Dungeon Brainstorming

Hey TG, are you working on a dungeon (or haunted house, or derelict ship, or any enclosed dangerous space)? Are you stumped for ideas for one aspect of it? Talk about it here!

I'll start:
I'm building a mad wizard lair with multiple levels with different focuses (various labs, an evil temple with cultist, barracks for a future orc army, a goblin tribe in a forgotten section, etc). I want to set up a situation where outsiders discover multiple entrances to the dungeon in a short space of time, despite the dungeon being entirely unnoticed for the 50+ years before that. I'm thinking maybe the dungeon is under a city, but I'm not married to that idea if there's someplace else cool to put it.

Other urls found in this thread:

mediafire.com/download/wb8n4t5499j98ig/Central Casting - Dungeons.pdf
mediafire.com/download/925yswz97sdm6lf/Engineering Dungeons.pdf
mediafire.com/download/ol6vk60xvnftxd5/AD&D 1st Ed - Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.pdf
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Have them discover the entrances independently. Then later they discover these multiple entrances all connect somehow, and that there's an entire dungeon beneath them.

I was more thinking I need a reason for the independent discovery of multiple entrances within a few weeks of each other after the whole complex has been hidden for years

mediafire.com/download/wb8n4t5499j98ig/Central Casting - Dungeons.pdf
mediafire.com/download/925yswz97sdm6lf/Engineering Dungeons.pdf
mediafire.com/download/ol6vk60xvnftxd5/AD&D 1st Ed - Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.pdf

There was an earthquake, and a cliff face that had been covered by up by an avalanche 50+ years ago is exposed.

There are other entrances in the splits in the ground that opened up during the earthquake.

Perhaps the earthquake was a man made (monster made?) laboratory experiment/mass casting spell casting failure....

Perhaps a group of cultists thought the stars were finally right to open a gateway or portal to let something eldritch horror in......

Or the Wizards thought the star alignment would cause the lay lines to move, and the dungeon is ground zero for the new lay lines to cross and the wizards were behind the earthquake, to take over the lay cross roads with the plan to establish a strong hold, regardless of their losses because the power increase makes able to caster stronger/more powerful effects, etc.

A civil war in the dungeon spills outside, and those hidden doors, which was really emergency exits, were open by retreating groups,while they forced open other exit doors from the outside...

Those are some ideas off the top of my head...

My thought in suggesting is that these different areas are all interconnected, but nobody realizes it anymore. A couple of independent groups have discovered abandoned areas, and independently came to the same conclusion: "this would make a good base." So they all appear to be unconnected incidents, until the players find out that there actually is a common connection.

I want to do a "funnel" type starting adventure to get my players to cope with the fact their characters might die a fuckton in a retroclone camapaign, so I'll start them off captured, and fighting their way out of the druids nest. Thing is, those particular druids are animals (bears) that can shapeshift into a human form instead of the usual reverse. What sort of traps could bears lay around the place?

Bear traps.

Oh boy, am I ever. I'm building an extra-dimensional prison that was made by wizards to keep the really nasty shit locked away forever, and I figured, well, what says crazy powerful wizards like 5th dimensional spaces? Nothing, that's what! I came up with themes for each of the different colored tesserects (Red is winter, Orange is desert, Purple is Innistrad/Bloodborne, Green is jungle, Teal is ghosts/incorporeal, Pink is a Victorian horror mansion, and Yellow is a prison block) and plan to trap the party in the whole complex, where they have to beat four of the monsters trapped within to secure the four keys to escape. I need cool puzzles that fit in any of the blocks, especially the prison, ghost, and jungle blocks.

I was expecting this response from the get-go. Yet I am still disapointed.

I was disappointed I was the one who had to say it.

A thousand times I've seen this screencap and I've only now noticed it says 72 rooms instead of 64. What am I missing? Is there an extra room on each tesseract I'm not aware of?

I'd love to run something like that but I'm certain I'd lose track of everything after a couple of rooms.

I always end up going out of my way to add as much mechanical depth to the dungeon as possible.
Which never amounts to much.

I just don't want my dungeons to boil down to a number of rooms with nothing but treasure and monsters in the rooms.

Yes, traps can be a thing. But those still are just "thing" that damages the party.

I've done things like having switch puzzles and having other gimmicks.
I've copied various JRPGs to try and find some mechanics I could rip off.

How else can I add creative depth to my dungeons from a mechanical standpoint?

I'm 100% certain that's a typo. Even if it isn't, mine is only going to have 64 rooms. I think the guy just failed to math or something.

try creating a list of dungeon mechanics and mix them and mess with them to create a new one every time. I have the same problem sometimes

A dungeon that limits the party's ability to leave or restore their resources is quite common but its a fun change of pace and strategy for groups used to above ground adventuring. If you can't rest you never get more spell slots.

As for gimmicks, various things like raising and lowering water/acid/lava, swapping layouts, reversing gravity, etc. are fun for one time dungeons. Maybe if your campaign focuses on dungeon crawling a super end dungeon combining all the gimmicks would be in order.

not quite a dungeon but instead the first floor of a player base. I have plans to use the top floor for bedrooms and a library/office area, so what else do I need on the first floor. It feels barren.

Honeypot?

This is going to sound paradoxical, but limit what you're using. The more different things you put together, the less depth you're going to get out of them. Not only does restriction breed creativity, but repetition lets your players learn. And learning means they can make new use of things that wouldn't ordinarily have depth, giving them depth. For example, if they learn how to identify spear traps, now they can use them to even the odds in combat. And that means you can design encounters that require them to learn, like a far too difficult encounter which becomes manageable after they lure most of their enemies into the spear traps.

Try limiting yourself to just using a couple of monsters and one, maybe two environmental gimmicks or traps. You'll be surprised how much depth you can build.

You could leave it barren, and leave them to come to the same conclusion. See what the players decide to put in it.

Sorry to say this, but your floorplan is just garbage. Being barren isn't the problem, your thing just has no scale and it's completely nonsensical from an architectural standpoint.

Use actual foorplans as reference, and remember scale, and do it again better.