I recently introduced my daughter Becca to the game “Dungeon!” With some modified rules, of course; Becca is only five. But “Dungeon!” is what I consider good RPG-training, and she took to it the way you’d expect a third-generation gamer kid to do.

For those of you who’ve never played this particular game, it comes with a large board covered with dungeon rooms on six different levels. Into each room goes a treasure card and atop it, a monster card.

The first-level monsters are easy to kill (hobgoblins, giant rats, etc.) with cheap treasure (bags of gold coins, for the most part), while the sixth-level baddies include red dragons and liches, guarding goodies culminating in the fabulous 10,000 g.p. “huge diamond.”

Sound familiar? It’s getting your feet wet for D&D, which I used to think of as the Freud of RPGs (because, like Freud, everybody learns that theory first but then move on to Jung or Skinner or whatever suits their personal style).

Stripped of all the good stuff, a lot of games are basically the same as “Dungeon!” Go in the room, kill the monster, pick up the treasure. That has its place, and it can be fun.

The problem often comes in the execution. I’ve seen, in published game supplements even, ‘dungeons’ that make absolutely no sense in the way they are built, the way they are populated, and the way they are equipped.

1. Construction.

The first thing you as the GM or writer must consider is the purpose of your ‘dungeon’ (and for convenience’s sake, we’ll refer to it that way although it could be anything from a cave to a castle to a starship, depending).

There are generic dungeon-generating tables the GM can use, and a roll of the dice will give you, say, a five-foot-wide corridor followed by a 10x10-foot room, followed by a staircase, followed by a thirty-foot-long corridor that branches into a Y.

While these can help out in a pinch, I recommend against them because they give you a random, senseless design.

Nobody’s going to build that way. Which is something to keep in mind even as you’re mapping out one drawn from your own head. If this is an actual construction, be it above ground (castle) or below (catacombs), you are looking at a lot of time, expense, and work to build it. There are tunnels to be dug, stones to be cut and transported, etc. No sane person’s going to put in a long hallway ending in a single room way out on the end.

If you want a loose collection of rooms joined by corridors, try using a natural cavern instead of something constructed. Or make that designer an insane person building at random (ever been to the Winchester Mystery House?) or someone with another pressing reason for doing it just that way (the pyramids of Egypt, for instance, or mine shafts and tunnels that end where the veins of ore petered out).

But in general, if you’re designing your ‘dungeon,’ you want to know its purpose. Form can then follow function.

If it is a ruined castle or forgotten temple, then at one point it must have been a functional castle or temple. You’ll need living space, storerooms, kitchens, laundries, smithies, craftsmen’s workrooms, everything that the people who were (or even still are) living there would need.

If it is a labyrinth built to contain a monster -- the team of Daedalus and Minos could be considered the world’s first dungeon masters -- then the function is different, so the form will be different.

It has to make sense.

This includes location. An evil overlord might have several valid and compelling reasons for building a stronghold out in the desolate wastes, but that wizard had also better have a good plan for getting supplies (including the initial materials for construction in the first place).

People initially built castles based on several criteria. They’d want a good site -- on a hill or cliff for view and defense, near farmland so there would be a source of food. They’d need it to be near a water source, a quarry for stones, a stand of trees for timber, maybe even a mine for iron ore.

True, you can get by with locating far from some of these, but if you need those materials or supplies, you’re looking at the expense and vulnerability of depending on imports.

Other factors to consider when mapping an interior would include:

Solid wall. Make sure you have enough of this for support. I once played in a game in which it seemed like every wall concealed a secret passage; the dungeon was honeycombed with them; realistically the whole thing should have fallen in with a big dusty crunch.

Drainage or sewers. You needn’t necessarily do a full blueprint, but at least keep them in mind. These are also a point of weakness; a lot more people are willing to creep through the sewers in a game than would be in real life, no matter what Rona Jaffe may have written.

Chimneys. In olden times when they built smarter, you’d find your fireplaces on interior walls to preserve heat. Nowadays, we locate them on exterior walls and wonder why our heating bills are so high. But especially if you’re doing a multi-level something, make sure your chimneys line up!

Stairs. Again, make sure these line up! You can always resort to trap doors and ladders, but these are inconvenient for transporting goods up and down; most people would prefer a staircase. Another thing to keep in mind is that spiral stairs were designed to give an upward-retreating defender the advantage, so the defender could swing a sword while an attacker approaching from below would have the inner column interfering with the swordarm.

And finally, there’s size. In construction, it really is important. You should never put something in a chamber that couldn’t fit through the passageway to get there (monsters too, as we’ll see in just a sec). If you have a massive piece of furniture or stonework, make sure you have a big doorway, or be prepared to say it was brought into the room in pieces, or the room was then built around it.

2. Monsters.

Live monsters just are _not going to be found sitting inside a closed, locked room waiting for adventurers to happen by.

Other kinds of monsters, okay. Golems or automatons or undead created for just that purpose, sure. In many ways, these non-living folks are the most convenient guardian/obstacles with which to populate your dungeon. They don’t have to eat, they don’t make much of a mess (except for some of the sloppier varieties of undead), they don’t have an agenda of their own.

But the drawback to them is that you then have to have a reason for them being there. Where there are no necromancers, there usually won’t be undead. Where there are no wizards, you won’t see many golems. So unless your dungeon was (or indeed still is) the lair of the evil spell-chucker, you’re left with non-magical wildlife.

The next easiest are the fungoid and amoeboid life forms. Here you’ll find your basic slimes, oozes, puddings, carnivorous mushrooms, spores, reeks, and even the occasional cube. These guys just sort of shloomp around and do their thing, which involves dissolving and consuming prey. They don’t need much in the way of sunlight, fresh air, or water.

But they will need a source of food, because although they will likely have slower metabolisms because of their simpler cellular structures, they’ll still need to eat every now and then. Most of the time, though, you can get away with saying they get along by sucking normal little bugs out of cracks in the wall, with the infrequent banquet of an adventurer wandering by.

The trouble with the amoeboids and fungoids is that they’re not very mobile, they’re not very dramatic, and a lot of the time they are pretty easy to kill (especially the flammable ones). In other words, dullsville. One or two every now and then, sure ... but a steady diet of them will have GM and players alike yawning.

Next step up would be the creepy-crawlies. You can get a lot of mileage out of bugs and snakes, especially giant ones, but remember, even they’re going to need something else to eat. If they’re left with just each other for long enough, pretty soon you’ll only have a few left. Though they might, by then, be really really big ...

The more evolved the monster, the more problems you’ll have to deal with in terms of the care and feeding thereof.

A dragon is a wonderful challenge -- high drama, high risk, high payoff. But dragons gotta eat. Maybe not often, but when they do, it’s likely going to be a lot. How is your dragon getting its chow? If it goes hunting, then it’s got to have a way in and out of its chamber (which means a potential way in for the party).

If your dragon is unable to leave, then it must be being fed. So who’s doing it? Where do they live, what do they eat, how do they come and go? And what do they do with the droppings?

Speaking of dragons -- long ago, has to be at least 12 years or more by now, I attended a panel at DunDraCon in which the speaker advanced quite a clever theory about dragons. That they absorbed energy from gold and jewels. This solved two problems at once, because it let the dragon avoid all those hunting trips, and explained the draconian lust for collecting and sleeping upon vast heaps of treasure.

Usually, if someone’s in charge of feeding the big monsters (one way or another), it’s your basic orcs. The most put-upon, downtrodden, reviled, common cannon-fodder baddies that ever were. Poor guys! If you’ve got tribes of orcs and goblins inhabiting your dungeon, they’ll need space -- or not; overcrowding can account for their reputed bad tempers. They’ll have their families with them, which brings up a whole new problem for your party: do they show mercy to the young, or do they take the “nits make lice” stance?

But your orcs and other monster-races are not going to be sitting around a room waiting for someone to come by either. They’re going to be out hunting and scavenging, fighting among themselves, and just trying to live their lives.

What does your monster want? I’m very into motivation, for NPCs and villains and even monsters. What’s the monster getting out of being present in the dungeon? A lair, some treasure, regular meals? Is it worth fighting to the death to defend? Is the monster there against its will, enslaved or enthralled, and might it be willing to turn on its master in exchange for freedom?

If your dungeon is a self-contained ecosystem (ie., nothing being brought in from the outside except adventurers), you might have just one or two big monsters, feeding on the smaller ones. It takes a lot of prey to support a small number of predators, and the prey will need a food source as well. The ubiquitous moss-and-lichens bit will only get you so far.

3. Traps.

Traps have a fairly simple purpose: to prevent an intruder from getting in, getting ahold of a treasure, or getting out alive.

But if the bad guys can get past it (which they’ll need to do; no villain is going to want to block the way to the vault with traps so deadly even he can’t get at his treasure), the good guys can find a way to do it too. Indiana Jones has certainly taught us that!

Any trap with a means to be disarmed (throw the correct lever, press the jewels in the right pattern, etc.) or circumvented (step on the floor tiles in the proper pattern) gives those pesky adventurers a chance to pass by safely.

One way to avoid this is by use of magic, but if the villain has the power to, say, teleport right to the vault, why bother having another way to get there? Brick the whole passageway in, and get there only by magic; that is much more practical than depending on traps.

The thing about traps is that there should be a way, a chance. They should be there to provide drama, atmosphere, excitement, and challenge. Not a messy insta-kill. There’s no challenge in getting squished to a grease spot by the proverbial ten-ton block.

All that does, at least the way I see it, is rub the players’ noses in the fact that their characters live or die at the whim of the GM. That’s not the way I like to game, and I have never liked being a player in such a game either.

The point of the game, at least for me, is in seeing the characters overcome the obstacles. If you just want to wipe them out, why bother playing in the first place? That applies to monsters as well as traps.

Traps can be troublesome in other ways. They run into the same problems of expense and secrecy as constructing the dungeon in the first place; someone’s got to build and install them, which means someone is going to know more about the dungeon than whoever hired the job done may like.

Anything more complicated than your basic pit is going to require maintenance. Even the most ordinary needle trap in a lock will eventually need a replaced spring, or a fresh coating of poison. And the more complex the trap, the more things that could go wrong with the machinery, especially after long years of unuse. Again, if maintenance is needed, someone’s got to be in a position to do it.

Sometimes a trap can be seen as a test of worth. Using Indiana Jones as an example again, think of the end of Last Crusade. He makes it safely through those thanks to the clues, which were provided to show the way, and required measures of faith, knowledge, and humility.

Compare that to the giant stone ball at the start of Raiders; Indy survives that one by speed, and agility, and raw luck. Not that there is anything wrong with those! It just lends an entirely different flavor to the whole sequence.

If you decide that traps are the thing for you, the “Grimtooth’s Traps” game supplements are a must. Even though your players might and probably have already read them, they are a wonderful starting point.

Conclusion:

My games tend to be more social than combative, but even I get the urge every now and again for a good old-fashioned “dungeon crawl.”

I’ve noticed these urges strike more often after I’ve watched any of a number of movies that make me think of gaming. Or after reading the latest issue of “Knights of the Dinner Table” ...

Next month: the place of humor, comedy, and comic relief; what they can bring to a campaign, and how a single joke or blooper can throw a serious game into shambles.

-- Christine Morgan

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