is this strange nature better epitomized than the expansive network of tunnels beneath Fenskeep. Both natural and crafted works have been documented to exist in this place but there is little to connect any of them together. None of these accounts, whether from various adventurers or fellow academics, corroborate to give a consistent understanding of this place.

In my early years of studying while pursuing a thesis I considered this location of worthy note and made my way along the coast to the keep, further inland past the brigands populating that accursed swamp only to find one such of their kind in charge of the keep itself. It was of no matter - I had enough know how to keep myself safe while in town and funds to hire a small group of local mercenaries for my preliminary expedition. However it took three weeks to pass before I came to realize the danger of the, to use the locals language, Halls Under the Hill.

When I asked the villagers about it I was given clear directions how to enter - beneath the keep on the northern end, along the moat that runs the course of the island it’s built on. Simple to find yet each one I talked to saw fit to warn me, usually unprompted, about the darkness or evil or some other such nonsense lurking below their town. But surely if there was any such danger, it would not make sense to live here in the first place, I informed them. And by now the town would have been long destroyed. I soon discovered their worries were well-founded even if that… entity, that exists in those wicked depths is for now content to hold sway over its domain.

I will not bother recounting the layout or encounters of each particular room in this summary. The following documentation included with this should suffice, as I spent hours cataloguing details of each space we explored. Plus I have some notes referencing other experiences in the Halls, all different, all bearing similar ill stories. I will simply tell you mine - and how it led me to leave that place the very same night, seeking shelter behind city walls that I have learned to never take for granted again.

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Yeah whatever the reason I think I’ve just moved away from using dungeons as a main driving force in my campaigns. I know that isn’t true for how it used to be and definitely not true for a good majority of DMs out there. Dungeons have just always been part of the shared language of D&D, whether you’re running or playing there’s something near mythic about the idea of the dungeon - a collection of rooms holding an endless variety of dangers and treasures, all for your adventuring party’s taking should you simply dare to go in and take it.

And I think for a long time that the idea of the dungeon was the driving force of wanting to play D&D. It gives you that power fantasy of getting to sling spells down corridors lighting a bunch of cultists on fire. It, much like the game, has this shared idea that’s easy for people to attach to. I mean sure, it’s easy to just think of a hole in the ground that has a bunch of different monsters from the books to fight. And it’s definitely a great place to start your campaign - you’ve all come together to see what you can accomplish as a group!

That’s more or less what happened to the, as they were beginning to identify themselves as, the Crew of the Ycnan - the story of that being that the monk Pedwar showed up drunk and wrote “Nancy” upside down the side of the boat. So far the campaign has been a series of scripted interactions for them. They had a goal but so long as they entertained the ideas I put before them they were sure to reach the destination without any real dangers. Of course, because it wouldn’t be any fun if they just die before they get to any real encounters right?

So anyway - they got hired by the baron to go investigate these Halls Under the Hill, a series of dungeons from the supplement I’m using to form a home base for my campaign. Each of the levels has different creatures and challenges, so it provides a unique flavor. There’s no cohesive theme to it, other than a subversive hostility that I attribute to a pseudo-intelligence of the swamp itself. It provides flavor as they try making their way to the bottom of the dungeon, trying to figure out whatever it is at the bottom.

I definitely have a different style of the game I run since I’m playing online than when I used to play in-person. At a physical table I had a classic setup: grid map, minis, all that. For online I really shrunk down what I’ve done from there. If they’re in a city I’m just putting up some concept art that shows the idea I have, and for a dungeon I slap a JPG of the maps in there and just hide what they haven’t seen from the party. As they go through the dungeon I reveal more, but rather than using minis for the individual parties I started having a single icon show which room the party is in. I was worried that maybe this would discourage them from being more explorative but that hasn’t been the case - they’re happy to just take initiative for themselves and go investigate things on their own if they want to. I do end up trying to run a dungeon later on with individual minis, but I’ll take about that one later.

As for encounters I take a similar, minimalist approach - it’s all theater of mind. When I started with 4e I used a grid and minis religiously, and I think there’s a lot to 4e that lends itself to that grid-focused system. However with 5e I found that using theater of the mind instead, where descriptive text between us all has replaced the grid, has tended to work better and much more my style as well. I also tend to be pretty generous to players anyway for distances then run. I think if I was playing in person I’d go back to using miniatures and a grid more strictly, but I’ve just found it to be a lot easier and more enjoyable to run the game this way. And that’s true for you and any other table - run what’s best for you and your group. Just because you see it done one way doesn’t make it the right way and doesn’t make it the way you need to run at your table. 

Although funny enough it was seeing other groups play without a grid and miniatures, specifically the Acquisitions Inc C Team podcast, when I decided to make the switch for my home game. Even when I was playing in person, as the years went on I saw that I was into the idea of using miniatures less and less, even for combat. When my group had an encounter distance seemed to matter less and less, and that may have more to say about my homebrew encounter design or my player’s aptitude but at a certain point I just decided I wanted to work the game differently whenever I run it.

Right, the dungeon - anyway, so the group makes their way around the back of Fenskeep and makes their way to the first, smaller room of this “layer” of it, encountering two giant centipedes. Giant animals are a fairly common encounter in RPGs so they didn’t think anything of it as they pummeled these overgrown insects into mush, but these actually worked as watchers for the group that had already made it to the dungeon before them - a group of goblins working in servitude to the local hobgoblin group in town.

They ran into the first members of this goblin group in the next room, a two-floored square with statues depicting mariliths, which are a kind of six-armed, half-snake battle demon? The statues were nothing more than stone, but they found a half dozen goblins scattered between the two floors. I placed some on the bottom and some on the top, and since the group was successful in sneaking up on them I gave them a chance to get even closer to try and make the odds more in their favor. Unfortunately, the dwarf done goofed the Stealth roll, so from there it was initiative. Being just a handful of goblins the party was able to dispatch them quickly as well, but they left one alive in order to do the time-honored tradition of interrogation.

This particular goblin, Brog, would later join their crew but for now was a bit miffed about these upstart adventurers coming down and killing all his friends in the midst of their very own job. However the batfolk cleric, Sq’Gee, had an inquisitorial style, and was able to tease out of him the particulars of the goblins here in the dungeon. They found out they were looking for something for the hobgoblin leader in town. For his honesty, the group let him live for now, tied up in one of the corners of the rooms.

From here, the path split five ways. Two locked doors were on the top floor, two open passages on the first, and the fifth way was a puzzle door, decorated with slots small enough for gemstones and a cryptic message in ancient draconic giving away its hints. They would later solve this Door of Seven Stars, but for now, since it blocked the path that would lead to the higher level content beneath the temple, would lay locked for now, but pieces of its answer would end up being collected throughout the dungeon floor - for on whatever path they took they would end up collecting the necessary gemstones to unlock the door, simply presenting stones that would make up the rainbow. Not the most advanced puzzle but as the party would learn still something to be taken seriously - especially when it ended up shocking them as they tried putting the gemstones in at a random pattern.

But that’s for later - for now, the group took one of the lower pathways, the one in the south-eastern direction, which led to two unremarkable but classic encounters. The first was a room with a pit, and I quickly learned that having a flying PC would mean that this trope wouldn’t work as well as it would with other groups, but for the sake of demonstration worked well to illustrate the kind of non-monster dangers they could encounter in a dungeon. The room after had a long flowing fountain, and few sentient skeletons. Without a necromancer in sight, this hinted at some other kind of magical purpose to this place, something I continued to run with the more the party dug into it.

This idea began to crystallize for them in the next few rooms that completed their circuit to the upper floor of that first split area. They ran into a statue of a demonic idol with writhing serpent legs and an avian head, obviously depicted in a shrine or place of worship. Its eyes held some gems that were mundane but useful for the puzzle door I talked about earlier, but this ended up being the starting point of an ongoing joke with the drunken master dwarven monk, Pedwar, who nailed his history check to have knowledge of this entity: Abraxas, a demon lord of knowledge. It’s been a long time since this point in our campaign, but demons have become a focal point for it and it kind of started here with that early planted seed - even before I had the slightest inkling the campaign would be demons.

The rooms after of what was apparently becoming just a linear path wrapped a side quest the party had gotten while in town about a missing noble: Garhal Silvercrown had gone missing with his companions, and were now twisted to undeath by this haunting place they had fell. The party had been worried about them not running into this guy as soon as they picked up the quest, but I think that’s another thing you can do if you’re keen on adding a bunch of side quests - add them to the “critical path” of the players, so that they won’t need to poke around as much as they think they need to in order to complete it. Shortly after slaying a wight, two zombies, and collecting the noble’s signet ring (plus more gems tying to the door) they rushed through what would unmistakably be a dark room out of horror game to complete the cycle of that leg of the dungeon and return back to their starting area - their goblin hostage still tied up waiting for someone to come by and help him.

And that was half of the first level! By my count that took up one session in itself, and since this particular dungeon wasn’t large I figured they’d be done with it tonight, but that’s just how things work out. You’ll likely always plan ahead of what your players will be able to accomplish in a single night, but that’s a good thing - it’s less prep for you and a chance to think about how expand on the next segment for any story opportunities. The group decided to take a short rest and recuperate with their hostage before proceeding to the next half of the dungeon, but we’ll talk about that next time.

I hope my talk about dungeons has proven useful to some of you. It won’t be the last time I talk about dungeons but I figure it’ll give you some idea about how I do it well or poorly and some things you could bring to your table as well. But hey if you have any feedback to give me or thoughts you’d like to share please do! You can reach me by e-mail at dmdiscoursepodcast@gmail.com and on twitter @dmdcpodcast. Thanks as always for listening and please leave feedback for me on social media or on whatever platform it is you’re listening on or just tell your friends about my weird show. It means a lot that you folks are interested in this weird story I’m making with my friends. Take care, and have a great week.