Adventure Design 101: Dungeons That Live

It’s a little delayed thanks to the self-destruction of my network card a few days ago, but now that I’m back online, it’s time to wrap up my thoughts on dungeon design.  My previous article covered some important questions that I like to ask when stocking my dungeons.  There are other questions you can ask yourself, most of which spring from those.  The main question that remains, though, is:  What are the inhabitants doing?

I don’t mean in the long run.  That, we’ve already covered.  I mean, what are they doing right now?

I think that answering this question is one of the easiest ways of making your game world seem more real to your player.  It’s one of the main differences between monsters who are just there as opponents and monsters that inhabit your world.

The brief summary is this:  Monsters don’t usually just stand around waiting to be encountered.  They should be doing something, most of the time.  As the gamemaster, you should know what that something is.

Sleeping, hunting, and eating are all common activities monsters are likely to be engaged in when the PCs come upon them, but intelligent creatures offer many more possibilities.  They might be standing guard, repairing a trap, sharpening a weapon, worshipping a deity, playing cards with a few friends, counting their gold, hiding somewhere to avoid work, bullying a subordinate, weaving a basket, delivering a report to a superior, or attempting unskillfully to whittle something out of a block of wood.  But they probably won’t be just standing around.

Doing these things makes them more interesting.  An encounter with five goblins standing in a room is kind of bland.  If the PCs stumble into a barracks where five goblin soldiers are sleeping, or kick in the door to find five surprised goblins staring at them from behind five hands of battered playing cards, that’s a bit more interesting.  It also gives you a change to toss in a personality quirk; maybe four of those card-playing goblins stumble to their feet, fumbling for their weapons, but the fifth is greedy enough to try to grab the stakes off the table and sneak out while his fellows’ backs are turned.

In order to pull this sort of thing off, though, you need to know what a given dungeon inhabitant is likely to be doing at a given time.  This could be a lot of work, but there are ways of cheating.

First, it’s not a bad idea to draw up a brief schedule for each type of monster in your dungeon.  Something very simple will do for most monsters; notes such as “goblins generally sleep from dawn to noon, eat at noon and sunset, and spend the night gathering corpses for the necromancer” would suffice.  That gives you a good idea of what the goblins are likely to be doing at any given time between a little before sunset and a little after noon, and you can assume that the free time between noon and sunset is spent on a variety of other maintenance and entertainment activities.

An important NPC, such as the Bid Bad Guy of the dungeon or his named lieutenants, probably warrants a separate schedule.  If there’s a goblin chief and a shaman among the goblins, it could be useful for you to know where they are at any given time.

When creating these schedules, keep in mind the character of the NPCs.  In a typical D&D game world, hobgoblins have an orderly and militaristic society, while orcs are chaotic.  Hobgoblins are therefore more likely to stick to schedules, to post guards (and actualy pay attention while on guard duty), and to operate efficiently within a hierarchy.  On the other hand, an individual hobgoblin is probably less likely than an individual orc to deviate from a “standard procedure,” so if the characters are trying to sneak into a guarded area, they have a better chance of “timing” and avoiding hobgoblins’ patrols than orcs’.

Another trick that can be useful is the old-school random encounter table.  With a little modification, these can give a sense of the dungeons’ inhabitants moving around the dungeon as they go about their business.  One way to achieve this is to make the table simply randomize planned encounters:  sketch out a few scenarios, such as “Encounter A: Five goblins playing cards” and “Encounter B: Six goblins preparing a meal”.  Then instead of filling the table with entries like “20%: 4-6 goblins,” fill it with “20%: Encounter A”.  Of course, randomization might not apply at certain times, depending on your schedule; if the goblins are all asleep at 10 AM, then when the party encounters them at 10 AM, they’ll be sleeping, unless an alarm’s been raised and awakened them.

Finally, you can simply decide on a general activity that’s going on when the PCs reach the dungeon.  Maybe the necromancer’s underground lair is suffering an invasion by the giant ants.  In that case, the party’s encounters could include a group of ghouls fighting the ants, a group of goblins taking their time about getting their weapons and armor ready, a group of ants carrying off the body of a dead goblin, perhaps even the necromancer himself angrily heading toward the goblins’ quarters, accompanied by some ghoul bodyguards.  All of these activities are logical outgrowths of the motives and relations we’d already established for our dungeon’s inhabitants.

One last word:  in a previous post about settings, I advocated filling the world with the strange and wonderful.  This does not in any way conflict with the “realistic” approach to activity I’m advocating here — just make sure the dungeon’s inhabitants respond logically (using in-game logic, that is) to the strange circumstances provided by the setting.  If there’s an area of magical zero gravity, the goblins might superstitiously avoid it, or they might set some sort of trap or ambush making use of it.  Magical areas of zero gravity are not realistic in the semantic sense, but assuming that they exist in the game world, then the goblins’ response to such an area is logical and lends verisimilitude to your setting.

This is a good thing:  You get to offer the players the sense of wonder about the existence of such a thing, while they also get the sense that it fits into the game world because of the way the NPCs’ interactions with it fit logically.  It can feel a little overwhelming at first, but with a bit of practice, it will begin to come naturally.

Related posts:

1. Adventure Design 101: Dungeons That Make Sense
2. Adventure Design 101
3. Adventure Design 101: The Setting
4. Adventure Design 101: The Villain
5. Adventure Design 101: The Plot – Story