Dungeon Creation Thread

ITT: We groupthink a dungeon from start to finish as a group, similar to the setting threads we have regularly.

We are tabling the issue of system and mechanical statblock use with the dungeon for now.
Feel free to explore or add ideas to any idea here.

Other urls found in this thread:

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/44834887/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Things we need to decide for each dungeon:
Scenario:
>Race against time; a methodical expedition into waiting dangers; a dense horde of enemies; a search and rescue; a snatch and grab; a cat and mouse with a monster; Other
>A dungeon should be a story. It doesn't have to be a grand, epic story, but it should have some kind of beginning, buildup with some setbacks, and eventual climax. They can be traps, puzzles, combat encounters, even just some drama, but think of your dungeon as being a story that your party someday might tell someone else over a beer.

History/Purpose/Layout:
>The first thing I do is work out a purpose for the location and its history, then a reasonable layout, then figure out how time has fucked it up and made it MAZE-LIKE but not a full on maze.
>This also means I'm fond of traps that logically could reset on their own or be capable of multiple uses before a need to be maintained.
>I usually worry about this too, but not in secret or sealed areas that couldn't have been disturbed. I pull out all the stops for those.

History: What created the dungeon and what happened since

Purpose: What the dungeon physically is: Laboratory; Prison; Hideout; Temple; Cavern; Abandoned mine; Other

Layout: How it is structure to achieve its purpose, reflecting its current status and architectural style
>Not every room is going to have a thing living in it, either, depending on its purpose. Sometimes you just find an empty dining hall, or an old bathroom. Pantries, armories, cells if it's an actual prison dungeon. If there's a bunch of kobolds living in one room, but it's the third subbasement and you need the magic red key to open up the floor above them, how the fuck did they get down there and what the fuck are they eating?
>Where would the enemies be hanging out? Is this their dwelling, or did they recently ransack the place? Would they place traps in their wake in hopes of capturing nosy adventurers? Where would these being keep their treasures? Where would well-equipped, less fortunate adventurers die, leaving both a warning, and their equipment for the betterment of the party?

Denizens and Inhabitants: People and bests within the dungeon; Current/Former
>If there's creatures living in it, how are they alive? Where do they get water from? How does the ecosystem sustain itself? If there's larger predator creatures, what are they eating? Is there enough prey creatures to sustain them?

Traps, Puzzles, and Doors: Physical impediments to proceeding; Lethal, alerting, confining, active, static, resetting, other

Hooks and Lures: Why the PCs will enter the dungeon
>Maybe people have been disappearing, and your dungeon has a big bone pile in it somewhere. Merchants along a trade road being robbed, and your dungeon is just a small horde of bandits guarding bolts of fine cloth and crates of fine porcelain in a store room towards the back. Maybe the government is unstable, and so this dungeon is an underground resistance cell with lot of traps but few desperate, poorly equipped defenders, with partial plans of a greater plot on one of their bodies being the only treasure of note.

Dungeon Ideas Posted:
>Endless Mountain Dungeon: Legendary macguffin lies atop its schrodinger summit – One line idea
>Church Island Cult Dungeon - Cult abducting members & worshipping leader
>Game Dungeon – Artificial creation for the amusement of villains
>Pop-Up Dungeon – Dungeons that appear magically and remain, menacing the land until defeated
>Dungeon of Dead Gods – Actively being worked.
>Flesh Dungeon – Development started
>Tesseract – Recently worked on

Dungeon Design iInspiration:
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/44834887/

Random Dungeon:
The Dead Gods dungeon was started by rolling on the random dungeon generator, modifying as seen fit.
Feel free to try it yourself, like this user:
>A forgotten dungeon beneath a castle. Inside a certain room has a skull on a pike that whispers dark words. bugbears live in the dungeon. There are many risks of being possessed by demons inside these walls. The bugbear's treasure is a onyx demon statue. This dungeon is known to have an infamous torture chamber filled with steam fissures. There is an ancient well leading to a dark world somewhere deep inside. Arcane loadstones cover the dungeon's walls limiting the use of magic.

>The Vampire and the Lost Dungeon of Dead Gods

Features: dark horrors and black tentacles forged from the first vampire's efforts to trap the Gods that cursed it by keeping them permanently dead.

A mysterious expedition into danger with the lure of legends of god-killing magical weapons once owned by the original owner of the castle.

Long ago, a noble built a farm or plantation on the edge of a jungle inhabited by Mammalian Beastmen who worshipped ancient gods. The noble pursued trade with the beastmen, suspecting they were naïve and could be taken advantage of.
They were not.
The noble offended the beastmen and they attacked his settlement. He returned violence with violence, enlisting superior warfare to push further and further into the beastmen’s land.
When his forces came to their sacred temple, feeling the power of the place, none of his men would enter. The noble alone entered, defiled, and toppled the temple of their gods.
His campaign ended that night as the gods cursed him with an undying bloodlust. He killed his own men and retreated into the wild, slaking his untamed thirst. He did not return for many, many years.
Not until he had mastered his curse, his power, and his thirst.

The vampire traveled the world, mastered his body, and developed his powers. He gained wealth and influence and returned to finish his war. He devastated the beastmen, nearly slaughtering them all. He forced the shaman witch doctors to reveal their secrets, and using the darkest magics, he was able to forcibly summon the gods into physical forms, which he slew.
Trapping their last breaths, he was able to keep their souls from reincarnating, passing on, or even resting. He trapped the gods in a state of non-existence and held them there with an evil pact, using each gods high priest as an unloving, undead lynchpin in his dungeon of dead gods.
Above the dungeon, he built a seemingly normal castle, and reestablished the farm. His initial servants are long dead, but he has given the old caretaker the gift of long lifespan by virtue of the cursed power in his blood. The caretaker runs the castle while the Vampire spends decades at a time in the dungeon, working his revenge, resurfacing as a returning member of the noble family every so often.

He held the dead gods prisoner there long enough for the dark energies working to hold them corrupted the land, the plants, and even the people themselves. And yet he holds them, for the ceremony is not yet complete.
He must continue the rites until no trace of hope for their freedom remains and they will exist impotently in permanent unending death forever. Recently, he has gotten closer to finishing his task, but the chaotic energies of the dark magic have grown increasingly hard to control and hide.
They’ve attracted attention that might spell trouble for his plans of vengeance.

Beastmen:
Master caste ruling as traders, craftsmen, and leaders.
Slave caste that devoutly believe they are serving penance for past lives.
Religious acolytes and witch doctors, supporting different gods and wielding ancient alchemy.
Scraps of the beastmen society may still exist in the jungle, with rare lore passed down through generations. To the villagers, they are likely a scapegoat for any strange events that occur.
These Beastmen have one animal type, or maybe a hybrid of two, but with consistent features.
What sort of beasts should they be?
What is there current remnants of their society like?

Village:
The village surrounding the massively wealthy farm is steadfastly loyal to the Family, but is worried the family suffers from some curse as each young noble that appears to run the castle disappears after a while, a strange “disease” with no cure drains the life from villagers, and dark, twisted abominations are becoming increasingly more common.
What sort of culture should the village be like?
I imagined a mix of Caribbean and Romanian, but that’s just me being associative and a bit cliché.

Servants:
Only the Caretaker knows the full truth, but many servants know the Caretaker has lived unnaturally long and is far more powerful than his frail frame appears.
The servants have developed superstitions and beliefs about the castle, which they believe is the source for the strange happenings. They dismiss talk of curses as nonsense and believe the castle itself is simply a powerful spirit, looking after the unfortunate family. They even believe that servants fortunate enough to conceive and give birth on the property may bear children blessed with spiritual powers that attune them to the will of the castle and grant them great power. They happily display such miracles to any who demonstrate an understanding that the castle is a blessed home, not a cursed one.
What sort of undead-like abilities or mutations do the Servants have?
What kind of creature is the Caretaker?

Dead Gods:
4 seemed a good number and I tied the domains together like this:
God of the Ice Season, Moon, Darkness, Death, Disease
God of the Rain Season, Sun, Light, Life, Fertility
God of the Fire Season, Lightning, Blood, War, Anger
God of the Changing Season, Stars, Fate, Justice, Peace
There are three gods governing the seasons and a fourth god mediating between them, neither above nor beneath them, simply governing the changing of dominance.
What appearances or forms should they have?

Head Priests:
The undead leaders representing each of the dead gods.
By keeping them undead, the vampire prevents a new head priest from rising and renewing the gods.
What are the undead beastmen priests like?
How were they killed?
Were they avatars of the gods when they were killed?
Are the weapons that killed them still in them, near them, in the dungeon or in the castle?
What form of undead are they?
What could be used to kill them?
What would happen if they were killed, freed, allowed to be used in the ritual?
Are they intelligent undead?
Can they spawn other undead?

Other Thoughts:
>What if the servants pledged themselves and their descendants to service of the lord and his family so that when the Vampire needs to collect reagents for his dark rituals he has people to rely on. If said dark rituals took something in the neighborhood of 5 - 10 decades to complete it would make sense that few in the castle would ever be keenly aware of their lord's presence.
>From a servant's perspective no one would have seen the lord or his family for almost a century and then suddenly a grandchild or cousin surfaces, stays for a decade or two and then meets a tragic end on the road.
>Could have the head butler also be a vampire who manages the house and ensures that any loose ends and/or problems with the current story get tied up nice and tidy.
>What if the magic binding the Gods in the dungeon has been leaking up and slowly mutating and corrupting the vampire's servants? Some of them have become ghoulish, some can move unnaturally fast, etc.
>A vampire would have too many issues during daylight. A Renfield-like “revenant” is the term that comes to mind, but I can't find anything to confirm that.
>A forgotten dungeon under a castle, with steam, black tentacles, a trapping mirror, a scrying room where the vampire monitors the rituals in the dungeon, steam jets

(Other Thoughts continued):
>The vampire is exactly that: THE vampire, the progenitor of all vampires in the setting, think Cain or Dracula. He fled to the frozen north where the nights can last for months to give himself ample time to construct his fortress from which he planned and executed his vengeance on the god or gods that cursed him. Making pacts with eldritch entities gave him the power to slay his punishers.
>However, the death of a god is never a permanent thing, and such is his hatred that the vampire is ever searching for the signs of the rebirth of the gods that cursed him so that he might keep them eternally bound in death.
>The foul magics that allow the vampire to enact his plans corrupt the very earth itself, giving horrors far worse than anything man has ever dreamt a foothold into this world.
>The adventurers are merely investigating the castle. Perhaps to find why an "abandoned" castle still stands, perhaps to discover the reason why none of the would be lords' of the castle have ever returned from their scouting expeditions, or perhaps they have determined that it is the source of the nightmares that have plagued the nearby townsfolk.
> I just realized the metaphor. The vampire's efforts to ensure the dead gods stay dead are exactly like the original function of a stake through the heart of a suspected vampire. It wasn't to kill it, it was to pin in down in its grave.
>I need to make a note to generate some enticing items, some used in killing the gods, some of which will naturally be twisted by dark forces and cursed.

Flesh Dungeon:
Every adventurer that has gone inside the Dungeon has not yet since come out. Nobody knows at first that the dungeon is actually one big giant living monsters, but eventually they all do once they hit the digestive system and get burned away with digestive acids. The entire Dungeon is one big living organism that wants you and your party dead. It will try to crush you, eat you, kill you with antibodies, or drown you in bile. There is no big boss to fight at the end of the dungeon, just a giant brain you have to lobotomize
>The Flesh Dungeon needs a strong reason for the PCs to not flee and either bomb/magic it from outside or seal it up. A needed, indigestible mcguffin inside could keep them from sealing it up, but not from trying to kill from outside.
>The exterior of the dungeon would be apart of a mountain and the only way to enter it would be through a cave. It catches unsuspecting people who enter it and forces them down its many traps and pitfalls as they become digested. What starts out as maybe a search for a missing person turns into this struggle to survive.
>The death of the flesh dungeon leaves such a huge amount of organic matter underground that the ecology of the region is forever altered. The PCs are hounded by the townspeople for ruining their lives.
>Years later the PCs return and find the town is now an oil/diamond mining town and incredibly rich.
>In order for the PCs to kill the dungeon, they need a motivation large enough to make them not just try to escape. Trapping them in until they kill it is a delicate balance. It's already a scenario without a reward, adding any railroading might be too much.

Church Dungeon:
There's a cult that lives on an island in the middle of nowhere that worship a God that has never been heard of before. More importantly, the cult has been kidnapping innocent people and forcing them to join their religion. As it turns out, the God they pray to is also the cult's leader. He's bound his own life to the lives of every other member and gains power from their faith in him. But you can't kill him or else you kill everyone in the cult

Game Dungeon:
Just slapdash in the middle of a field, with the dungeon master someone who treats it like it’s a gameshow, narrating and broadcasting to fucknoswhereland,
And the host actually being an actual villain who is using the tower as a place to disguise his villainly,
Or as a meeting place for other villains
>I like the idea of several villains lounging around, idly betting on the horrific outcome.

Pop-Up Dungeon:
I've always had this idea for a game where Dungeons pop up out of nowhere and cause trouble for the people they spawn near and the only way to get rid of them is to complete it. So people start putting up money for whoever can get rid of it so that life can go back to normal. Kinda like a mix between a bounty hunter, an exterminator and a ghostbuster. People band together and go about solving these highly specific dungeons to reap the rewards people put up for them. And whatever they can get along the way, of course

Tesseract Dungeon:
Remember that just as the 1D lines that make up the sides a square surround a 2D space, and the 2D squares that make up the sides of a cube are surrounding a 3D space, the 8 3D cubes of a tesseract are surrounding a 4D space.
[pic related was not provided by the user and might not match their envisioned tesseract.]

Every time we discuss tesseract dungeons, all the attention goes to figuring out how the 8 cubes fit together, how characters would travel between the cubes, and whether gravity is uniform or relative, and ignore the most interesting thing about a tesseract- the 4D part.
Consider who created the dungeon, and why? Creating a 4D object (which would in all likelihood not be on the material plane) would doubtlessly be a large effort for 3 dimensional beings (why else would it possible for 3 dimensional characters to traverse it?). Too much effort to be just for show, (especially if they're 3D, and thus couldn't even see the entire thing). What if the tesseract is hollow? Consider the possibility that it was constructed to surround something that exists in four dimensions, as some sort of prison or cage.

>Ignore spatial anomalies. Being a shape that exists in 4 spatial dimensions has nothing to with bizarre anomalies. The possible exception being where gravity points to the center. This is a totally valid, and perhaps most realistic, method of using gravity in the dungeon (gravity points toward the center of the tesseract, and the center of a cube is the closest distance). That said, the following is designed with the more common variation, where down is subjective, in mind (though it may still be possible to use the above with some alteration)

Using a prison or cage as the reason for its existence, here is my proposal:
The party enters as a result of a mishap with a circle of teleportation, or some equivalent. From here there are two ways to do this, and primary objectives for the party:
1. Permanent Teleportation Circle or equivalent is on the ceiling or high up on a wall; party falls out, have to navigate the cubes so that the circle is on the floor.
2. The party exits through some kind of magitech equivalent of a Circle. After the last party member has come out, you may have the power supply run out, and task the party with finding the backup power crystals or equivalent contained elsewhere in the tesseract in order to escape, or leave it open and letting the party wander around.
Depending on where the portal was connected to, and possibly depending on whether option 1 or 2 was chosen above, it may be overgrown and inhabited.
[I like the idea of 1 and 2 combined. The PCs drop out of the Circle on the ceiling, it expends the last of those crystals power, and it sputters into darkness. Now they need both the crystals and to work up to the ceiling]

In the center of some of the cubes, the party will see a metal sphere. If the method of traveling between cubes is to have holes at the center of each face, with poles running running through them (one would get to the above cube by climbing up the vertical pole) the room would appear like pic related. If instead, there are doors on the walls to go to adjacent rooms and staircases/ladders to go up and down, taut chains will connect the sphere to the corners of the room.
You can see a glowing line or wire running down the pole/chain. Whether the glow is due to divine magic, arcane magic, or something else entirely running through it is up to you. The poles/chains may also be rusting.

Whatever is under the spheres will register as evil under detect evil, etc.
Messages in an ancient language on some walls will speak of a horrible monster which can move in inexplicable ways that terrorized the planes, and how the builders managed to trap imprison it. The message may go on to suggest how to re-bind it.

If option 2, some random room will have a chest with the crystals necessary, though the face the chest is on should take a while to get to.
In one cube the party will find a large strange looking device extending from the wall(s) or corners and into the center. looking at it, it seems that not all of the device is visible. Instructions on a wall (or all the walls) in the room will indicate that the device is for temporarily stunning The Monster. There should be a button or something that a character can use to activate the machine. If option 2 is being used, it may contain the type of gems needed, though not as many as needed.

In another room will be a machine or something that inscriptions say powers the enchantments keeping The Monster imprisoned. If option 2, this will also be powered by the same kind of crystals. If option 1, there will be some way to accidentally disconnect the machine.

if the power is disabled or the chains break, the spheres will momentarily shake, move back to the center of the cubes, and then fall, hollow. A shrieking sound similar to that of Giygas will reverberate from no clear direction.
The party will promptly receive an automated telepathic message informing them that the exit has been blocked to ensure The Monster does not escape. (Returning to the starting cube will confirm this to be true).

At this point, The Monster can attack by having tendrils intersect with the cube. 'Stabbing' attacks have the tip of one of the tendrils appear as a point that grows into a sphere[cube?] just smaller than the metal sphere. It takes a turn to retract the tendril. While intersecting with the cube, any physical attack can pierce its 'skin'. If other beings aside from the party are in the tesseract, The Monster will attack them as well. As long as they aren't far from each other, The Monster can attack targets in two adjacent cubes at once.

To defeat The Monster, the players must use the stunning machine, reattach the metal spheres to the limp tendril tips, put the spheres in place, and reactivate the power.
>[the GM’s face when the PCs start removing, collecting, and destroying the spheres from every cube]
Alternatively, they can kill it, but The Monster has an absurd amount of HP.
>[If it bleeds, we can kill it.]
After re-binding/killing the monster, the party will be notified that the exit is no longer blocked.

I wanted to work on this tonight, got too busy, and now it'll likely fall off the board before anyone bumps it.
Que sera, sera.

I have some ideas I might be able to write up and add later

That's a neat idea. Like that interdimensional wizard's sphere from Baldur's Gate 2, I think it was, that just appears in the middle of a city as a random dungeon.

That's a good example.
I personally thought of pic related.

How do we do an homage to pic related without being a cheap knock-off?

Still hoping for a chance to work on this.