In Dungeons & Dragons, every location is a dungeon

Also posted in r/DnD because nobody actually reads this blog

Hugo Darnaut (1850-1937), Dürnstein on the Danube, 1876

In Dungeons & Dragons, “dungeon” refers to any underground or interior system of corridors and chambers: rooms connected by hallways. Their layouts run the gamut from totally linear—just one path through—to bewilderingly labyrinthine. Dungeons have their own ecologies and are often dynamic. That is, those orcs don’t just lock themselves in a 20x20 room waiting for adventurers to wander in; they live there, they move around in it, they engage with other factions occupying the space.

Every DM knows how to run a dungeon. Something about it just makes sense: you go from room to room, you encounter obstacles and traps along the way, you interact with objects and NPCs, you fight monsters, you find treasure. You might even learn something about the history of the setting while you’re at it. It's a self-contained area where adventures happen.

It might be helpful to think about outdoor adventures the same way. When your players strike out into the wilderness, there’s no need to reinvent the game (a lesson I learned from constantly trying to reinvent the game). Just exchange your graph paper for hex paper.

Instead of drawing rooms and hallways, you’re drawing plains, hills, and forests separated by mountains, rivers, and canyons.

Instead of stocking rooms with furniture, artwork, chains on the walls, the vials and alembics of an alchemist, or barrels and chests, you're stocking outdoor areas with trees, plants, logs on the ground, stones, ruins, mile markers, road signs, abandoned wagons, and old campsites.

You still have monster and NPC encounters, just at longer distances. You can still find “secret doors” in the form of treasure hidden inside a tree or behind a stone in a wall or as previously unknown mountain passes and river fords. You may still be confronted by traps in the form of rickety rope bridges held up by worn-out ropes, rockslides, traps and snares set by hunters, or scree that can cause you to lose your footing and go tumbling down a hillside.

I’ve built entire campaigns by drawing a hex map, stocking each hex by rolling on random tables, and then building the backstory by drawing connections between whatever ends up in each hex. That’s a lot of planning up front, both in making the tables and in stocking each hex, but once you do it, you won’t have to prep again for a long time (unless the party makes a beeline for the uncharted corners of the map!). You could even save yourself the up-front prep and just roll on the random tables as the party enters each hex if you are confident in your improvisation skills. But many dungeon adventures involve exploring a specific, self-contained underground area; by the same token, your players could be tasked with exploring a specific 6 hex by 6 hex region of the map, whether to map the area, catalog plant species, prospect for precious metals, or drive off monsters.

When designing wilderness areas, whether it’s just to get the party from point A to point B or to create a wilderness adventure, set it up the same way you’d set up a dungeon. The game is Dungeons & Dragons, but you don’t have to take that phrase literally. Everything is a dungeon if you believe in your heart it is.

This might be met with "well, yeah, no kidding" by experienced DMs, but it's something that took me a long time to figure out on my own, so I hope it is helpful to people struggling with the same questions.

Worldbuilding With Players in Mind

Summary: Since I’m playing with people I don’t really know, and the desire to play Dungeons & Dragons—and not some other game or some homebrew bastardization of D&D—is what brought us together, and because I don’t want to say “no” to anyone’s character idea because it doesn’t fit with my selfish vision of what the campaign should be, I’m taking a more improvisational and collaborative approach to worldbuilding in my current campaign.

I’ve created a number of “conceptual” campaign settings over the years, most of which required mechanical alterations to the game. Usually, these changes are restrictive: no gnomes, no single-class spellcasters except for rangers or eldritch knights and the like, no plate armor. Others are cosmetic (“imaginary” rather than “symbolic” to use the psychoanalytic jargon): these elves are aliens, these orcs and dwarves are created by currents of chaos energy and law energy pulsing through the depths of the planet, all spells must be cast as rituals.

When such restrictive alterations amount to small ideas revealed through gameplay, the players might just go, “oh, that’s cool,” because that’s all it is: a twist on something we all already know about D&D, a sigh of new life breathed into a well-worn concept. But when they are big ideas that require major mechanical changes, or when they restrict the choices a player can make about their character, the results are a little more mixed. You start to realize why certain mechanics exist in the first place. It is rare that a player who is not a good friend will say, “sure, I’ll read your 50 page word document before the first session!” And when it’s already hard enough to find players, I don’t want to tell that player who loves gnomes for some reason that there are no gnomes in the world.

So with this most recent campaign I’ve taken a much more improvisational and collaborative approach to worldbuilding. I’ve ditched the preliminary worldbuilding along with the question, “what is this game about?” in favor of allowing a constellation of small ideas to cohere through gameplay. I’m playing with the races, classes, and rules presented in the core rulebooks (D&D as gaming lingua franca). My preference is for human-centric (anthropocentric?) parties and worlds, but my players came to the table with their own ideas: an elf ranger, two halfling bards, and a gnome druid. They all have great backstories, too: an elf supremacist death cult, a halfling sibling rivalry, a community of gnome druids chased from their forest. Since I’m trying to be a good DM, my first thought was not, “ugh, this is messing with my idea for this campaign.” It was, “in what sort of world could these characters and backstories coexist?”

I can’t come to the table with such rigid ideas about what my world is like that I reject player input. I can’t expect the players to play the game the way I want to play it while ignoring the way they want to play. I can’t force them to respect the integrity of my precious creation while stifling their own creativity and asking them to compromise their own creations. So those backstories and all of the assumptions that go along with an elf, two halflings, and a druid becoming friends gets woven into the fabric of the world.

This doesn’t require too much radical change if I don’t bring my preconceived notions of what this campaign setting should be like to the table in the first place. Worldbuilding is fun, creating campaign settings is fun, but it’s fun mostly for the person doing the creating, especially if that world does more than just tweak players’ understanding of what a D&D world is supposed to look like. So for this new campaign I’m running, I’m implementing only those “cosmetic” changes, bringing out what’s weird or interesting in the default assumptions of the game as presented in the three core rulebooks, and integrating the implications of character backstories into the fabric of the game world. 

Thoughts on Research (and Some Other Nonsense)

I’m currently working on a Victorian-inspired campaign setting. I know, there are like at least—and this is just a rough guesstimate (not even a precise guesstimate)—forty eight thousand of these out there already. Why make another one? I’ll get into that later. But right now I want to talk about research.

I studied a lot of 19^th century British literature (not just Victorian) in grad school, even published a paper, so I’m having no problem finding source material. I’m going as far back as the Romantic era, Coleridge in particular, since Gothic literature continued to influence poets and artists up to the turn of the 20^th century. Poe’s in there, too, and all of the French poets he inspired, and Marx’s Capital (lots of vampires and werewolves and ghosts in control of the arcane constructs that are colonizing humanity); I’ve been reading everything from Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna to China Miéville.

I’ve got about 30 books, articles, poems, and films in my “Appendix N” right now. It’s like writing my thesis all over again, and it’s easy to get bogged down, or just to get so into reading and learning and absorbing information, that I never get around to actually writing. So here’s what I’m doing about it: I read a source, I take some notes, and then I don’t look back at it again.

I’m trying to keep the research at arm’s length for a few reasons. Most practically, constantly referring back to what I’ve read means I’m not writing. But I also don’t want to just put a fantasy paintjob on the Victorian era, faithfully reproducing historical details in D&D terms. What I want is to get a feel for the time and to capture the major themes without just doing “Fantasy London” or whatever. I have zero interest in steampunk; my interest lies more along the lines of the use of Gothic aesthetic figures as a way to describe and come to terms with the new social and economic order taking shape in this era. Hopefully this approach will result in a game more interesting than gears on a corset and goggles on a top hat, but steers clear of a super serious, not-your-grandma’s, grim’n’gritty reflection on class struggle, slavery, imperialism, and patriarchy.  It’ll be pretentious¹, how could it not be, I’m making it, but shit, I like games that let you go into a cave and kill everything and not have to think about the orc babies.

So anyway, the research I’m doing will help me get into the thematic space I need to be in to write this thing, but I don’t want to be shackled to notions of historical accuracy, so once I’ve read something, I’m not going back to it.  I have to remind myself that this isn’t scholarship; it’s a game.

_____

1. Pretentious, like having footnotes in a blog post. Reminds me of this classic from Jeff Rients. God, I can’t believe that post is almost a decade old. 

The Vampire Muse

Vampire Muse

Medium humanoid, neutral evil

AC: 12

HP: 54 (8d8+16)

STR 10 DEX 12 CON 14 INT 14 WIS 16 CHA 18

Saving Throws: Int +6, Cha +8

Resistance: Cannot be charmed

Skills: Perception +7, History (art) +9, Persuasion +8

Languages: Common, Elven (or the dominant artistic language for a particular culture)

Innate Spellcasting:

2/day: charm person, energy form, misty step

1/day: Visceral art

Actions:

Mind blast: recharge 6. DC 15 Intelligence save or take 22 (4d8+4) damage.

Slam: Melee weapon attack, +4 to hit, 2d8+4 bludgeoning damage. While in ethereal form, the Vampire Muse can strike out with a wispy tendril up to 10’ long that affects both corporeal and noncorporeal beings.

Onaya: You already have the talent inside you. I can see it. You just need someone to help you bring it to the surface.

Jake: How?

Onaya: There are ways. Exercises...techniques.

Jake: Can you show them to me?

The pen of the poet, the brush of the painter, the chisel of the sculptor, the voice of the singer: the acts of creation of great artists release arcane energy into the world. There are beings that feed off of this energy. They are called Vampire Muses.

Vampire Muses are aesthetes with a great appreciation for beauty in all its forms. Their charisma allows them to easily forge relationships with young artists who are still full of potential and eager to prove themselves.

Vampire Muses usually reject overt violence, but if attacked, defend themselves with their mind blast, use their energy form ability, and try escape the confrontation.

Visceral Art: With a touch, the Vampire Muse unlocks the target’s latent artistic potential. Establishing contact takes one round. The target does not make a saving throw if he willingly submitted to the Vampire Muse’s touch, and the Vampire Muse cannot use this ability on a creature against its will. As the target creates its work of art, the Vampire Muse surreptitiously saps the target of his power. As the target’s magnum opus pours from the his pen, the Vampire Muse draws sustenance from the target’s mind. Roll on the following table each day that the target is under the spell to determine the spell’s effects:

Roll (d8)          Effect

1                Target loses 1d4 points of Intelligence

2                Target loses 1d4 points of Constitution

3-5             Target loses 1d4 point of Charisma

6                Target loses 1d4 maximum hit points

7                Target takes 1d6 psychic damage from pushing too hard

8                No effect

While in the visceral art trance, the target will actually be creating his finest work of art; it is not a trick or an illusion. The target can see the results. The target does not, however, realize that he is slowly being drained of life until the effects become obvious to him. At the end of each day that the target suffers a negative effect, roll a DC25 perception check. On a successful check, the target may then roll a DC18 Charisma save to break the spell. If the target’s Charisma, Constitution, maximum hit points fall to zero, the target dies.  If the spell is broken while the target is still alive, the target regains any lost ability scores and maximum hit points.

Onaya: They all died in the end...but look what I gave them in return: immortality. Their names will live forever because of me.

One thing though: “Vampire Muse” isn’t a very cool name. Aesthetic Enervator? No. Art Sucker? Nope. Poiesophage? Ehhhh.  

Central Asia-influenced Campaign Setting

• Imagine if the Plague of Justinian (541-542) wiped out 75% of the population of the Roman Empire, sending the Mediterranean and Europe back to the Neolithic Era. (think Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt)
• The starting town could be in a Kashmir/Hindu Kush/Torugart Pass-type crossroads where there is something interesting in all directions
• East: The western frontier of China
• Northeast: Smaller warring kingdoms
• North: the endless steppes, nomadic tribes
• Northwest: more steppes
• West: desert, scattered city-states
• Southwest: the Sasanian Empire
• South: Hindu Kush Mountains (Dwarves?)
• Further South: Greco-Indian Kingdoms of Punjab: remnants of Alexander the Great’s empire—this is where you have statues of the Buddha done in Greek style. Descendants of an ancient elven empire?
• Southeast: Tibet
• Silk Road: Desert oases, caravanserai, cave monasteries.  Nomads settled into cities built by older civilizations. 

 

Wizard, hireling, fighter, cleric

Classes

·         Cleric:  I can see the cleric’s role in society being the disposal of corpses in towers of silence (give them a spell to summon scavenger birds?) in addition to their traditional function as fighters of the undead. Fire and Water are agents of purification. Corpses are a host for druj, which reanimates impure corpses.

·         Fighter: Cataphracts, nomadic mounted archers, guardians of caravans, bandits.

·         Magic-User: The Greeks and Romans claimed Zoroaster invented magic and astrology.  Ostanes introduced it to the West by accompanying Xerxes in his war against Greece. 

·         Thief: Explorers, merchants, highwaymen, among other things.

·         Elf: The Xian, celestial beings said to live in the Tian Shan mountain range

·         Dwarf: The Yaksha of Hindu mythology (caretakers of treasure buried below the earth)

Alignment

·         Law: Asha, created in the world through good deeds, etc.

·         Chaos: Druj, the opposing force that seeks to destroy the world (Although I personally don’t like the use of “law” and “chaos” as synonyms for “good” and “evil”: Maybe instead of the Law/Neutrality/Chaos system, a simple Good/Evil system to reflect the dualism of the religion?)