Why I Hate Dungeons; or You Can't Spell Dungeon Without Dung

I have a confession to make. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but the truth of the matter is that I hate dungeons. Endless poorly lit corridors with random encounters, challenges that get tougher the deeper underground that you go. I want no part of it. Can not stand them. Probably the last place I want to take a group of adventurers. Please don’t take my d20 away for this. I can deal with some caves, an underground passage that leads somewhere interesting, and maybe even some mines if something halfway decent is going on in them and they don’t follow some sort of monotonous layout for hours. But a real dungeon filled with T intersections, wall sconces, and bags of rotted things? No thanks. I don’t see the fun of placing player characters into an environment that is so one sided and thoughtless. There just doesn’t seem to be much to do other than walk from room to room and kill whatever you find. And take the treasure after wiping the blood off of it. Right? Even the classic dungeon crawls in the annals of D&D bore me. Tomb of Horrors? Really, what the fuck is that supposed to be? That’s fun? Queen of the Demonweb Pits? Come on, look at that map! Aside from being absolute nonsense (granted, I realize that it does exist on some sort of plane of chaos…) it is nothing but an exercise in rolling dice and hoping that the ones you roll come out better than the ones that your opponents roll. And we’ll ignore the fact that Lolth lives on a weird pirate ship, I suspect that some people think there is something cool about that. I am not one of those people.

Perhaps if I understood the general ecology of the dungeon better I would appreciate them more. But as it stands, they really make no sense to me in terms of how they actually exist. Some of these fantasy dungeons really are very impressive feats of engineering; traps all over the place, incredible architecture, secret passages cleverly hidden into the stones of some well carved walls, enchanted statues that animate and kill people unless the proper words are spoken. This is some serious shit going on. But that’s actually the part that really infuriates me. You mean to tell me that the same evil genius lich that had the chutzpah to put this entire operation together, is the same dude that sits in a tiny alcove all day hoarding some fantastic magic items (but not actually using them) and doing nothing proactively to stop the adventurers that are rampaging through his lair and killing all his minions one by one? It just seems inconsistent. And none of these monsters are smart enough to decide, “Hey, maybe we should all work together to kill these guys before we are all slaughtered one at a time.” That never occurred to them? They would rather play a card game behind a closed door and wait until it gets kicked down and a horde of murdering lunatics storm into the area and annihilate them? It just seems to me that all of these danger filled dungeons exist solely to be a foil to adventurers. What if the adventurers never arrive? Did the dungeon really even exist? I understand that a lot of them have some sort of flimsy backstory to explain their existence, but I’m not buying it. I like realism in my fantasy!

The point of all of this is that I have been thinking a lot about urban settings in fantasy worlds, and mainly about how much I like them. It’s true that they are much more challenging to run from the DM/GM/ZM/Keeper/Referee standpoint because of all the options that are available to the players, but that’s what makes them come to life and feel like you are actually having an open adventure as opposed to a semi-scripted jaunt through a dungeon. There are only so many decisions that you make at an intersection. And the worst part is that a slog through a dungeon generally reduces a character to nothing more than their stat sheet, they are usually only worth whatever they bring to combat and trapfinding. Come on, let’s be honest. Dungeons are lame and lazy on the part of the DM. I don’t think I have ever seen players get real excited about the prospect of trekking through the subterranean darkness in the way that they light up when learning some juicy information from a well placed NPC or in slaughtering the adversary that had been hanging around town and taunting them. Towns and cities have structure and laws, whereas a dungeon really has neither of those things. Having laws, customs, and structure forces players to think about their actions and to balance risk versus reward, as opposed to operating inside of the pseudo vacuum that is the Dungeon of Evil Wizard. Who cares what you do in there? I guess that I am just at the point in my roleplaying career in which I have seen every monster, given out every piece of treasure, and watched players die in every sort of horrid manner that there is. I want more than that and I don’t think I will be finding it inside of a dungeon. I like creating and designing cities for PC’s to run through. Coming up with an unusual shopkeeper or a tavern with a weird theme is fun for me, finding ways to work interesting combat situations into an urban environment is a rewarding challenge. Generally I homebrew all of this stuff, but there are lots of sources that I have drawn on over the years for both inspiration and examples of how this information should run and look. I’ve talked about my love for the City of Greyhawk boxed set before, but over the next couple of posts I am going to look at some of the other urban fantasy sourcebooks that I have used in the past.

Hall of Fame: City of Greyhawk boxed set

As a young Dungeon Master in the early 90’s I frequently ran parties through the wonderful campaign setting of Greyhawk. Sure, from time to time we found adventure in the macabre land of Ravenloft or ran through Dragonlance as it burned, but our heart really belonged to Greyhawk. Nowadays I am strictly a homebrew setting type of DM, but there is one aspect of Greyhawk that I refer to from time to time. The City of Greyhawk boxed set is probably the most useful, thorough, and cool campaign supplement that I can possibly imagine. It came out in 1989 and I still find it to be extremely relevant and, despite the fact that I have read it about a thousand times, I always find something in it that I can throw into an adventure.

For a single supplement it really contained a lot of information. Inside of the box the eager DM finds waiting for him two books, four very large maps, and an entire series of short modules. The two books are really the heart of the boxed set; Greyhawk: Gem of the Flanaess details the actual city, while Greyhawk: Folk, Feuds, and Factions is all about the inhabitants of Oerth’s primary city. As a teenager I was really just beginning to hone the craft of creating adventures for players, most of the time they were one shot style games that had little to do with the previous sessions. The characters would continue and sometimes NPC’s would resurface, but the idea of actually having the PC’s inhabit a world that lived and moved not only around the PC’s, but even in their absence, was not just a novel idea but one that may have been over the head of a thirteen year old. The Greyhawk boxed set changed all of that for me. For the first time I saw a game world that existed outside of a module, that is the citizens of Greyhawk had lives that they lived that had nothing to do with the invasion of evil giants or the secret slavers latest attempt to capture unsuspecting folks. It made them so much more real, and in turn really contributed to the world that the PC’s were looting their way through. Something clicked with me and I continue to design worlds like this to this day.

I have a confession. I thought that the maps were so cool that I had one hanging on my wall as a poster. I was 27. Kidding about the 27 part, but it was hanging in my bedroom for a long time. The four maps are phenomenal. Three of them show the city from the same point of view and scale, but each has a different spin on things. One of them (my poster) has a nice color detail of the city. The buildings are all visible and the city teems with life and action. Another map shows the city with very little details, but all of the buildings and areas are marked with a number and letter, which corresponds to an entry in the Gem of the Flanaess book. I’d gaze longingly at my poster and when a building seemed intriguing to me I would look it up and learn all about it. What’s that weird building that looks like a temple at the foot of the Grand Citadel? Oh, it’s the Lord’s Tomb. It even lists the guards that will typically be there, even some of the jokes that they make when killing time. The third map shows the same view, but reveals the underground of the city. Sewers, secret passages, crypts, and even cisterns! Wow, that is some level of detail. The fourth map places Greyhawk in context with the world around it, which is cool, but why would you ever want to leave Greyhawk?

It’s not just that the boxed set contained so much information, for what is quantity without quality? But the information contained within was top notch. The NPC’s in particular were all well thought out and they all made sense. They were not just one dimensional foils for the PC’s or overly generous benefactors anxious to part with magic items. They had agendas! They had lives! They did things. One of my favorites was the detailed descriptions of Mordenkainen and the Circle of Eight. A group of nine powerful wizards, I had been using their spells for years without knowing a thing about them (for the most part, I had picked up some info here and there). Now I knew everything about them, including their relationships with one another and why they created the types of spells that they did. It was a revelation to my inquisitive mind. I had no idea that Otto was obese. Shocking. I also appreciated how several of the NPC’s were presented at several stages of their career, making it easy to drop them into any campaign. One of my favorites was Varmai Zendeihei, a young lawful good warrior working to benefit the folks of Greyhawk. Over time she discovers a paired of cursed bracers created by Vecna and slowly transforms over time into an evil, trusted agent of Iuz. The book contains stats for her various incarnations and levels of power over different points in time.

The adventure cards that came with the book were also excellent and great for a night of adventuring, usually on the outskirts of the city. Inside the box are 23 of these adventures. They were short (all the info was on both sides of a single piece of paper) and usually quirky and compelling. They range from simple (watching over a shop while the keeper is out of town on business) to deadly (retrieving a broken staff from the crypt of a lich). My personal favorite was Vote for the Goat, in which the party is hired to provide protection for a goat that is running for political office. Great stuff all around.

Of all the TSR products of my youth, the City of Greyhawk boxed set may be my favorite. Certainly the one with the most impact. It just seemed so limitless to me in it’s scope and ambition, and what was capable with a game of D&D. Do they still make things like this today? I have no idea. I hope so. I was at the bookstore the other day and noticed the obscene amount of 4th edition material that is out there, perhaps there is another City of Greyhawk out there somewhere. I would think not though. Flipping through the Greyhawk boxed set one thing that jumps out is the lack of numbers. It is not entry after entry of feats, spells, magic items, and prestige classes. It is about enhancing a game through NPC’s and a rich world to explore, rather than by elevating the power level and providing the PC’s with endless opportunities to specialize their characters.