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.

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.

GYGAX'S FORTRESS

Gary Gygax is probably the best known name in Role Playing Games -- still, nearly 15 years after his death. Considered Dungeons & Dragons’ co-inventor and principal author of most of its early material, “Uncle Gary” was also a tireless promoter of his game and of role playing games as a whole. For the hobby’s ½ century Gygax’s name has been synonymous with it, he shouldn’t need an introduction, but it's still worth taking a close look at his adventure design legacy. Specifically how Gygax designed his dungeon adventures.

Gygax was author of many of the best early adventures for Dungeons & Dragons including: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, Vault of the Drow, Village of Hommlett, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Tomb of Horrors and of course Keep on the Borderlands, likely the most played Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time. While some of his adventures, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Tomb of Horrors, were at least significantly the work of others (Kask and Lucien respectively), though Gygax undoubtedly had a hand in them as well. His output was prodigious and his foundational adventures are still well known today. I’d argue that adventure creation, rather than rules of mechanics, was Gygax’s greatest strength as a designer. With Arneson, Gygax wrote a system of adventure or dungeon design into the 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but he didn't follow it long, and certainly not in his published work, instead innovating and diverging from his own early advice to pioneer a new style of adventure design. Yes, his most important contribution to the hobby was likely organization and promotion - and the hobby of role playing games owes him a great amount of credit, perhaps even its existence for his efforts there - but Gygax’s adventure design still stand tall a half-century later, and it's full of useful lessons and techniques. 

Gygax &  Design
Like all good designers, especially early in the hobby, Gygax’s design has its own flavor and concerns. For Gygax adventure design is most often focused on the nature of the forces opposed to the players and potential environmental factors or conflict among these enemies that the players can exploit. He was first a wargamer, and his signature adventures are far more “sieges” or “infiltrations” then they are “explorations”, though this is not universal or absolute. Gygax’s adventure writing itself is marked by an relative indifference to map design, and the use of sparse keys that offer the minimum of environmental detail while focusing on the monsters encountered and their military strategies or behavior.

Gygax designed a variety of scenarios over his long career, but the central challenge in Gygax’s best known adventures, at least the ones where he’s clearly the sole designer (again, not Tomb of Horrors or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks) is one of military tactics or strategy. In a Gygax adventure the party will succeed if they can outwit, destroy, suborn, or bypass a hostile, organized force more powerful than them. Examples of these forces include the giants in the Against the Giants modules, the humanoid tribes in Keep on the Borderlands, or the mountain giant and his flunkies in the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. In all cases the party is unlikely to survive a direct confrontation with the forces against them, and instead needs to use schemes, things they discover about and within the dungeon, or subterfuge to overcome them. Often these solutions require that the party access the enemy base/dungeon without alerting its guards, and then conduct a campaign of theft, assassination, and sabotage within.

The siege or infiltration scenario is natural enough, it’s the sort of thing that naturally evolves from skirmish wargaming -- where one wants to justify both a small group of characters and provide their player(s) agency within the context of a larger military conflict. In 2002, during a Question & Answer session on ENworld’s bulletin boards Gygax rejected idea that Dungeons & Dragons had an exact analogue to military siege scenarios, stating that “no actual D&D game module I've ever seen has taken the base, sieges, to the 'commando' raid stage, either in infiltrating a fortress of for breaking out of one to wreak havoc on the besiegers lines.” However, Gygax liked the concept, and claimed to be writing an adventure based on the scenario of infiltrating a fortress during a siege … his rejection of the idea appears more one of exacting terminology than to the suitability of the design itself. Setting aside the context of a strictly military “commando raid”, it’s obvious that Gygax often wrote adventures centered on infiltration as a part of a violent conflict - ambushes, evasion, assassination, and sabotage. While there are elements of dungeon exploration involved, including entire adventures written using other design forms, the infiltration scenario is distinct, and Gygax perfected it, even creating special tools to run it more efficiently. 

When interrogating this style of design, the first thing to notice is that the primary source of tension in a Gygaxian Siege is not supply depletion or the pure risk of random encounters, but the larger risk of an alarm being raised. Once the fortress is alerted the adventure will change almost fundamentally as the enemy forces begin to actively patrol, reinforce each other and gather at choke points. A siege adventure is not usually a race against the steady depletion of character resources like the traditional dungeon crawl, but an effort to get as close to one’s goals before the alarm is raised and the enemy begins to hunt the party.

The Underground Maze or Primordial Stack

Crawling Down From 1974
“Dungeon crawl” has entered the popular lexicon as a description of any sort of adventure in an underground or ruinous space. It’s a common way to describe video games and occasionally other forms of media such as a part of novels or movies. Of course it’s most common in Roleplaying games, because the concept comes from Dungeons & Dragons, specifically from the earliest iterations of the game  - 1974's Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. What is it exactly though?

The term derives from the redefinition of the word “dungeon” by Dungeons & Dragons. Prior to the RPG hobby’s explosive growth in the 1970’s and 1980's the term's popular meaning (itself not the original 14th century meaning) of an underground prison was almost the only one. One can offer theories as to why Gygax & Arneson chose to use the word dungeon in both the title of their game and as a descriptor for the primary arena of play*. Interestingly within the first 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, while the word dungeon is used more often than other descriptors for the place where adventures occur, it is largely in reference to the name “Dungeons & Dragons” or the title “Dungeon Master” for the referee. When Gygax & Arneson are serious about discussing the concept of the fantasy space the characters explore they most often use “Underworld” and sometimes “Labyrinth” or “Maze”. Dungeon is the description that stuck, and the word’s meaning is now far more likely to be the one derived from Dungeons & Dragons.

In the context of role playing games for “Dungeon Crawl” is most helpful as a term if it means something beyond a light aesthetic gloss connotation a particular type of D&D-like fantasy (or an element “Gygaxian vernacular fantasy” aesthetic to be more precise): a place of grim stone corridors, screeching not-men to murder, and the occasional treasure chest that bites. This sort of view of the dungeon and dungeon crawl aren’t a problem, it certainly captures something, but it also tends to create a lot of dispute, because it’s a surface definition. A handful of aesthetic cliches, this idea of the dungeon crawl is however immediately and intuitively easy to grasp -- it becomes the first impression of what a RPG dungeon consists of. It’s not especially helpful though, because it says nothing about how the adventure will work with rules or what sort of play it aims for.

To make the concept meaningful, as always I want to look at dungeon crawling and dungeon design specifically from the perspective of how well an adventure encourages or supports “the procedural exploration of a fantastic space”. This is my definition of the “Dungeon Crawl”. It’s what is often referred to as a “location based” adventure, but I would add the additional qualification that a Dungeon Crawl also emphasizes exploration by connecting it to risk mechanics.

Likewise, this sort of design is sometimes considered the product of the early phases of the RPG hobby, especially of early Dungeons & Dragons. To some extent this is true, Dungeons & Dragons started to define this style of adventure design beginning in the 1974 edition, but I would argue that the game quickly grew away from it, with early D&D communities rapidly pushing the rules towards more character and scene-based scenarios such as wilderness adventure and narrative paths as early as the late 1970’s. The Dungeon Crawl was sidelined for some time, and its development has been fairly slow since, or largely about moving away from the granularity of room by room exploration and risk management towards narrative structure or improving tactical combat. One could even say that every edition of Dungeons & Dragons since the first - starting with Greyhawk, has increasingly focused on character and combat options at the expense of exploration - but that’s an argument for a different time. I like dungeons and the Dungeon Crawl play style though, and so I find it useful to look at how they can be written, what past dungeon designers have managed, and how one can better design dungeon adventures today. 

Patterns of Dungeon Design
When I look at Dungeon Crawl adventures, I see a few patterns of design. these are ways that the author of a dungeon adventure chooses to create a space for exploration: the size and "shape" of the dungeon, where its challenges are, what sort of play will predominate, styles of keying and assumptions about how the adventure will be used that are incorporated into the design itself.  While not exacting there are many elements of dungeon design that repeat both in specific authors works but across entire communities and play styles, creating reoccurring patterns or perhaps standards of adventure design.  

The most common patterns in contemporary dungeon crawl adventures are Philotomy’s “Mythic Underworlds” or variants on the idea — large, relatively minimally keyed adventures that are almost always dependent on referencing rules manuals for setting and detail. Another common design pattern is the “Thracian Ruin”, after the style of Jenelle Jaquays, dungeons with layered history and greater internal detail to facilitate player interaction. Both of these design trends, the dominant forms of Dungeon Crawl, come directly from the same source: the advice and examples in the 1974 “original” edition of Dungeons & Dragons (“OD&D” or the “LBBs”).

Yet the Mythic Underworld and Thracian Ruin are quite different design patterns. They may derive from the same source, but obviously Jaquay’s late 1970's reading has very different influences from Cone’s early 2000's one and this leaves questions…

• What is the design advice in the 1974 edition?
• Does any pattern of dungeon design follow directly from the 1974 edition's advice?

A Fistful of Crystals

Character Generation
and House Rules for My Home Game

I'm going to be running a Crystal Frontier game online, the first semi-public game I've run since the end of G+.  In preparation rather then introduce my house rules piecemeal I've prepared a character generation and basic rules document for the game.

It includes the major subsystems for my house ruled version of Original Dungeons & Dragons (the 1974 pre-Greyhawk version, but not using Chainmail). This is the system I've used for several years and I find it works quite well for dungeon crawls. The goal is a quick, low complexity system that makes exploration a coequal element of play and can be used for online two to four hour sessions in an expedition based (each session you must leave the dungeon) campaign.

They make significant changes to the base OD&D system, though I think most of these changes fill in voids in the original rules or streamline areas where the design doesn't support contemporary games. At it's core though it should still be that same sort of D6 and D20 based flatter power curve, high lethality system as the original.

Classic Vs. Treasure, Part 1

All Illustrations are
Howard Pyle's from 1883 - 1921

TREASURE TROUBLE
One aspect of Dungeon Crawl play that All Dead Generations hasn’t covered in any detail is treasure. This is an oversight, because treasure, like exploration, like encounters, and like combat is an important element of fantasy RPGs and especially important to the older style of play that All Dead Generations discusses. When we consider how treasure works in fantasy RPGs it usually seems fairly simple, even in Classic games - pick up the treasure and bring it back to civilization for experience and leveling. It is this simple, this is the gist of treasure in Classic fantasy RPGs -- pure reward ... but like everything else in the interconnected edifice of Classic play treasure presents its own complexities that interact with various important procedures and mechanics. Unfortunately the way treasure is structured in most classic systems makes it less of a reward and more of a chore, eating up play time with logistics and calculation.

The Function of Treasure
First, recovered treasure is the Classic player’s metric of success. Even in Classic rule sets that provide experience for defeating or killing monsters (something I dislike as it sends confusing messages about the goals of exploration), the majority of characters’ experience will come from the treasure recovered in the dungeon. Random treasure generation has been a mainstay of Referee preparation since the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons however, and it has an enduring appeal because imagining treasure is delightful - it’s a space where wonder can enter RPGs, this alone makes it valuable. Yet, these formative random treasure systems, as found in all early Dungeons & Dragons, reject wonder. Despite the gambling style fun of rolling up random hoards, random treasure has been largely unvariegated mass of coinage.

There are mechanical reasons for these coin hoards, coins are far easier to generate randomly and far easier to track encumbrance for. Dungeons & Dragons has also long used coin based encumbrance, with characters able to carry a few thousand coin weight (it varies by edition and represents a failure point for early dungeon crawl mechanics - see below). This ease couples well with the gambling appeal of random treasure generation, and the random “treasure types” that appeared in the 1970’s white box have endured appeal, despite most older editions cautioning against coin hoards for various reasons. However, even when a designer or referee doesn’t use random generation or design advice cautions against it the treasure tables set the standard and expectation of what treasure looks like in Dungeons & Dragons, and from there fantasy adventure as a genre.

More influentially random treasure generation in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons provide guidance about the expected speed of character advancement. For example, if the party defeats a dragon in 1981 Basic D&D and takes its hoard they will find the glorious Treasure Type H, worth an average of 50,000 GP. This of course isn’t really a linear challenge system as even the relatively weak six Hit Die White Dragon has such a hoard, while the much more dangerous saber tooth tiger (big cats are absolute terror beasts in Basic) they will get only a few hundred gold from its paltry Treasure Type V (or more likely nothing - the chances of having even d100 GP is 10%). Still, Treasure Types and random coin hoards are the main way that early editions offer referees and home designers a means of visualizing the rewards of successful adventuring and so provides clear metrics for pacing and level advancement.

Yet, treasure should be more than coins. Coins are a simple game currency that characters can exchange on a 1 of 1 basis for experience points, but “treasure” is, like fantastic locations and strange creatures, a concept that offers up the excitement of fantasy. Yet I won’t suggest abandoning random treasure generation in favor of inventing unique treasure caches as part of adventure preparation, perhaps lovingly describing each valuable object after reviewing the online collection of the British Museum for inspiration. This is time consuming fun, but it neglects an important element that makes coin hoards useful -- coin hoards work perfectly with early Dungeons & Dragons coin based encumbrance system to create complications and allow players to make informed judgments about the relative value of specific treasures.

The coin system is still of course dull, but it need not be as it’s easy to expand and cover a wider variety of treasure with minimal change, once one recognizes its mechanical basis and if one is willing to set aside some of the implied setting it creates.

A STRUCTURE FOR CLASSIC EXPLORATION PROCEDURE

The Procedural 
Dungeon  Crawl

The “Procedural Dungeon Crawl” gets mentioned a lot on All Dead Generations” and many of the pieces here describe its theoretical underpinnings -- but what exactly is the Procedure in the Procedural Dungeon Crawl? Not “What is Procedure?” in some abstracted way, but specifically, what Procedure does one follow to produce a Turn of Classic Exploration play?

Below are two lists that breakdown how I would run a Turn of Exploration in both a Classical way (using OSE similar clones or 1981 Moldvay Basic [B/X] mechanics) and how I actually run my own games (using house ruled 1974 Dungeons and Dragons.) Both function just fine with the other rule set however (some movement distances are different, and by the book OD&D adds procedures for incidental traps that I omit because not every square foot of every dungeon has broken pit traps in it) as they are Procedure rather than mechanics.

Before I go into detail about how and why they work, here are the “Classical” and my own “Neo-Classical” (with plentiful ideas from other bloggers and designers) methods of running an Exploration Turn as I understand them:

CLASSICAL EXPLORATION PROCEDURE

TURN BEGINS
A. Referee calculates and Players note equipment and/or status changes due to passage of a 10 minutes.
B. Random Encounter Die Events are resolved. (Can Open Encounter Procedure).
C. Referee describes surroundings (Can open Encounter or Combat Procedure).
D. Players ask questions about surroundings or events and the Referee clarifies.
E. Players state actions.
F. Referee confirms player actions with clarification of any mechanics used.
G. Actions are resolved. Any movement is calculated.
H. Players note any status or equipment changes on Character Sheets.
I. Roll Random Encounter Die for next Turn.
TURN ENDS

NEO-CLASSICAL EXPLORATION PROCEDURE

TURN BEGINS
AA Referee describes surroundings (Can open Encounter or Combat Procedure) and applies Exploration Die results from the prior Turn.
BB. Exploration Die Events are resolved and noted. (Can Open Encounter Procedure)
CC. Players ask questions about surroundings or events and the Referee clarifies.
DD. Players state actions.
EE. Referee confirms player actions with clarification of any mechanics used.
FF. Actions are resolved.
GG. Players note any status or equipment changes on Character Sheets.
HH. Roll Exploration Die for next Turn.
TURN ENDS

Dungeon Crawl Parctice 7 - Wilderness Exploration Tables & Procedural Generation

WITHIN THE GREEN MORASS
Shadowed channels and dense thickets mean that encounters with the resident horrors of the Green Morass tend to occur at close range, 2d6X10’, unless the party is surprised in which case the encounter occurs at the monsters’ preferred distance (melee range except for the Scavengers who will engage with missiles at 80’). Monsters with surprise will attack, capitalizing on their advantage, unless otherwise noted.

D8	Denizens of the Unwholesome Sea
1	Vampire Apes (1d6/3): Mountains of aggression, stinking white fur, and pale pink flesh. Four-armed alpha predators of the Green Morass, always hungry for fresh blood and dominance. Vampire Apes have no fear and arrive booming and ululating.
2	Malign Thrall (1): Cheerful, with a shanty on its withered lips this mad hermit still wears the rotting garb of a sailor or explorer, rags hanging from a withered frame.
3	Dead Men (2D6): Shambling confused corpses: bones wrapped with the shreds of a naval uniform, sun blackened gristle wearing explorer’s boots or naked and sea changed.  The dead have no needs, but furious anger. They may ignore you however.
4	Scavengers (1D6+2): Crouch and men in travellers leathers, blackened mail. Each with a sheepskin pelisse. Hard-eyed and wary of the mangroves, they creep and watch.
5	Owlbears (1D6/2): Fat balls of grey fur and pink feathers with curved beaks. Smaller then many subspecies, the Owlbears of the Green Morass are well fed and numerous.
6	Plague Monkeys (2D6): Screaming from the trees, grey green with mouths of  ivory sickles, the monkeys are the eyes of the Malign Intelligence, tormented by hunger.
7	Sea Hulda (1D6/2): Languid singers of enchanting melody who nest along muddy channels, the Hulda are not predators but filled with mischief, curiosity and wild cruelty.
8	Droning Birds (1 swarm):  Hummingbirds, bloated to the size of a sparrow - each a carbuncle reflecting angry red and cool grey green.  They fill the air with droning song and seek to drown their jagged beaks in warm blood with singular purpose.

Dungeon Crawl Practice 6 - Small Point Crawl & Exploration Die

A LAND APPROACH

Approaching from the shore is no less dangerous than from the sea, and the area within a half day from the wrecks is an arcane sink, polluted with rotten magic. Wilderness Encounter checks in the morass occur once every two hours, including during the night, unless the party has camped with the Lost Lambs. However, beyond constant threats and strange happenings, the very land revolts against mortal life, making camping within the Green Flow Morass near impossible due to the mangrove's Vampire Ecology.

Despite the constant attention of biting insects and the sucking mud’s reek of vegetal decay, travel through the morass is beautiful in its fecundity - the profusion and variety of life arresting. A narrow reed choked channel opens into a dappled pond where gold and scarlet pitcher plants blanket the sluggish water. A siege of herons with bright banded legs, beaks and cascading tail feathers hunts along the shore of a white beach. The alchemical ceramic columns of a sunken Hemiolia’s pilot house rise from a marsh, jarring white against the Morass’s greys - a shaded portico that promises cool respite from the desiccating heat.



MOVEMENT AND THE MAP
The Morass isn’t huge, but it’s a dense and unruly maze of shifting channels, mud islands, red sand beaches and overgrown wrecks. Traveling through it takes time and rarely follows the same route, but as a matter of game mechanics the Morass is abstracted, its map is a simple point crawl, with dots noting each segment of travel. Assuming the adventurers are equipped with skiffs, coracles or canoes, items available and recommended at any Crouch Village, each segment of travel requires roughly two hours (approximated as six each day and six each night) and an exploration die roll. Without water transport explorers will take 4 hours and two checks per segment of travel as well as quickly becoming drenched in foul mud and briny marsh water.

An exploration roll, like a random encounter roll, is a D6 check that determines what the party discovers of encounters in the next period of travel. Used in wilderness travel it has the advantage of providing context for travel beyond encounters for wandering monsters: encounters, signs, weather, events, landmarks, and becoming lost.

A NOTE: Illusionism

What’s Illusionism, and why should you care while running a game?

Illusionism is a method of setting building or adventure design that raises the question of player choice or agency. It’s the practice of Game Masters or designers of changing encounters or events in game that will follow a specific path or create a specific scenario. The term itself is sometimes used pejoratively - but like most other things in a hobby or fandom that get people angry it’s a nuanced issue with multiple perspectives. Obviously GM actions that force specific results or events can be a problem for players when the players feel that their choices will lead inevitably to the same results. This is somewhat like the tendency of players in of computer RPGs to skip through cutscenes and dialogue because they expect that decisions about plot developments or the motivations and plans of their characters are pre-scripted or will inevitably lead to the same result.

In a tabletop game roleplaying the plans and motivations of both player characters and NPCs or factions in the setting are an area that tabletop can manage extremely well with a GM there to make the setting react reasonably to unexpected plans, shifts in allegiance or changes in player goals. In a video game the next adventure or scene has already been scripted and designed and cannot be modified should the player decide they want to do something else or approach things in an unexpected way, while a tabletop Game Master can easily change things to adapt a scenario to unexpected player decisions. While such improvisational adaptations might share elements of illusionism, they generally result in players feeling more connected to the setting and events then if the GM had simply run events as initially expected.

Ogre art from the 1st Edition Monster Manual

So essentially the danger with illusionism is that players will feel their actions and desires are meaningless, advancing a plot that the GM has already designed even when they want to take the game in another direction, and the advantage of it is that it can create more dramatic or responsive reactions to player decisions and character plans, goals and personalities. In dungeon crawls the advantages of illusionism rarely outweigh the risks - because the nature of the setting already contains a great many logical, diegetic (that is resulting from the story itself) restrictions on player choice. Many classic types of Illusionism are also more dangerous for the GM to use in a dungeon crawl because the sorts of decisions, especially decisions about character movement and encounters, that it tends to effect are ones that are already a focus of player attention in a dungeon crawl. For players to accept the GM violating the assumed nature of the setting: time, physics and other constants (for example putting the same mundane creature in multiple places at the same time to force a player encounter) it's best that these interventions are secret, unknown and relatively unimportant.

An alternative way of viewing illusionism is as a sort of inverse of ‘simulationism’ - the impulse to make your game as realistic as possible - entirely controlled by realistically modeled rules and chance. In the perfect (and entirely impossible) simulationist game the GM wouldn’t make any decisions, only consult rules and tables of chance and likelihood for even the most mundane events. As much as illusionism’s bad reputation is earned when GM’s use it excessively or clumsily to negate player decisions, simulationism deserves an equally bad reputation when ‘realism’ and the inescapable tyranny of chance are used in ways that make game boring or lead to frustratingly pointless character deaths (such as a GM who claims that characters have a 1 in 100 chance of slipping on tavern stairs or choking to death on a beer).

Exploration Play

THE DUNGEON IS FIRST A QUESTION OF SPACE

The first leg that the classic Dungeon Crawl stands on is “Exploration Play” - a description that points to (or obfuscates depending on how understandable the following is) the Locus of Play in the Dungeon Crawl. Characters in Dungeon Crawl scenarios or games are first explorers - adventurers even - not combatants, designed with abilities and ‘builds’ maximized for destroying specific potential opponents. Nor are characters in the Dungeon Crawl personalities first - they don’t require meaningful information about their pasts or goals (not to say these aren’t potentially fun elements) to play and the Dungeon Crawl isn’t designed with story growth in mind. Exploration play may include a good amount of role play, but it doesn’t focus on emotional character development in the sense of the examination and resolution of character flaws, traumas or desires. It also doesn’t ask the players to deeply inhabit their characters as representatives of a genre - a Dwarf fighter won’t succeed or fail in a dungeon crawl based on how well the player performs aspects of ‘Dwarfiness’ or ‘Fighter’. None of these other types of play are bad, but they aren’t at the core of the Dungeon Crawl experience. Instead the game is found in the characters and players direct interactions with the location itself.

From the 1st Edition Player's Handbook

A dungeon or location exists to be explored - to have it’s passages mapped, its puzzles solved, secrets revealed and inhabitants outwitted or pacified. The trick is understanding what that all implies and to make these exploratory activities both mechanically significant and meaningful for the players. Exploration is facilitated by more than a dungeon with a large number of keyed areas, or many encounters that will take multiple sessions to investigate or overcome. To make exploration meaningful the act of moving through dungeon locations needs to create a sense of ‘risk’ - tension and anticipation. In a scene or encounter based adventure tension builds as the narrative rises towards confrontation and the story advances towards climax - much like a novel or film. In a location based game the progress of the party in exploring the location creates tension without expected end point or climax: unraveling secrets, delving deeper, discovering its dangers and its potential rewards while steadily exhausting their resources.

Another way to say this is that there is no overarching plot to provide tension, and no predetermined, expected or rules generated climax that will become the moment of greatest risk and reward. I don’t want to suggest that you can’t have plot or set piece encounters in your game and still incorporate dungeon crawls - but if one is running plotted large-scale narratives it may be best to think as the crawl itself as a single scene or plot point. Nor is this to suggest that characters’ motivations can’t be tied to a location - a character may want to explore a location for personal reasons, and the GM can, even should, still accommodate that. A character’s backstory can be worked into a dungeon - a missing brother may have joined a faction within the dungeon or a lost heirloom might have been stolen away to the dungeon’s fastness - but this is an afterthought. Characters’ individual stories can advanced while exploring the dungeon, character background might even be a useful hook to initially encourage exploration, but personal character stories shouldn’t be the focus - both because this fails to offer incentives for other characters and because the Dungeon Crawl’s Design Principles make scene based revelations and narrative structure difficult to include without forcing the spatial complexity of the dungeon into a linear mold, scattering clues and scenes haphazardly or engaging in sleight of hand that degrades player trust. I don’t want to suggest that a good GM can’t pack a lot of story into a location or that a good location based adventure doesn’t lend itself to creating stories, and I’ll get try to address some ideas about how this works when I discuss the importance of factions in a a Dungeon Crawl, but the Design Principles behind exploration aren’t related to any kind of extrinsic story or narrative.

What is a Dungeon Crawl?

The blinding blackness of the underworld held back only by the sputtering light of your candles, lanterns and torches -- dim points in a vast ocean of darkness. Dank stone walls close in the and the weight of earth and stone above grinds down on a maze of corridors, galleries, vaults, tombs, caverns and ancient fortresses.  You trespass in the domains of long extinct subterranean peoples - the histories of their underworld unclear or unknown, their wealth abandoned and unclaimed. The darkness is full of death, yet it draws fools and fortune hunters with whispered intimations of gold for the plundering, only to devour them -- the dead's monuments melted candle stubs and mummified corpses clad in rusted mail laying forgotten in dusty endless halls.

The Rakshasa - 1977, Dave Trampier
AD&D Monster Manual

This is the stereotypical setting for fantasy table-top games, the titular ‘dungeon'. Acknowledge for a moment that the ‘dungeon’ is an utterly bizarre conceit, a setting that has few if any corollaries in the real world, an expansive multi-level maze of tunnels and rooms beneath the earth filled with treasures and home to monsters. Despite the absurdity, there are plenty of ways to justify and visualize this classic setting in the context of fantasy world building.

Planning and running the exploration of such dungeon, or at least running it well, is a bit more complex than a fictional origin and a few evocative descriptions of stone corridors or caverns teeming with bats. Running a RPG in a dungeon setting requires an understanding of a play style that’s fallen out of favor or been set aside in recent years and editions, and benefits from mechanics and adventure design principles that can at first glance appear antiquated or burdensome. The earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons were designed with a vast underground maze drawn on graph paper as the playing field, primary challenge, and largest, first, part of the setting: this is not true of more modern editions and adventures, including 5th Edition, which are designed with the idea of the adventure as a series of encounters which together create a story.

This difference in design is the first important element in running a dungeon crawl -- a dungeon is spatial environment, not a narrative one. There is little or no predetermined story. few events are designed or even expected to happen in a dungeon crawl campaign. The players characters tend to be less complex at the beginning then contemporary players may be used to and their motivations and personal backgrounds aren’t intended to be the source of future narrative. There are (often confusing) ways of talking about these conventions and how to play older editions that depend on gnomic phrases like: “Rulings not Rules” and “Heroic, not Superheroic” (both from Matt Finch’s excellent Quick Primer for Old School Games) ... they won't always help one understand older systems. Instead a larger framework is needed.  For me that framework is Proceduralism, the idea that dungeon crawl play depends on a set of often unwritten rules regarding how and when to apply the rules that determine success or failure in the fantasy world.

There is plenty to say about the interplay of mechanic, procedure, and table expectation that produce the Dungeon Crawl, but I also want to talk about how one might use a contemporary system to create a play style with some of the same elements and feel as that older style of adventure. Old School primers such as Finch’s may offer some ideas on ‘design principles’ and ‘game ethos’ (Ben Milton & Steve Lumpkin’s Principa Apocrypha is similarly interesting and more approachable source also available online), but without the ruleset to support them, cultural notes and a set of aspirational maxims will only go so far. This blog will try to note the distinctions between more contemporary play styles as well as considering if what sort of rule changes to 5th edition might make it better support "Dungeon Crawl” play.

WHAT IS A DUNGEON CRAWL?
Obviously a Dungeon Crawl is a setting, adventure, or part of an adventure where the characters spend the majority of the time exploring some kind of maze of rooms: a cave system, a buried city and hidden tomb or whatever else doesn’t stretch suspension of disbelief too far. Yet the dungeon need not be underground and it might not be a maze. An abandoned city is another traditional location which works well for Dungeon Crawl play and any location can function as a dungeon. Others have written about the nature of the dungeon more eloquently than me, but a definition of the dungeon that focuses on its mechanical elements and design principles should be more useful to the Referee then one that looks to its metaphysical purpose.

Interestingly, the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons has almost nothing to say about the existence or nature of the dungeon.  Though Underworld & Wilderness Adventures (booklet 3 of the 1974 edition) is about dungeon crawling, it doesn't explain much about what one is, choosing to immediately launches into peculiarities and specific rules regarding the exploration, lighting, and design of dungeons. The 'why' of the dungeon is assumed, even in the first edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax assumes the dungeon is a known quantity and is far more interested in justifying and describing how one might play the game in non-dungeon environments: the wilderness, under the sea, on alternate planes of existence. The Guide spends pages and pages describing these environments, their fictional relationship and underpinnings, as well as the rules that make them mechanically different from the default environment of the dungeon--but it doesn't discuss dungeons very much.

The assumption of the dungeon as default setting is such an inevitability at the publication of the Dungeon Masters Guide, in 1978, that it's section on "THE ADVENTURE" (after an admonishment to draw a map) begins:

"Naturally, the initial adventuring in the campaign will be those in the small community and nearby underground maze."

- Dungeon Masters Guide (First Edition - 1979) Gary Gygax, pg. 47.

The idea of an underground maze filled with monsters, traps, and treasure is already so natural after four years of Dungeons & Dragons that it needs no explanation.  It's a central concept to Dungeons & Dragons, yet there is very little about how to run a game in one in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (or Player's Handbook).

Even the sections that seek to aid new referees in running dungeon adventures are, much like those in the 1974 edition, short expositions of specific mechanics such as underground movement and searching speed. Rather then offer a theory of dungeons or how adventures in them work (something that the Guide does with wilderness and other types of adventure) Gygax provides the partially keyed map of a dungeon level beneath an old abbey along with examples of play. Examples are a great teaching tool, but they rarely address the foundational ideas and goals of a task. There are also some hints in the Appendices, including a large section on random dungeon generation, but Gygax's assumption that readers will already use and understand the underground maze as the chief location for adventure is absolute.

Little has improved today, though perhaps the knowledge that underpinned Gygax’s implacable assurance has withered. The 5th Edition Dungeon Masters Guide, while it's discussion of how to place Location Based adventures within the game is still limited, does a better job of encouraging their adoption, and notes a key conceit of the Dungeon Crawl that make it distinct.

"Within a dungeon, adventurers are constrained by walls and doors around them, but in the wilderness adventurers can travel in almost any direction they please. Therein lies the key difference between dungeon and wilderness: it's much easier to predict where the adventuring party might go in the dungeon because the options are limited- less so in the wilderness."

Where the 5th edition fails is that it doesn’t seem to understand what this limitation means. It doesn’t point out how the spatial limits of the dungeon work with mechanics that emphasize supply and randomized risk exploration.  It doesn't recognize that the dungeon emphasizes player navigation choices as it's limited but primary narrative or that it's goal is to elevate exploration to a coequal part or pillar of play. 5e’s advice on designing locations is limited to using them as backdrops for challenges, encounters, and longer external narratives that often depend on limiting player choice. Perhaps because of these omissions, the modern Guide seems reluctant to embrace the dungeon, despite a note that "Many of the greatest D&D adventures of all time are location-based. Creating a location-based adventure can be broken down into a number of steps."  Subsequent years and many published official adventures for 5E show that location based exploration really isn't the system's focus, or at least remains unsupported.