Going into a nearby cave system or mysterious underground death maze is fine, I guess. But for a really unforgettable 'dungeon', try shaking things up a bit. You can literally invert the concept- remove the walls and roof, and sometimes even the floor. You can stage encounter rooms vertically. You can have a dungeon that takes place entirely in someone's dreams- it's up to you!
So, how do you do this? The 'easy' version is a rooftop battle, taking place on a variety of flat topped-roofs joined by bridges or ramps or ladders. An example of this is playing the rooftop missions in Inquisitor: Martyr, which I'v been playing a bunch recently. Some rooftops might be close enough to have fierce ranged battles across the gaps between them, or allow characters who have some kind of flight ability to travel between them, disrupting opponents' tactics. Falling off might mean certain death, or it might mean plunging to the alleys below, taking 1d6 of damage. If you want to make the stakes higher, roll 1d6 to see how many storeys down the person falls, inflicting the appropriate amount of damage, and maybe taking them out of the immediate fight, or maybe only temporarily incapacitating them. This lets you still write your dungeon using a basic dungeon map, you're just pushing it out and removing all the 'blocks' where the walls would be. For a more intriguing battle, fighting your way up the interior (or exterior!) of a rampaging colossus, trying to immobilize some limbs to prevent property damage, or unlock pathways to other areas which might let you stop the colossus in its tracks altogether. On the way, you might have to battle infesting creatures within the structure, improbable death traps caused by whirring gears or jets of steam/fire. In this instance, you can still keep your standard dungeon rooms, you're just turning them so they're stacked, rather than all on the same flat plane. For more disconnected dungeons, like the Fade quest in Dragon Age, you can abstract all of that "euclidian geometry" and "physics" and "reasonable sense" garbage. Look at it like you're reading Alice in Wonderland while tripping on LSD. Sure, touching the teapot makes you enter the vast and cavernous Teapot domain where you have to battle the Walrus of Dantioch, while entering the hedge maze might trigger the battle where each of you becomes a mouse and struggles against the Pits of Sadness. Nothing has to make sense, and you can skip from encounter to encounter without having to worry about any specific interactions- each one is a separate domain which can't influence the others. I hope this gives you some ideas to work with! Also posted on Game Masters Stash on 3 June 2020. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
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