It has taken me a very long time to internalise the concept of dungeon as "mythical underworld" but now it's so internalised there's not much space left for alternative ways of understanding subterranean adventure spaces.. except as spaces that sit alongside the mythical underworld, one way or another...
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| Interior made with sketchup |
A dungeon is a dimensional rift. Or rather, a Dungeon is an incursion of Chaos into the Wilderness of the Known World. It can be a castle, a cave or even... a dungeon.
The deeper you go, the weirder it gets. This weirdness connects rifts to one another.
All dungeons are connected.
Delving Deeper
Delving Deeper's wandering monster tables expand upon those of the original Underworld and Wilderness Adventures by Arneson & Gygax. Dungeon depth (by level) determines which of the six encounter tables are rolled upon: simply put, the deeper you delve the more dangerous (and to some extent, the weirder) that encounter is likely to be.
While pondering how this could also be applied to the tricks, traps and treasures of the dungeon I considered my recent solo delves into the Stygian Library. In the both Gardens of Ynn and the Stygian Library Cavegirl one of the shared features is gateways to other worlds. Effectively, these pocket dimensions facilitate travel across the planes, in a similar way to Sigil in Planescape or Troika.
I've always said I think of Pariah in a similar way: the game can turn into a realm-hopping psychedelic journey across various spirit realms. D&D has already allowed for planar travel since at least AD&D 1e... why not integrate it into the core game environment, the dungeon?
Improbable Exits
When randomly generating dungeons, use an improbable exit as an alternative to the trick stair. The level of the dungeon determines where the stair emerges, as follows:
In addition to expanding the campaign setting this also provides an additional impetus for dungeon delving: essentially, delvers open up new trade routes and markets, as well as military and espionage opportunities for ruling powers.
Travelling the Warp
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| Page 143 of Rogue Trader, published by Games Workshop nearly 40 years ago |
Parties can therefore offer their services as guides and scouts, having pioneered these routes on previous delves. The Dungeon is Hyperspace, with all that is entailed by that: there's something brewing in my head at the moment around the corruptions of chaos, the warp from 40K and this kind of additional weirdness and corruption to conventional dungeon delving. This has been inspired by Completely Unfathomable and this post by Shuttered Room. There will be more coming very soon
Notes
While the mythic underworld always felt like a valid take (and one popular among the OSR sphere), it hadn't been part of my games as a youngster. I had learned D&D from the book, not the tabletop folk tradition—and the books depicted dungeons as "real" places that follow most of the rules of the "real" world... or at least world defined by the quasi-real Gygaxian Naturalism. Somewhere, in the dungeon, there should be a place where the orcs take a shit.
With a bit of OD&D exegesis, the folklore surrounding D&D is no longer opaque to me (although it's still murky). Anyway, now I no longer feel that dungeons need to have orc toilets.
Links
Solo Stygian games:https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/search/label/stygian%20library
Cavegirl's blog:
https://cavegirlgames.blogspot.com/
Delving Deeper:
https://ddo.immersiveink.com/
Shuttered Room's Surreal Sidhe Rift
https://shutteredroom.blogspot.com/2025/11/that-night-forest-grew-d66-monsters-of.html
Understanding Gygaxian Naturalism
https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/gygaxian-naturalism.html
Oh wow.
ReplyDeleteI think I'm going to adopt the Rift as a thing now (I've also been looking at some older Ravenloft stuff recently; broad-stroke skims but turns out one of the faerie-horror elements is something called the Shadow Rift, so not far off). It's absolutely the right name for this kind of reality-fracture.
In a similar way, I used to think of dungeons as 'real' places, that needed (eco)logic, and this didn't always work well with the spectacle that seemed equally necessary. It took a long time to wash out that stricture.
Almost forgot - I do still feel that dungeons need toilets, but that they don't have to accurately reflect the lavatorial needs of the population; sometimes it's just a lair for a toilet-ghost yokai.
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