Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 207 - Dungeon Crawls Part 1

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

Dungeon crawl adventures can be some of the most fun adventures that you run and they are relatively simple to set up provided you have a few pieces of information prepared ahead of time.  Tune in this week to find out what those are:   #pf2e #dnd #DMTips #Dungeon   Resources: Redd Horrocks on Fiverr - https://www.fiverr.com/reddhorrocks  5 Room Dungeons - https://www.roleplayingtips.com/5-room-dungeons/  Jaquaysian Dungeons - https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/xandering-the-dungeon

This week on the Taking 20 podcast. And they all feel like sewers with different adventures. You could do the same with dungeons that are abandoned buildings or underground lairs, nations of creatures in the dark lands, crashed spaceships, unsealed areas that were previously lost or revealed by the environment. or revealed by the environment. Happy 2024, and thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 207, part one of a two-part topic all about running a good dungeon crawl adventure.

I want to thank our sponsor, Katz. You know, I've been doing this for more than 200 episodes, and when I look back, I never had an episode sponsored by Cats before. Waiting this long was just simply a cat-tastrophe. Oh, groan all you want. That pun was purr-fect. Oh yeah, baby, that was hysterical. My 2024 pun game is starting off strong, and if you thought I'd cut back on the bad jokes, think again. If this is your first episode and survived that barrage of puns, welcome!

If you enjoy the podcast, please like, rate, and subscribe to it wherever you find it. I would love it if this little podcast could reach everyone who's considering playing a tabletop roleplaying game. I don't have any advertising budget, so word of mouth and social media is all I have. Please help me get the word out by sharing it wherever you can. My eagle-eared listeners... That's not right. That can't be right. No, okay. Let's just go with it. My eagle-eared listeners may have noticed the opening voiceover sounded a little different. Red Horrocks is now providing my voiceover work, and I think she honestly knocked it out of the park. If you have any voiceover work you need done

and would like a female American or British accent, check her out on Fiverr. That's Red Horrocks. R-E-D-D-H-O-R-R-O-C-K-S. I'll put a link in the resources directly to her profile if you'd like. So check it out there if you can. Her quality is amazing, the costs are very reasonable, and she has an extremely quick turnaround time. She didn't

pay me for advertising, by the way. I just want to get some love to some quality content providers wherever I find them. It's the first episode of a new year and I'm slipping back into my comfy podcast recording chair, so I think it would be wise to define a few terms right off the jump. I consider any adventure where you enter, say, a single environment or a connected series of environments, the dungeon, and you navigate the area, fight monsters, collect treasure, avoid traps, and that kind of thing, in other words, you crawl the dungeon to meet an objective, a dungeon crawler adventure. Almost every adventure you can name will have a dungeon of some sort,

whether it's a massive underground labyrinth or a small five-room dungeon. And see episode 19 or the article on roleplayingtips.com for more info on five-room dungeons. I'll put a link to that, too, in the resources of the episode. With that definition of a dungeon, it's easy to see that dungeons are commonly used at gaming tables the world over. And who would have thought that dungeons would be a major part of a game called Dungeons and Dragons or Dungeon Crawl Classics or, for that matter, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Morg Borg, GURPS, Forbidden Lands, or... The point is, dungeons are prevalent in a lot of game systems

out there because they are some of the simplest and easiest ways to have fun. The objective is simple. Go in this place and do this thing. Go in this castle and steal the Scepter of Domination. Go in this underdark cave system and kill the Drow Queen. Go into the Necromancer's crypt and seal them away for all eternity. Most of them? No more complicated than that. They're easy to set up and run, the players enjoy them, so it makes sense why they're so prevalent. But as they say, the devil, or the Lich, is in the details. Dungeons could contain bosses or minions, tales. Dungeons could contain bosses or minions, traps and secrets, dangers, and of course, treasure in the twists and turns of the dungeon. Older adventures tended to be dungeon crawls because the original Dungeons & Dragons, Advanced D&D, and even later versions were built to run

dungeon crawls. The original Ravenloft, Temple of Elemental Evil, the Mud Sorcerer's Tomb, and the Meat Grinder that was the Tomb of Horrors were adventures that largely consisted of getting to the dungeon and then doing what you need to do while you're there. Heck, one of my favorite dungeons I ever saw was one called the World's Largest Dungeon, and it was just that. A huge dungeon consisting of 16 different areas, each with its own theme and inhabitants and environments. I only ran it once, and the party all died in section 2. All I can say is I was young, I made mistakes behind the screen, and I talked about it a lot in episodes 116 and probably a bunch of others. So give episode 116 a listen if you're interested in the TPK advice I have from

that mistake. If you're running a group that picks through every nook and cranny of a dungeon, you could spend years worth of game sessions in the world's largest dungeon, meeting every week and never ever reach the end of it. Even newer game systems like Pathfinder have long dungeon adventures built in. One adventure they released that I still want to run one day is Emerald Spire. It's a 16-level dungeon with each level designed by a different author, and there are legendary names among the designers. Eric Mona, Keith Baker, Jason Bullman, Lisa Stevens, Wolfgang Barr, and many other extremely talented people. Another one that's a massive dungeon that I'm about to run is

Abomination Vaults, and I'm in a group going through that one, and I'm going to run another group through it separately. I won't mention anything about it to avoid spoilers, but running through it has been a tremendously good time. Yes, Jeremy, but that's Pathfinder, and I play the vastly superior 5e game system. Okay, version warrior. How about Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Tales from the Yawning Portal? Those are or have great dungeons as part of the adventures. So the question you would ask, what makes a dungeon crawl different? Dungeon crawls tend to take place at a single location or connected series of locations that

are in an easily defined space. You're not trekking across four continents to six different castles to meet 25 different NPCs and woo them into supporting a particular cause. A dungeon crawl tends to be pretty easy to draw a circle around where the adventure takes place. Contrast that with, say, wilderness adventures that tend to be wide open and contain a lot more of your game system's safe travel mechanics. Dungeon crawls tend to have relatively few friendly encounters. Doesn't mean they're bereft of them, but in most dungeon crawls I've been in and run, there's a lot of combat. No, I don't think you're hearing me, by the way. I mean, there are shit tons of combat. Aside from meeting the occasional non-

or maybe less hostile group of people, the party is going to be swinging swords and slinging spells more often than not. Another thing that makes good dungeon crawls different is that it's pretty rare to find somewhere to buy and sell what you need in a dungeon. Most of the time, the party is surviving on what it can find, scrounge, loot, or steal.

Rests may be hard to come by in a long and difficult dungeon crawl. Also, if the DM really wants to make them difficult, they can include wandering monsters. And if you've never experienced that, wandering monsters are exactly what they sound like. They're creatures or humanoids or aberrations or whatever that roam the dungeon and can be encountered at any time. Sometimes it's in a random hallway where you round the corner and there's a gelatinous cube sliding its way slowly, picking up random bits of detritus.

Sometimes the party's in a room having just finished a fight and looting the corpses when two hobgoblins open the door to see what all the ruckus was about. Or, and here's where arrests are affected, the monsters stumble upon the characters while they're trying to get some sleep. A particularly difficult DM will have some random chance for something to stumble on the party every short or long rest, and it makes it difficult, or at least harder,

to recover spells and abilities for all the characters. Other DMs, myself included, will plan on a couple of interruptions to rests here and there, but more often than not, the characters complete a short rest and a lot of times even a long rest successfully. Wandering Monsters, by the way, could be an episode all its own, so I'm going to save more thoughts on the subject until later. The takeaway here is that in a largely self-contained area with lots of rooms, corridors, etc. that contain a certain amount of monsters, it's likely that the PCs will complete

rests less often than they'd really want to. And they may have to expend more resources between rests than they prefer to to complete the dungeon. So now that we know what a dungeon is, what makes a good dungeon crawl? Well, just like it's easier to make a quality meal when you start with quality ingredients, to have a good dungeon crawl, you need to have a good dungeon. Off the cuff, I think a good dungeon needs a theme, an objective, and a reason for it to exist. Your dungeon needs a theme, based on current or past occupants. This theme could be very simple, a dark cave that goes to an unknown location, abandoned ruins revealed by a slowly draining swamp, a previously sealed crypt, or whatever fits the adventure, area, lore, and tone of the game.

I mentioned the theme could be based on past or current occupants, and those two things could be completely independent of each other. Okay, it's easy to talk generality, so let's talk specific examples. Imagine you want to run a dungeon crawl that happens to be within a temple to a forgotten god. You could align the creatures and the dungeon themes together, and the temple contains, say, ostracized worshippers of this god who are monstrous or insane or undead, maybe survivors of a catastrophe, or other people or things who might remain to worship this deity even though more powerful ones may exist.

The temple could be remote. The domains of the deity speak to them or whatever makes sense for your game. However, what if the temple just happened to be a building that was discovered by a completely different group, ignorant of or dismissive of the building's original purpose? Driders could move into this partially revealed temple and use it as a forward operating base. A green dragon could have moved into the giant room that was formerly the cathedral. It enters and exits through a shattered stained glass window. Or, you know what, an owlbear and her cubs. Cubs? Is that right? Are baby owlbears cubs? Or are they chicks? Maybe they're a mix of cubs and chicks. Like chubs? No, that can't be it. So dungeons have a theme and the creatures may, but don't have to, match that theme. It would

be a completely different experience if the PCs were asked to clear out a sewer that turned out to have a rat king versus one that has a pair of larger bipedal mice called Yosuke in Pathfinder and Starfinder. Maybe they're just a couple just looking for a safe place for themselves and their 92 kids. Replace the Ysoki with redcaps, and those are fey that like to kill and dip their caps in the blood of their victims, and they all feel like sewers with different adventures. You could do the same with dungeons that are abandoned buildings or underground lairs, nations of creatures in the Darklands, crashed spaceships,

unsealed areas that were previously lost or revealed by the environment. Let's move on to the second thing you need. You need an objective for the dungeon. Why in the holy name of Shalen or Bahamut would a group of adventurers want or need to go there? There needs to be an objective to draw the PCs into the dungeon. Now, don't get me wrong. I've DM'd for a lot of groups that would enter the yawning portal to hell if someone told them there was a 10 gold piece of loot somewhere in there.

They're motivated by gold and voila, they'll go anywhere and do anything to get gold. In all seriousness, that could be the objective you need for your adventuring group. There's possible loot in there. Go get them, tigers. They march in, take a long rest or two, march deeper into the caves, and voila, you've got them in a dungeon. Some groups will go into dungeons simply because they're there. A haunted house, an abandoned ship, a volcanic lair, interdimensional space with tentacles sticking out of it.

No more reason needed. Gird those loins, we're going in. However, not all groups are that easy to get into a dungeon. Some of them need a little more motivation, and here's where you can use the concept of MacGuffins. I've used the term before, but as a reminder, MacGuffins drive a story forward and keep the plot moving. What they are, generally, isn't important at all. They have value to either the party or someone who hires the party to get it for them, and either retrieving it or getting rid of it becomes the real reason the adventure happens at all. The MacGuffin example I always think of is the One

Ring in Lord of the Rings. The secret of the ring is discovered and the quest hinges on taking it to Mount Doom and destroying it. Because, well, Isildur didn't do it when he had the chance, and that's beside the point. Agents of Sauron are seeking the ring, which serves as the call to adventure, and our unlikely heroes leave the Shire to go to the end of the Prancing Pony, in the town of Bree, where Gandalf doesn't meet them like he said he would. But Strider does, and they head off to Rivendell, form the Fellowship of the Ring, Mines of Moria, Fly, you fools, Lothlorien, breaking of the Fellowship, etc, etc, etc. But Jeremy, none of that would have happened if not for Bilbo stealing the ring from

Gollum, and you forgot the Bridge of Khazad-dum, and the Battle of Helm's Deep, and I know, I know, I know. This is only a 20-minute podcast. It's tough to sum up a nine-hour movie epic in that time. The point is, the ring keeps the story moving. For another example, the MacGuffin doesn't even have to be a thing. It can be an idea, a threat, or as in the movie Saving Private Ryan, a person. Private Ryan was the MacGuffin keeping the group moving until they found him and protecting him led to the finale of the story. You can use MacGuffins as reasons to get the party into a certain area. In an adventure I jammed a long time ago, I cobbled pieces together from different stories

to make an adventure written around seven artifacts called the Riven Regalia. They were trying to find it before the Big Bad did, and the story took them into tombs in cities that had long since fallen to the undead, took them behind enemy lines where they'd make deals with powerful orcs to collect these objects

and properly use them during the ending battle with the orcs to collect these objects and properly use them during the ending battle with the big bad to ensure the blood war didn't spill out into the material plane. MacGuffins, or even rumors or hints of MacGuffins, can be enough to get a party into the dungeon. Remember, we're looking for an objective to the dungeon, and if you don't use a MacGuffin, you can always tie the dungeon into, say, character backstory or development of that character. This character's reason for becoming an adventurer is because their uncle was an adventurer and they want to be like them, or be better than them, or rescue them, or find their corpse and pee on it, whatever. Maybe they hear about the danger radiating out from this dungeon in a local town, and the

residents of Starkfest are concerned because they've seen little cackling creatures in the forest surrounding the old abandoned fort. At night, there are mysterious lights floating in the woods, and they need someone to go check it out. Boom! You've got a reason to get them into the dungeon. Last idea for an objective. Money or magic items.

Prey on the classic greedy adventurer's desire for more, more, more. Hey, I heard there's a shit ton of gold left behind in the old mines, but it's said that the spirits there are restless, and if you can get in and get out quick, well, there's wealth there for the taking. But don't get caught. We've talked about needing themes and objectives for your dungeons. Finally, and as a tangent to the last point, there needs to be a reason for the dungeon to exist.

You could just hand-wave it and say, It's there because it's there. The end. But most of the time, structures, even cave systems, were built for some purpose. What is it? Or what was it? Was it an ambitious project that was never really fully realized or completed? Like a luxury hotel in an area where tourists no longer go? Hang on. That's an adventure location I haven't really done much with in the past few years.

Old abandoned hotel, many of the windows are long since busted out, rich carpets in the main level and dark boiler rooms down below, creatures lurk and scheme. Okay, God, I gotta write an adventure for this. Let's add that to the list of stuff I need to write. Sorry about that, I got sidetracked. But what about a dam or other infrastructure that was never completed because money ran out? Maybe a location outlived its usefulness, like a big military fort in a strategic location for a war that's long since finished. A factory that shut down a long time ago.

Or, I'll admit, something that would scare the coconuts out of me, an abandoned asylum or sanatorium. Blech. Yeah. Sorry, being committed to someplace like that has always been a fear of mine because of one simple question. How do you convince someone that you're sane? Doesn't make for an interesting Delta Green adventure, by the way.

Anyway, even caves have a reason for it to exist. The reason could be as simple as it's a naturally formed passage to the Darklands, but it could have been a former lair for giant worms, prehistoric sloths, or the result of an ancient battle between, oh, let's just say druids and earth elementals driven mad by radiation. At this point, and please accept my apology, but I'm going to have to cut this off here and continue it in a part two next week. I'm looking at the rest of the bullet points I've got written to want to fill out, but there is no way in Infernus I'm going to be able to complete all of them in the next zero seconds. To sum up this week's conversation, look at giving your

characters a dungeon to crawl through. Give your dungeon themes, objectives, and reasons they were built or reasons to exist, and you're going a long way toward having a good dungeon crawl adventure. With just a little prep work and foreshadowing, I bet you and your players would have fun doing it. If you like this podcast, please subscribe wherever you found it and leave it a rating and review. It only takes a couple of minutes and it does help the podcast grow. Tune in next week when we're going to continue this topic, focusing on the characteristics of dungeon crawls that you should include, like dungeon dynamics, atmosphere, wandering monsters, and so forth. Before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Cats. I have a cat that loves to hang around when I'm cooking.

She loves it when I whisk her. Okay, okay, alright. That's enough cat puns for one week. I'll just press pause. This has been episode 207, part 1 of Dungeon Crawls. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2024. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.