whats the logic in there being hundreds of unexplored dungeons around in the wilderness and the countryside full of creatures and loot that already haven't managed to kill each other off? especially with dungeons with one entrance.
why are there so many unexplored and abandoned dungeons just lying around?
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I dunno.
Maybe it's some sort of purgatory and the dungeons are symbols of the sins the various characters have to atone for and eventually be reincarnated and given a new shot at salvation?
Or maybe it's just cool to wreck shit for critters living in holes.
After the first great war between the gods the servants of the dark one were packed into prisons, which were then hurled into the sky.
Occasionally they come falling back down, embedding themselves in the ground and awaking their inhabitants.
In many cases these dungeons are hit by adventurers shortly after falling, but in some remote areas they can last for years without being discovered.
i dont like it
Depends on the dungeon. Each dungeon can have its own thing going on. It doesn't even need an explanation: "this was built a thousand years ago and no one has a fucking clue what the builders were thinking or where they went" is perfectly valid from time to time. But usually you can hint at something at the very least.
Maybe the monsters don't care about treasure. Maybe they collect it. Maybe they're remains from the people who built the place. Maybe the last adventurers that tried the place got wiped and the monsters split the spoils. Maybe it's a tomb. Maybe a wizard was using it to keep his pets and other creations. Maybe the church of Zot finally got around to casting their province-wide purification ritual and it's only now safe enough to even attempt the venture, but there are dozens of caves and tunnels to check
Dungeons should never feel mundane and accessible or you lose that mystique. They can be dangerous, forbidden, recently discovered, whatever. But that doesn't mean there's a limit to them.
Depends on setting.
How do you keep something safe from people who can teleport and fly?
Put it in an underground maze filled with traps.
Fuck logic. Gimme dungeons.
Most of them in my setting are in one area, which is filled with monsters and very, very little civilization. The area is rich in resources, gigantic (bigger than the two largest nations put together), and the soil is very fertile because it's never been truly exploited. Over the course of history, many a kingdom or empire have tried to settle there, only for their attempts to fall into ruin thanks to the fact that the monsters there are incredibly plentiful and powerful, leaving many a ruin. In some cases, entire abandoned cities, eerie in how well preserved they are, yet have no signs of life.
Also, the setting has, well, wars, and plenty of forts and castles simply get abandoned when their usefulness has ended. These generally get taken over by bandits of monsters.
I feel this has never, ever been so appropriate as it is in this moment.
>hundreds
The Pathfailure meme that hearty adventurers are a planet wide phenomenon is retarded.
That being said, its quite simple -- dungeons are more defensible and stealthy than castles etc., more efficient, less susceptible to the elements, allow better escape, etc.
All the civilizations of the surface are but a drop in the bucket compared to the subterranean civilizations, like the dwarves and worse things, that writhe through the depths of the Earth, expanding in three dimensions at once.
There are constantly dungeons regenerating underground, born out of ambient magic. When they're ready to join the wider ecosystem, they grow entrances and exits to the surface.
Also, conquered dungeons lose their animating magic and slowly melt back into undifferentiated earth.
fair enough
Sounds like 13th Age. Sort of.
Actually, it's ripped from a story called The Bound Dungeon. royalroadl.com
>All the civilizations of the surface are but a drop in the bucket compared to the subterranean civilizations, like the dwarves and worse things, that writhe through the depths of the Earth, expanding in three dimensions at once.
This is a pretty neat campaign concept. Pitch it like dragon age with the deep roads, but much vaster and more varied, with hints that the surface world really misses out on the grand scope of things going on.
I like Dungeon Meshi's explanation that they're constructed ecosystems made by sorcerers to be mana resevoirs.
Wizards tend to live for a long time
The longer they are alive the more chances there are to turn evil
Evil wizards LOVE building dungeons and hiding all their loot and artifacts in them for safekeeping
Even the oldest evil wizard dies eventually (or turns into a lich)
When the wizard is dead (or a lich) only a dungeon with his assorted monsters remains
Sometimes a wizard didn't keep pet/guardian monsters, in that case it often becomes home to wandering monsters such as orcs or goblins
Really it's all the wizards fault
This. Dungeons are inherently unrealistic and nonsensical. They are also an absolute blast to play in.
Teleportation can be blocked by magical - even naturally magical - interference or protections. Lead paint can protect against divinations. Flight is great, but that doesn't mean there aren't traps such as pockets of deadly air or poisonous fumes and spiderwebs that can't be used as traps or barriers that could be used as triggers. Knock spells can be defeated by a piece of string. UIf you read the section about magic it usually tells you things that the broad spectrum of spells are affected by, and the full description of a spell can make things more clear. People all too often don't READ the spells and just assume things.
>Dungeons are inherently unrealistic and nonsensical.
They're more realistic and make more sense than castles, that's for damn sure.
Nearly as logical as that party using a torch instead of a lantern.
>This is a grim land. Summers are short. Winters are long. The towns are overcrowded. Food is expensive. Guilds control trade. Nobility control the taxes. Priests pray for our damned souls.
>Out there, beyond those walls, are beasts, bogies, monsters. They inhabit the forests, live under the fields, dwell in the ruins of our burned-out fortresses. They kidnap the lone wanderer, harry our caravans, and when they are bold, they attack our towns.
>This land is wild, untamable, and in it we struggle to survive. We who thought we could conquer it, subjugate it—we are guests here, our days numbered.
>Our forebears succeeded in wedging a toehold—a small point of light in a vast, weird darkness. Their hubris led them to believe they had won, that victory was inevitable. But they were wrong. The forests fought back. The mountains rebelled. The seas heaved in protest. Things issued forth from crevices and caves; the foam and fire spat forth a writhing, crawling answer to our fathers’ “conquest.” We fought them. We banished them. We flung spell and prayer at them. But they came like a creeping tide, forcing us steadily back.
>So now most of us crowd into our walled towns and make do with what’s been given to us. Some hardy folk brave the long nights and, far behind our defenses, work the soil at dawn. A few of us—those with nothing left—take up torch and sword and stride forth into the dark wilds.
>For underneath the roots are the ruins of those who came before us. Layers of foolhardy civilizations crumbling atop one another like corpses. Each thought they could conquer this land. Each failed.
>But in failure, they left us hope. They left us gold, artifacts, secrets, knowledge. Those brave or foolish enough to bring back these treasures are richly rewarded. Those successful enough can even can rise above their station.
>Thus, we can become heroes.…if we survive.
I like the Occam's Razor explanation from Fell's Five - it's because there's fucking dragons everywhere.
Because dungeons aren't really a single thing
A villain's lair is just as much a dungeon as a cave with some kobolds in it
since someone already brought up anime, I liked Konosuba's one dungeon so far (in the anime): it was some rich dude's mansion, he was a lich, he used it to hide out, and the monsters were at least partially tied to him wanting someone to purify him so he could join his wife in the next life
No, no, he was about to say "I LOVE IT!"
Actually, considering the sheer number of ancient and defunct civilizations, professional survivalists and archaeologists being a planetwide phenomenon is a perfectly valid thing. We have those now and we don't have all that many ancient civilizations, much less alien ones.
You're not even wrong. Dungeons per se aren't exactly realistic, but it's when in room 3 there are kobolds, in room 5 a slime and in room 8 some skeletons -all in some kind of cold war- that it crosses a line from "it doesn't make perfect sense but it's cool and works fine" to "what the fuck".
This. Fuck adventurers guilds.
Dungeon should just be a general terms for structures lined with challenges for the players to overcome, a forest can be a dungeon, fuck retarded gamist settings where there are literally thousands of underground labyrinths that only exist to sustain bands of murderhobos
It really depends on the setting. From that Old School art, I'm guessing you want some of the classic answers, so here we go:
>Gygax (funhouse): Wizards did it.
>Gygax (naturalistic): Dungeons are ruins of ancient civilizations now over-run by savage monsters. They exist as a reminder of the fallen state of the world.
>Holmes: Dungeons are just Three-Dimensional snapshots of the Great Underworld. It does not exist as you think It does.
>Moldvay: Dungeons are a fun setting for low-and mid-level adventures.
>Mentzer: What Tom said.
>D. Cook: The focus groups and playtesters agreed that dungeons are a fun aspect of First Edition gameplay that we should carry forward into a new era of the game. But they're optional.
>a forest can be a dungeon
Another solution is making dungeons an actual ecosystem built by certain tinkering races like kobolds instead of just being a place where random monsters apparently made the pact of waiting peacefully to be felled by adventurers.
Dungeons in my game are either A. trippy divine test grounds or B. wizard dick waving competitions.
>why are there so many unexplored and abandoned dungeons just lying around?
Goes about something like this:
>Build Temple, Fortress, City, Castle, etc
>Everything goes good for maybe 200 years, maybe even 700 if you've got a stable economy and solid defenses.
>Something goes wrong in such a way that you can't fix it.
>Temple, Fortress, City, Castle, etc.. Is abandoned by it's previous occupants.
>Aforementioned place is overtaken by some form of nature, squatters, or what have you.
That's literally all there is to it.
The important thing here though is that these various constructions only have to fail "once" for everything to fall apart and once they 'do' they're technically dungeons until someone of a civilized and respectable background reclaims them.
It's still a dungeon if it has a homeless tent village occupying it- even if you wouldn't necessarily (hopefully) murder homeless, impoverished, vagabonds for petty change.
>trippy divine test grounds
like experiments and such?
no, like divine trials.
ok can you elaborate? That sounds cool too
It basically plays out as an excuse to have JRPG style themed dungeons.
All you have to do is have a lot of gods that vary by region, and suddenly you have a magma forge trial over here, a weird puzzle crypt over there, here's one made entirely out of stairs by a minor god of elevation. They vary in quality. Some aren't very good. Not all gods are good at dungeon making, but they still want to make one to determine who gets blessings.
And then you get to the wizards, who are assholes, and build dungeons to show off.
I usually use "dungeon" as a catch all term for "unexplored location" so a dungeon could be a literal, underground construction, or it could be a cave hidden beneath a waterfall, or an unexplored valley out in the desert, or a mountain path leading deeper in, or just a simple jungle, maybe with ruins.
>professional survivalists and archaeologists
Sure, but them being the global standard in international wealth, power, military might *and* the Chosen of God is what makes the Pathfailure Society so retarded.
Honestly it depends on how true your GM is to denizen motivations and habitats. More often than not it’s just thinly veiled excuses for halls with traps and monsters.
The thing with adventurers is that they’re all basically PMCs or gangsters, which takes a lot of the allure out of the profession when you realize we have modern day equivalents, and they’re not nearly as romanticized as “adventurers” are. It’s basically a profession you’re forced in to for lack of skills or opportunities. At best they may be wealthy thrill seekers, which again, kind of takes the mystique out of the whole thing.
This thread is good.
My personal explanation? The God of Evil is the father of monsters. Once per year on not!Halloween, all of the mortals have to give him gifts, which his monsters come down from the hills and mountains to grab from the shrines and bring them back up to their caverns they've dug out to live in, since they hate sunlight almost as much as they hate beauty. Adventurers going into dungeons are basically just stealing back all of our shiny shit that was extorted from all of us in the first place.
Dark ages cliches, civilisation in decline, wilderness increasing, hill forts and barrows and ruined settlements and cities
>you realize we have modern day equivalents
PMCs are most closely analogous to... men at arms.
Now, I like to try to typically *put* PCs into the context of mercenary companies (especially the more flavorful and infamous sorts like the Landsknechts and Blackwater), but a setting where Sir Jesus Christ and Dr. Manhattan with the money of Bill Gates are just a common, ho hum thing is A) not going to view them as anything analogous to mercenaries and lowlifes and B) not going to resemble any earthly parallel. The Pathfinder Society isn't anything like Blackwater, its the Superfriends.
Conversely, while subterranean strongholds laden with traps and guardians are generally your best bet for someone who needs maximum security, them being a common, ordinary, ho hum thing and it being a casual thing that you can raid them if you're good enough, without catastrophic consequences (other than the direct peril involved) and gain supreme power is, likewise, not something that has an earthly parallel.
A setting that has adventurers as a wide scale social phenomenon, and hundreds of dungeons, is just going to be so alien that its better off being viewed in terms of very weird science fiction rather than the usual Tolkienian Renaissance Fair setting people envision.
>Dungeons
Dungeons are holdings for prisoners. Centuries of castles and keeps have been built and razed, but their leftover defended captives were locked away, morphing and growing even more monstrous while they clutch at the leftover precious treasures dropped by ill-fated wannabe heroes who sought to light their stone corridors and banish their ilk.
In the forgotten realms universe the rationale is that there have been countless empires with nearly all of them being skilled in magic. I mean for fucks sake we have world spanning continents from giants, dragons, yuan ti, aboleths and I think in some books stupid bullywugs.
Like, from an outsiders historical perspective, faerun has been one apocalypse after another. So dungeons forgotten to time are not too surprising especially if they change hands often.
>God of athletics builds a dungeon dedicated to tests of athletic ability
>Yearly pilgrimage where people gather at the dungeon to test themselves before the god.
>People compete to complete the dungeon fastest, in the most impressive ways.
>This practice eventually spreads and becomes popular among many major and minor religions.
And that's how I became the #1 dungeon speedrunner in the world.
True. This is generally true for DND settings, or even for fantasy RPG settings.
What it's not really clear is why the shit isn't more organized, tough. Nobility would certainly think about using an army or at least more istituzionalized adventurers.
... which maybe is a good reason to use MORE the adventuring guilds, albeit with some differences that would make it less Konosuba and more XCom.
I use this excuse in my DnD plays:
>"Something is moving deep underground, something is creating these halls, caverns, strange places... bringing monsters and richies, tales and nightmares. For now, we can't explain it's chaotic nature, we know however that it's a link between different planes and some of them can lead you to hell or heaven or even beyond...
>It's a dangerous task to explore theM, many have died, that's why we have so many especialized groups to explore them.
>These...
>Dungeons."
Don't copy plz.
Dungeons come up from the bottom. People notice the ones that reach the surface.
So a mystery dungeon?
In My setting most of the Races were almost completely wiped out. The massive land mass they are on that used to have empires and large vast cities and towns. Kinda all got fucked on due to a massive war that lead to famine and disease.
So with it being some time since that has happened. Nature has taken over and the populations have began to stabilize again and go out searching through the old ruins and dungeons.
Dungeons blend together to make up the Mythic Underworld.
I see you Piers Plowman
This. Dungeons are bunkers from the dangers of the outside world filled with evil squatters. Originally commissioned by kings and mayors to protect the townspeople from foreseen raids or attacks, dungeons were to serve as a bastion which defends itself with traps and can be disabled from the inside. But, something got in there, snuck through everything, and let its friends in. Occasionally, a caravan disappears alongside the road, but the bunkers are so old they're no longer on the maps, so no one ever considered it was there the fiends were coming from until it amassed quite a bit of goods.
Because a dungeon that is cleared is only done so temporarily. Oh this crypt has zombies in it to protect it? Well those zombies are disposed of so its empty now. Until bandits move in. But soon those bandits are killed. Now goblins have taken up residence. And sure the original treasure is mostly missing (someone might have overlooked a secret room or 2) but each new monster brings its own treasure too.
So you can reuse the setting multiple times without doing the same dungeon.
Didn't early FR say that most unexplored ruins are in inhabitable places that got blown up in apocalyptic scenarios?
While dungeons in more nearby areas often aren't unexplored, just a bunch of adventurers kill undead, and now a bunch of kobolds move in because the adventurers didn't stop to secure the area and establish a town that would keep monsters away.
When those kobolds get massacred, suddenly a bunch of carrion crawlers move in and other scavengers that want a meal.
Etc
True dungeons- dungeons that are more than just a dick wizard's tower or the like- all exist for the same reason in my current world;
The gods are all overly competitive that-GM's.
Easy; there aren't.
In a high-lethality setting, where every encounter could potentially kill a character, the theme of an encounter is far more important and far more interesting. It could be something like an old watchtower, or it might be a mountain cave, or it's a witch hut. Dungeons with dozens of floors can be good, but tend to just really drag on.
I don't get this post. When the game was at its highest lethality point, it also had the most meandering of dungeons.
Who said they're unexplored? And they're certainly inhabited.
The monsters are themselves adventurers and it's all just coincidence that you're all in the same place at the same time
So the GM has a place to put his retarded rollplayers at
I like the way 4e does it. First of all, you are in a remote corner of the world that has been very recently ravaged by a war. The closest areas that could provide infrastructure are in even worse shape. Human presence is very little, focused on rebuilding and getting by, in just a few decent spots of the land. Scattered around there are the remains of the former kingdom now turned into dungeons. Adventurers are not that common, and in fact you're likely to find them poking around in said areas (going by the last monster book).
Then, when you get to a level high enough, you start poking around other planes and find that they are mostly shitshows hostile to the very existence on mortals.
Well, the demons, the dragons, the giants, the elves, and the goblinoids, all once had much larger civilizations than modern society, which has just gone through a long and devastating war, leaving both the ruins of the ancients and some modern abandoned areas to be found.
Simple enough; don't make your dungeons random monster filled underground structures. Anything can be made a "dungeon", a remote pass turned into a bandit hideout? A dungeon. Ruined fort taken over by cultists? A dungeon. Natural cave system inhabited by a gnoll pack? A dungeon. Ancient subterranean burial complex guarded by reanimated slave soldiers of some long forgotten king? A dungeon. Woods infested with God knows what? A dungeon.
Because this setting just had not!WW2, but instead of nukes, we have ultra powerful magic, and instead of two cities being blown up, 5 civilizations have been. As well as plenty of not!Allied territory is in Anarchy because of the damage. Dungeons are just ruins of shit that are being searched by everything so that they could find these spells that have the power to destroy continents.
One setting I made there was a war between three factions of gods. The Old Gods were sealed deep below the ground and their magic seeps into the earth and creates deep dungeons and labyrinths from what were once simple crypts and tombs. They appear and disappear through the ages and adventurers, paladins of the church, and knights are required to delve into them to clear them out to make sure the creatures that spawn inside can't go about murdering the townsfolk.
Rather Gamey, but that was the point.
Unappreciated idea.
I like it. It's very cute. I'm not gonna take it wholesale, because I think it's perfectly suited to an in-world myth or folklore: there's goblins and creeps and monsters, sure, but they don't actually do that.. The peasants just BELIEVE they do that.
Which is why my county is covered in castles and not dungeons.
The world is a dangerous place for a peasant. You don't stray too far from the border of your village, or you're likely to be stabbed, shot, eaten, sacrificed, or raped into an early grave. Much of the old civilizations rotted where they fell, and haven't been touched by human hand since.
Towers and keeps moulder and tumble, being merely gravestones to mark where the settlement once was. Sometimes, under these overgrown jumbles, you might find a door, and through that door, lie the remains of the treasure chambers, torture rooms and prisons of those who once dwelled there - except now they are home to the fell creatures that lurk in the wild.
At least that's what Blind Mogh says. Buy him a drink and he'll tell you all about it too, I expect.
Checked
Post-apocalypse. Magical war happened, most people died and the survivors are rebuilding.
are you allergic to fun?
but muh realism
enjoy your game where your players die of dysentery at level 0.
>All the civilizations of the surface are but a drop in the bucket compared to the subterranean civilizations, like the dwarves and worse things, that writhe through the depths of the Earth, expanding in three dimensions at once.
Reminds me of this unsettling feeling I had, inspired by Pthumeru in Bloodborne— the notion of a place where all civilizations eventually achieve enlightenment, and, when they do, follow their predecessors down into the earth, becoming stranger and stranger as they go.
and those castles have dungeons don't they? Perhaps all dungeons are fucked up castles
Dungeons are living organisms that feed not only on rich mineral deposits but living creatures as well.the monsters lurking within are parasites/symbiotic or servitors of the super organism and try to defend it from harm.
It's not logical.
It's the fantasy world's version of Bitcoins. Every once in a while dungeons pop up and delvers go in and find their loot, bring it home and sustain the economy.
Jus replace adventurers for knights. People have beem knighted for far less than killing an orc chieftan. Also, it makes the allure of adventuring more acceptable.
Most don't. They have a cellar at most.
Dungeon is a business. The Master can take all the loot and gold of adventurers dying in it, and an organization pays him. In return, the dungeon has to be fair and he has to give loot to adventurers that manage to find him.
faggot casual castles
>why are there so many unexplored and abandoned dungeons just lying around?
I always liked Earthdawn’s background. There was a cataclysmic demon apocalypse. The good races knew it was coming and built underground cities called “kaers” sealed from the demons with powerful magic wards. After 400 years the demon s courage ended as magical forces waned. Player characters explore the new world. Some Kaers were overrun and are still occupied by demons or have new masters, some died off from disease. Some don’t believe the demon scourage is truly over.
Sorry, but the vast majority of real castles don't have large sprawling dungeons; historical dungeons tend to be a cellar with a door and maybe a pit in the room itself about seven feet deep.
Because there'd be no game otherwise. There's some stuff you just have to agree to not think about too much.
pre-history titans needed places to keep their shinies, so they built these dungeons all over the land and filled them with all manner of creature to guard their treasure.
>using an army more of at least more institutionalized adventurers.
So mercenary companies than? I prefer the thematic and at least quasi historical plausibility of them versus adventurer guilds in my game of pretend.
I remember going through the rule book for one of those 2ed clones. In the back there were the rules for the strongholds different classes could make at higher levels. When you get to the wizards section, dungeons make sense.
The monsters are there because they can be harvested for ingredients to make magic items. Races like cobolds and such make a pact with the wizard to be his guard dogs in retern for not getting hunted down by the "civilized" races like the rest of their kin. The rest of it is because a wizard is bound to have a few rivals and a few more people he's just plain pissed off but never managed to kill properly by that point.
The dungeon keeps expanding as the both the wizard's power and need for reagents grow. Eventually the wizard begins to suffer from some combination of insanity and senility, eventually he dies or becomes a shut-in undead and civilization forgets about him. Generations go by, the creatures that made pacts with him forget their place and begin raiding the surface world for loot.
A group of young adventurers is called for help, including a young wizard fresh off his apprenticeship. The cycle continues...
In 13th Age the basics reasons are a) multiple apocalypses leaving behind the husks of progress and b) a type of magical organism called a living dungeon that swims up through the earth from who knows where, breaches the surface, and sets up shop while magically spawning monsters, treasure, and traps. Their origin and purpose is left to the individual DAM to decide.
*DM
>mercenary guilds acting as adventurers.
No no no, the mercenary guild provides loyal, trustworthy military support at the best rates. "Adventuring" can ask for a place to stay at the sewer cleaning guild.
Is Satan that is often showed as goatman the same being as Lucifer?
If it is so, then why he was described as being the most beatiful of angels if he is a goatman?
Yes, the vast majority of Christian sects identify the "Lucifer" mentioned in the Bible with Satan. As to how he could be beautiful in the beginning and horrible later on, it's the result of his rebellion, of his pride, envy, rage, and wickedness altering his countenance to match, and the fact that he has cut himself off from the grace of God from which all good things flow.
He was the first angel, and favored by God, but he became a monster.
You could just not have your gameworld be like that, because it's silly. Have ruins where there's a reason for there to be ruins, have predators and scavengers and bandit gangs in logical places. You don't have to make your world a themepark with "adventurers' guilds" and different rides to go on.
I mean, you can if you want, if that's fun for you. Or you can just have a dangerous world, and not get hung up on the dungeon format. How about the party spends three sessions being hounded across the steppe by wolfriders, finally escaping down a half-frozen river on a hastily constructed raft? There's a "dungeon" for ya.
Dungeons are living entities, extensions of the dimension that Magic comes from;
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honestly I don't really see much difference between a Mercenary Company and an Adventurers Guild beyond the latter ostensibly being for more than just killing stuff(but still mostly being hired to kill stuff)