I'd watch a video of someone with architectural experience analyzing these old dungeons and ranting about how impossible to construct and functionally useless they are for anything other than dungeon delving.
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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For starters, just ask your DM three questions (assuming enemies are sentient and civilized beings, not just "wildlife") and watch him sweat nervously:
- Where do the enemies sleep?
- Where do they cook, eat and store food?
- Where are the toilets?
In a lot of modern guides on dungeon design, they stress thinking this stuff out. Yeah you should definitely have some idea why the inhabitants are here and not elsewhere, where their supplies come from, and how they interact with whatever else calls this place home.
They should have a place to sleep, eat, maybe recreation even. While the PCs poke around, the dungeon denizens shouldn't just be waiting around in preset rooms, fully ready to fight like MMO mobs. They could be on patrol, raiding their neighbors, sleeping, arguing, partying, whatever.
There's even fun things you can do with this like inter-faction conflicts between floors or other regions. Do the Orcs fear the dragon at the bottom of the dungeon?
Do the bandits have an uneasy non-aggression pact with a lich? Or are they constantly embattled with seemingly limitless undead because they're struggling for a legendary artifact?
Somebody's gotta reset all those traps, too.
Players should definitely feel like trespassers in a living place. Few people enjoy that ancient style of dungeon delving anymore, where you slay a band of kobolds, answer a sphinx's riddle, then bust in on a vampire who's as confused about why they're there as you are!
Where are the toilets?
Maybe the hallway but the local gelatinous cube roombas it up. (Eeeeeww) ... Or a room has holes dug dropping into an underground river. Or just a really deep pit, or a convenient portal to the Abyss LOL.
You can have fun with this stuff.
Now i have an itch to go reread Dungeon Meshi
I watched the Anime and I feel like it expands on the above concept very well.
Lots of fun.
Where are the toilets?
(...) Or a room has holes dug dropping into an underground river. Or just a really deep pit, or a convenient portal to the Abyss LOL.
Or to the Underdark. The Drow must hate the dungeon occupants...
I really like this approach. I'd say few dungeons are really places of inner conflict though, since that usually either resolves itself quickly by one side winning or fleeing, because few people like to have a potential rival as a direct neighbor. But of course, there are exceptions and even dungeons belonging to a single faction should feel like the monsters are actually alive.
My DM would burst out laughing at those questions and respond with:
YOU'RE the adventurers, aren't ya? So:
- explore and find out
- explore and find out
- explore and find out
Generally yes, the DM doesn't need to answer all things (heoght be revealing some secrets after all, where you can ambush, poison food, whatever). BUT he better is prepared after the questions
I ran a bitd game with a civil engineer playing a leech. 'Where does the poop go' got a lot of people killed.
Make the enemies coprophages and all the problems sort themselves out.
DM sweats profusely, starts searching for books on underground ecosystems.
Someone should make a 100% science-based dungeons game.
It’s short, but it’s a start:
Lindybeige! Haven't seen that guy in ages! And he's still active!
IIRC this dungeon was created specifically for dungeon delving, and the mad mage who created it is, as the name implies, batshit crazy, so this one makes sense.
And now I want to play Dwarf Fortress again.
Plot twist: It's just a printout of the DM's last Dwarf Fortress save.
Below level 23 is where the FUN starts.
The mandatory water-themed floor is only there because the DM messed up making a waterfall. Again.
I know a guy who did this. Use the entire worldgen for the overland map, locations, and factions then would handcraft some dungeons in fortress mode. Sounded like a lot of work but worth it.
How many years does it take to play through a map?
Look up how many years it'll take for iron stars to form and multiply that by six.
In the back of the 2014 DMG is a set of tables for generating random dungeons. I thought it would be fun to see how that goes. After spending maybe 6 hours on it across a few days, the abomination I created ended up making DungeonScrawl crash in my browser and be unable to work on it further, but if it hadn't it probably would've ended up like roughly 1/4 of this.
1/10 do not recommend
D20srd.org has an automatic random dungeon creator. It's rarely sensible but even a rogue needs exceptional luck and several levels to make the detect and disarm checks that it comes up with. The monsters it populates the dungeon with are appropriate to the level you set
It creates a player's map and a GM version
this is why i do theatre of the mind
Man, you should see my mom's megadungeon; this is fucking tiny.
There's a labyrinth in the labyrinth.
I've always wanted to play a MEGA-DUNGEON with a DM who wants to run one. I love to making a 2-3 level dungeon when I DM but I don't think I can do a MEGA ones.
I feel called out.
Maximum effort!