Talking to the Dungeon

Prepping dungeons is hard and while I’ve read a lot of great modules, I never seem to remember what I loved about them other than the vibe. So now, whenever I read a module and notice a cool monster or room or trap I copy and paste it into my dungeon book.

Here are hundreds (211) of corpses propped up as if cheering, facing the tower ruins. These are long dead worshippers of St. Garamond propped up and tended by the 1d6 Undying Servants (see Keep area 14) who tend to the Broken Saint.
– Keep of the Broken Saint by WR Beaty

MAN-O’-MIST: The floor is covered by 2’ of mist. There is a 60% chance that the mist will form into a man shape that will gesture towards room 9, then walk into that chamber, point at the lizards nest and finally walk through the nest and seemingly disappear into the wall. A melee round later, the mist will come pouring out of the nest and flow back into chamber S. This of course will irritate the lizards and allow for no surprise against them.
– Dark Tower by Jennel Jacquays

The more I do this too the more I learn that there are a lot of writers who can write a compelling milieu, but aren’t fluent in dungeon storytelling. That is, storytelling as it is experienced by players exploring a space. Environmental storytelling. Level design.

This is something I think about more and more as I get older. The way players experience a dungeon is so different from how we naturally write spaces. We usually write them as things to be passively observed (or to be read) rather than as objects you interact with. Maybe I’ve just been playing too much Riven recently.

This isn’t bad, I think there’s room for a lot of kinds of experiences in RPGs. But collecting these scraps is helping me develop my own kind of pattern language for dungeons. One that starts with simple patterns like:

• A closed portcullis, the lever is on the other side. If you can get to the lever and pull it the portcullis opens.
  
• Another closed portcullis, the lever is on your side. If you pull the lever, it opens a trap door and you fall to the next level down.
  
• A closed portcullis, the lever is on your side. If you pull the lever, it opens the portcullis, but one slams shut from the room you previously left.

This series of events is part of a conversation between the players and the dungeon.

• An untrapped chest with treasure inside.
  
• A trapped chest with treasure inside.
  
• An untrapped chest with nothing inside.

There’s a call and response. Setting an expectation and then subverting it.

This pattern is how players often interact with dungeons. They experience something they can interact with, they do it, it does a thing, they commit that to memory until the next time they see it.

They can do all sorts of things too like ignore it, blast it with a fireball, drop it on a goblin.

But developing your ability to be conversant in “dungeon,” to talk to your players in “dungeon,” is so fun. And as you and your players gain fluency in the language, the conversation gets deeper.