A Comment on Scenarios

By Ben Frank

There is a tendency in many scenarios to have dungeons that may be neat but make no conceptual sense. For instance, a dungeon with many rooms linked one to the next with monsters in each and nothing of substance at the end. Or, a dungeon with a nice final encounter with the big nasty where you have to go through a gauntlet of traps, tricks, and other rooms and beasts to get there. Why would any intelligent creature build such a place? If you came home at night and had to go through every room of your house and your neighbors’ to get to the bedroom would you still live there?

In this vein, many dungeons are too large. Sometimes it is the number of rooms which serve no purpose except to contain monsters to fight. Some times it is the length of the entry corridor to a dungeon, which can be so long as to take up the a significant part of the length of the map.

Again, if you had to walk down a long corridor after going through your front door just to get to doors at the end which allowed you to get back to the front of the house, wouldn’t you knock down a wall and put a door close to the front to make the trip easier? Similarly we have the overtrapped corridor phenomena, where there is treasure in a chest or such and the floor is “trapped” to do damage as you walk on it. Traps are one thing — presumably the occupants know about them and can avoid or disarm them. But forced damage (or a pool of lava, etc.) that the owner would also have to pass through makes as much sense as the long hall or extra room.

Keep in mind — the monsters have to live where you put them. They need to have a food supply, place to rest, and easy access (at least for them — lava is o.k. if they are immune to fire.) You are building a home. That doesn’t mean you can’t have many rooms or a long corridor, but if you do there should be an easy way for the homeowner to get in and out.

Keeping that in mind in dungeon design will be more logical and make the scenario more fun to play.

This perspective will also help avoid the “Monty Haul” effect of too much treasure which has crept into many of the scenarios. If you were an intelligent mage, would you keep a wand of fireballs and steel chain mail in a locked, trapped chest? No, you would be using both or would at least have them easily accessible. You might have gold, gems, or something small stored away, but the big stuff you would wear/use yourself. Big treasure should not be easy to find (unless you stumble upon an armory or magician’s lab, in which case shouldn’t the owners or guards be nearby?)

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