Dungeon Design Note: Obstacles Support Exploration

Less Combat ... More Obstacles

I’ve been talking about dungeon crawling as a play style here for years, and I’m not alone among RPG bloggers to do so. Most of the points All Dead Generations focuses on, such as the importance of turnkeeping, supply mechanics, random encounters, navigating dungeons, and threats to characters that don’t involve hp loss, are fairly well understood in the Post-OSR space or at least fairly well represented.

Yet… I don’t see a lot of focus on the play style itself … especially in the adventures released. Perhaps dungeon crawling just feels old and boring compared to the popular subjects of “high level play”, “wilderness crawling”, or “mass combat” … but rather then complain about what people like at the moment, I suspect something more is at work. Just as you can’t bake much of a cake you can’t run much of an exploration based dungeon crawl without a dungeon that supports exploration. 

As I’ve mentioned, writing good dungeons is hard, and this means too many dungeon based adventures, old and new, aren’t designed for dungeon crawling, instead they usually focus on combat encounters and sometimes complex puzzles … This won’t do it, not alone. Set piece combat and a complex room puzzle can’t make for a solid exploration adventure, because they so easily become a series of disconnected scenes. The core of Dungeon Crawling is players making informed choices about where to go in a location and “obstacles” to overcome to get there.

An obstacle is a relatively simple challenge that impedes further exploration or makes it risky in some other way. The obstacle can be something as simple as a locked door,because obstacles are smaller in scale, less complex, and less threatening then set piece puzzles or hidden traps. They aren’t intended to offer a serious threat or difficulty and likewise don’t protect significant treasure. Obstacles are a challenge that requires player intervention or resources to move past, but isn’t likely to create a permanent obstacle.

The function of obstacles is largely to root the adventure in the location and offer alternative challenges along the potential routes of exploration. For example … the party might head North in the dungeon and encounter a locked steel door. Not having one of the obvious tools to pass it (a thief with lockpicking skills or the knock spell) they have the options of retreat (returning next session with tools/spells), to search for a key, or to seek an alternate path through the dungeon that bypasses the door. 

The first of these options (full retreat) is costly and discouraged by the risks of random encounters, including that of restocking between sessions and the equipment or supplies expended to reach the obstacle.  Full retreat is of course undesirable, the reverse side of the long despised “15 minute adventuring day”. While this undesirable situation can happen when players fetishize caution but it is usually the result of problems in adventure design. If one’s players have decided to deal with risk by retreating after every encounter or to perfect thier approach to every puzzle and obstacle the best course as a referee is to increase the risk of delay and the cost of slow exploration … rival adventuring parties that sweep in and loot areas the party is “saving for latter”, rile up dungeon inhabitants or set traps for the party are an effective way of doing this.

In most cases a party will choose one of the other two options: to search for a solution to the obstacle or blaze an alternate route. This depends on the availability of either clues and suitable materials, or alternate routes, and makes obstacles an issue for designers even more then one for players.  A well designed adventure must provide these alternative and tools, rather then offer a single linear path or insufficient tools. To put it another way - when the party finds a locked steel door they should also find clues as to where the key for the door can be found and/or have passed other potential routes. 

Of course alternate routes will themselves lead to obstacles and tools may require over coming some challenge to obtain. Trying to bypass the locked door might mean taking another route past a guard post … or perhaps backtracking to one and obtaining a set of keys from the guards. Obstacles can have this interplay or remain independent, but collectively they make it useful for players to understand the dungeons layout and offer a variety of challenges that different parties may choose among to reach the same goals or locations within the adventure.

Dungeon Design Note: Defining Interactivity

A lot of dungeon design advice focuses on “interactivity”, and to a degree this word can be a meaningless substitute for “stuff I personally like”. Yet one should strive to write locations with “interactive elements”. In the context of location based (or dungeon crawl) adventure design interactivity in an adventure means the degree to which there are obstacles and dangers beyond inimically hostile monsters and simple traps. An interactive adventure describes things in the area or room “key” that the players can ask questions about and do stuff with…

STEP INTO THE DUNGEON DRESSING ROOM

Interactive design offers elements of the adventure that aren’t a superstructure for simple die rolls - something beyond simple traps to “save” against and monsters ready to “fight until killed”. The more reliant one’s adventure is on these sorts of purely mechanical challenges the more the RPG becomes a sort of dice and board game. It’s likely that to some degree this was how Dungeons & Dragons was originally envisioned. That the dungeon adventure was originally intended to be played from something like the “zoomed out”, impersonal perspective of a wargame. OD&D reads like this at times, and one can imagine a referee running it who rolls each turn and declares new mechanical challenges or events … “You encounter three Ogres” or “One of your hired footmen falls into a pit trap as you go down the hallway.” Players then roll dice to fight the monster and remove resources such as their missing footman from their sheets, then they collect any treasure, move a few squares on the map and the next turn begins.

To run such an adventure you would need basically a map and set of random encounter tables, or a location with keys like this:

AREA 1 5 Orcs, 50 GP

There’s not a lot for designers to do with this kind of adventure, the dungeon generation tables at the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide can generate a decent version of this sort of adventure. However, this isn’t how RPGs have ended up being played by most, not even in the early days of the hobby. Some outliers like Dave Megary’s DUNGEON! and the amazingly charming Rules for the Game of DUNGEON by then teenage Craig VanGrasstek seem to have sprouted from Arneson’s Twin Cities game, but for most, and certainly in 2025, this style of dungeoneering board game is not considered an RPG.

Gygax also recognized this over time and didn’t want to play a board game. The few pages of “Solo Play” dungeon generation tables he originally published in the first issue (Spring 1975) of Strategic Review Magazine were included in the Dungeon Masters Guide as Appendix A, but had added random generation tools in Appendices C, G, H, I, J, K, L, and M - mostly adding description and specifics to the bare halls of the earlier version. Appendix H even includes “Dungeon Dressing” - the sounds, smells, air movements and mundane objects that might be found in a dungeon. This, along with Gygax’s dungeon design, show an appreciation for “interactivity” and a step away from the board game possibilities of early D&D.  Gygax may have written more military or wargame style scenarios then some other designers, but he wasn’t playing a board game like adventure limited to mechanical challenges.
FROM PROCEDURAL GENERATION TO BESPOKE
Of course these type of random tables suffer a lot of issues - the most important being that the more complex randomly generated spaces become the less thematic and interactive they can be… that is the octagonal room filled with ... a feculent smell, mushroom patches, a chasm, 5 orcs and a portcullis trap doesn’t do much more than the ultra-minimalist room. The smells, sounds, trap, and room contents are only incidentally related to the room’s inhabitants and the contents of surrounding rooms. They are disparate descriptive elements that players can interact with by asking questions about, but they don’t “do” or “mean” anything that will help the players. All these sorts of dungeon dressing accomplish is to give a vague sense of the real to the dungeon - it is full of things and fixtures, just like real spaces.

Natural History of the Mantichora

A HUNTER OF THE VERGE AND WASTE

At the heart of all violence, atrocity, and suffering is fear, and a mortal's greatest fear is death. Some will do anything to avoid it, face any indignity, make any compromise, or commit any crime. The metamorphosis of the Mantichora requires all three: transformation into the ungainly and bestial, a pact with the foulest of demons, and crimes unending.

This is why the Mantichora is shunned, why he hunts the waste, desolation, and the verge ... and why he preys on man. The cursed diet of the Mantichora is pain, fear, suffering, and panic. He laps it in with the blood and flesh of his victims to thrive, heal, and endure - immortal unless murdered. It takes an evil heart to become a Mantichora, and the size and ferocity of its monstrous form is in proportion to the malice of the man who becomes one. Past crimes and cruelties offer the initial sustenance to the demon who shares and changes the Mantichora's human body to monstrous mien. A passionate murderer will only grow to the size and shape of a wolf, while the true Mantichora, winged, spike tailed, or spitting fire rise from souls so vile no mere catalogue of crimes can plumb the depth of their wickedness and spite.

Mantichora are thus of two kinds in proportion to the crimes of the men who become them. The lesser of the foul breed is subservient to the greater.  Both retain the twisted minds of twisted heartless men, though all human desire is subsumed by the demon’s hunger for the flesh and pain of others. The distinction between lesser and greater is one of size and pussiance not mind or demeanor. 

In strength and appearance, Pards, the lesser Mantichora are like predatory beasts while the greater I are akin to demons: winged, gigantic and enhanced by foul sorcerous features. All Mantichora share the head of a man, swollen or shrunken to fit their beast’s body, with features recognizable beneath usually unkempt beards and manes. However, the bodies of Mantichoras differ dramatically, always that of a quadrupedal predator or scavenger, but beyond that there is no pattern. The Mantichora’s form is stolen from whatever creature devoured the host’s dying, demon wracked body, the scavenger corrupted and subsumed to become the basis of the Mantichora’s new flesh. The lizard, the dog, the lion, the wolf, the rat, and the pig all lend their forms to the Mantichora, but even among the lesser Pards further transformation is common as the demon within shapes the animal and man after its own perverse whims. These demon boons are more common and dramatic in the greater beasts, and they begin with the creature’s wings and enormous size, but include numerous other horrific and dangerous transformations, with each greater Mantichora’s form warped in some significant way by its demonic symbiote.

Most Adventures are Bad - An Adventure Writing Process

This is an odd post, it’s adventure design advice, specifically dungeon/location based adventure design, but it’s not about specifics, just the process. I have been reading recently published adventures again and I’m not especially impressed. Similarly the recommendations I increasingly see in Post-OSR (often just labelled OSR) spaces are largely for very old adventures from the TSR era. At the same time there’s more new adventures published for OSE, Cairn, and any number of other Post-OSR systems or B/X clones than ever before…

So why do a lot of adventures stink? I mean this, and I promise you my standards are not high, but a lot of what I see published is similar to or worse than the products of forty or fifty years ago - when the idea of the published adventure was still emerging… How can this be? Yes, there are people using “AI” to write and illustrate adventures and flooding DTRPG with them - and they are universally terrible. Also, the barriers to publishing are so low now that there are children publishing childish things, and maniacs hammering out a dungeon in a few drunken hours … I’m not talking about these circumstances. I mean adventures written by people who clearly care, and clearly spent time, but still failed to produce playable adventures…

How does this happen?

I ASK YOURSELF ... WHY IS MY NEW ADVENTURE SO BAD?
Even if it's not. Ask these questions.

• Am I afraid to use my own ideas, did I just rewrite the simplest, most cliched adventure “as practice”...

• Did I have some notes from when I ran a cool adventure at my table … and decide drop them into a layout program... 

• Did I have ideas for each and every room, that are all different and unrelated…

• Did I decide I couldn’t draw maps, so why bother ? Do I think maps aren’t important…

• Did I have one cool set-piece idea and couldn’t think of anything for the other 5-25 keyed locations on the map I have “borrowed”... 

• Have I never played this system before, but figured that every game is basically the same…

• Did I write a “five room dungeon”...

• Did I use a random generator to fill the rooms of my dungeon…

• Did I get bored after the first few rooms and think everything else could just be improvised in play…

• Did I only want to do one part of the process, like design cool monsters, and rush everything else…

• Did I even want to write an adventure or did I write a cool history of a fantasy location and grudgingly add a map and key…

• Have I heard that location based adventures don’t need “stories” or that stories “emerge” from play and take this too literally…

• Do I have the creativity of a doorknob … or did my “market research” tell me people like bland and cliched adventures the best…

Obviously this isn't an exhaustive list, there are lots of other things to do and things to avoid when writing an adventure. Also recognize that of these mistakes none come from malice or personal defect (even a lack of creativity is something that comes and goes). Mostly mistakes come from fear or misunderstanding of how to design an adventure for publication. Writing adventures is a distinct skill, and it’s not one that’s taught anywhere. It is neither entirely a technical process or entirely a creative one. It is not writing a novel or a screenplay because an adventure (at least the location based adventure) isn’t about a narrative structure.

Fear in a Handful of Dust

A Brief Barrow Fields Gazetteer

I was born on the Cidro. The City of Fountains, back during the war. Devil's pox and the proscriptions took most of my family. Left my poor mother, my brothers and me. So I headed north to prospect with the Blockers, they were robbing gems on the Crystal Frontier. In the poisoned dark among the tombs and the haints, were many a young man who took leave of his life.  I could see the blood on the crystal where others had died. I took myself away in the year '85.
 
Here's where I stopped, in the cool shadows of the great silent mounds. The skills that I learned in the gem mirrored halls have served me well here year after year. Most the old dead rest easy, among their bronze and their silver, and I've built a life from their bones and misfortune. But it's all cut and dried now.  I  came off moor when we diggers were kings.

- Robero Dulce, 86, Digger

The Bone Lands, Barrow Fields, Moors Dolorous, the Big Dig … a fragment of the Frontier that stands apart, on the lee slope of the Maiden Tombs.  Soil gone cursed and acidic, but still wetted by downslope fog, the land’s pastures have long transformed into gray moor. Grim and drab, it is a landscape of darting brindled hares, twisting scrub oaks, obscene lichen, spider-faced black vipers, and skeletal euphorbia bramble. Persisting among the moor’s wrack, the legacy of ancient times and ancient death. Everywhere. Bone fragments in the gravel, sigil stones tangled in briar, empty cists open in the sod and the stone topped barrows that loom from the obscuring mist.

This connection to the deep past sets the Bone Lands apart from the rest of the Crystal Frontier, while their uninhabitable harshness makes them just as much an unclaimed waste. The Barrow Fields are a fragment out of ancient day, a heroic age before the Sky Tombs began to plummet in fire from the firmament bringing poison and wonder. Before the Warlock King staked a claim on behalf of Kosse Sildar’s people and brought a new war and new kinds of terror to replace the old. Before even old Kosse Sildar’s and its pompous, chivalric insistence that it was not a servant to the Empire across the mountains to whom it tithed a conqueror’s share of its wealth.

This is no argument for the glory of the Barrowland’s past. Write no poems on the glory of an age undreamed of. The ancients rotted the land as thoroughly as The Warlock King’s demon hosts, Kosse Sildar’s excesses, the Empire’s casual plundering, or the chromatic blight that leaks from the Sky Tombs. Acid soil, haunts, and foul beasts are not the only legacy written on the land by the Chariot Kings and Palace Queens of old, but they are of a lot with the rest. The hulking barrows, deep pits, and stone dolmens contain silver baubles, green bronze, mountains of ancient bones … all tainted with hard death, and blood sorcery.

Geographically the Barrow Fields remain a strip of land some marches deep that runs across much of the northern Frontier, just beyond the foothills, from the Emperor’s Ribbon to the river. They straggle down toward deep desert, ending in a series of rugged bluffs near the Silver Highway to Old Argento. For the discerning Gem Robber however, they are a “hole in the map”, largely free of fallen crystals and occulith, but full of a particularly distasteful sort of danger that makes them unworthy of notice.

In the Bone Lands they feel different of course, everywhere has its local pride. Pride in the least of things. For the hardy few of the Bone Lands that’s pride in hard graft and the desecration of the ancient tombs. There is one valuable that the desolate moors are rich in…the ageless dead. The men and women of the Barrow Fields, proudly proclaim the title “digger”, and mine time yellowed bones by the ton … for ancient bone, steeped in rotten spellery has no modern equal as sorcerous fertilizer. Throughout the Empire, “Maiden Tomb Bone” or “Barrow Meal” is a panacea for the ongoing agricultural decline. In the failing fields of Green Hive, Syndicators plow it under to revive alchemically enhanced crops and in the gardens of Dawn Rill the gardeners feed their prize topiary on the Barrow lands’ residual magic.

AN INTRODUCTION TO DUNGEON CRAWLING

You want to run a “Dungeon Crawl” adventure… Not just an adventure in a "dungeon", but a Dungeon Crawl - that distinct, classic mode of RPG play about exploring a fantastical space, obtaining its treasures, and unraveling its secrets ... while surviving its dangers. Notably, the first rule of Dungeon Crawls is that surviving dangers does not always mean destroying or even overcoming them.

Dungeon Crawls should emphasize the tense experience of exploring a wondrous and dangerous location. These adventures will be more enjoyable if the referee pays attention to and uses the full suite of exploration rules while omitting even traditional rules that limit them, such as “darkvision” or “infravision” as a natural ability for characters. I encourage you to play with turnkeeping, encumbrance, and random encounters so you can experience how these mechanics work together to make navigating the fictional space tense. To help, this essay offers advice and even some streamlined alternatives to some classic exploration mechanics.

However, beyond mere game mechanics, this style of RPG depends upon utilizing a set of procedures—rules about how, when, and in what order the characters can act—that should make navigating the unexplored depths meaningfully tense. In particular the classic version of Dungeon Crawling relies on three ideas, and their corresponding rules, without some version of which the adventure is likely to be a less enjoyable experience.

1) Turn Keeping: Turns are important! They are the foundation on which all other Dungeon Crawl procedures are built. Though the Exploration Turn or just “Turn” is commonly described as ‘about ten minutes of time within the game world,’ it’s best not to get hung up on exact measures of time. This is a game, and like many games it is organized by turns. One player goes, then the next—or in this case: the player group goes, then the environment reacts through the referee. Because of this it’s more useful to think of Exploration Turns as an abstract unit representing the amount of in-game time it takes to perform most useful actions: moving, examining a room, or interacting with some object. After the players act, the setting acts and takes its own ‘turn’ by depleting the party’s supplies and checking for a random encounter. Of course some useful actions may require multiple Turns, and that creates greater risk.

2) Limited Supplies: Attrition is one way a Dungeon resists being explored. Players are rewarded for learning a Dungeon’s secrets by being able to venture further while enduring less attrition. Hence encumbrance rules (either based on coin (CN) weight or a “slot” system) are an essential limitation on the player’s resources. Time spent in the dungeon expends resources, especially light, and players must retreat before being trapped in deadly darkness. Encumbrance and supplies also force players to make decisions about what treasure to take. 

3) Randomized Risk: Dungeons are filled with tricks, traps, foes, puzzles, and confusing passages. The safest way to deal with them is to slowly and cautiously move through the space checking everything with the infamous  10’ pole and other tools. This makes for a tedious evening of adventure gaming. Besides the depletion of light and other supplies, the counterweight to player caution is randomized risk. Random Encounters are rolled once per Turn or two, and threaten the party with a potentially hostile creature that offers no or very limited rewards for fighting because most or all character advancement comes through recovering treasure. Worse, Random Encounters will often be more powerful than the party, as it is not essential to fight them and they represent the manifestation of risk for players who push their luck too far.

Together these three design principles and their supporting mechanics create the tripod that holds up a Dungeon Crawl. Though some may seem silly in the abstract, without them exploration becomes far less exciting and tense.

A Few Crystals More 1 - Magic Rules for My Games

I've been running an ongoing Crystal Frontier campaign using the "Fistful of Crystals" ruleset for the past several months, and at the same time finishing up editing and layout on a larger dungeon for publication - the Iron Barrow.  Both projects mean that I've had to take a long look at how I treat spells and magic users.

Below is a set rules and in world explanation for how I see sorcery in my games, and the rules I use to make it more interesting. In the attached document I've also included examples of several starting grimoires and a grimoire of high magic - an necromantic text that effectively provides a "Necromancer" Subclass.

Stena the Beautiful - Plague Prophet, Lich
and Antagonist from Bones of Bronze

Sorcery on the Crystal Frontier

Standard magical practice comes from many traditions, and each magic user is likely to command only the one they are originally taught or naturally adept at. Only through long study and the discovery of specialized, advanced forms of magic can sorcerers switch this focus, and again, only to a particular field or magic. The nobility of the Empire, would quibble with this distinction, claiming that their academic arcanism is the study and knowledge of magic itself, but this is a theoretical debate - Imperial wizards simply cannot perform the feats of sorcery that other magical traditions excel at.

It is more common to think of the majority of magical arts, including arcanism, as “common spellery”, or simply as “magic”, with numerous distinct, but related traditions. This means that only followers of a tradition may use its spells, but that there is enough similarity in the way the forms of common spellery function for practitioners to transcribe spells from one tradition to another, much as one might translate between languages. 

More advanced, or at least unique, fields of magic exist as well. These are sometimes referred to as “Mantia” or incorrectly as “High Magery” and though not always more powerful or complex than common forms, function in unique ways that are antithetical to the forms of common magic.  The practice of a Mantia is an all consuming study for a magic user who undertakes it and they such practitioners must rely only on their own research or spells from within the tradition to expand their spellbooks.