So.

I wrote a post defining dungeon design terms that is 8000 words long.

You might not wanna read all that. So this is the quick and dirty Sparknotes edition with little nuance or discourse, just the definitions and some examples. If any of these don’t make sense to you, I refer you back to the Masterpost for all the context.

Dungeon

An imagined space. It needs to be (1) representing a space the designer came up with, made of text and diagrams, (2) perceived through fictional senses by the players coherently so they can traverse it, (3) have its own rules and norms, which can be found by interrogating relationships kept alive within the dungeon-crawling community, (4) should have 16 or more rooms, (5) Jacquaysed, (6) have Doors & Pools in mind, (7) and evoke the Mythic Underworld.

16+ Rooms

You should have 16+ rooms, ideally 22+.

• 1-10 rooms means players may not have to backtrack, and backtracking is a big part of the Town & Dungeon thing.
• 10-16 rooms means players may backtrack and then feel bad that they wasted time backtracking when they were so close to the end.
• 16-21 rooms isn’t as big an issue, but sometimes players backtrack a second time, near the end, and feel bitter about doing it. In general the more times players are “supposed to” retreat the less insecure they are about whether they were scaredy-cats or rational actors.

Town & Dungeon

Basic D&D play loop where you go into a dungeon, go back to town to rest and resupply, and repeat. In this play loop the town isn’t really a place for roleplay or play, you just buy stuff. It may as well be an item shop and HP-replenishing inn. This is my own term and isn’t historical, it’s just that a lot of people start off playing this way.

Jaquaysing

Techniques to de-linearize a dungeon layout, named after Jennell Jaquays’ dungeon design work for Judges Guild. It includes stuff such as:

• Multiple entrances
• Loops instead of branching paths
• Multiple connections between levels
• Discontinuous connections between levels
• Secret paths
• Sub-levels for multi-level dungeons
• Divided levels for multi-level dungeons
• Nested dungeons
• Minor elevation shifts
• Having PCs enter at the dungeon’s midpoint
• Non-Euclidean geoemetry
• Extradimensional spaces

Not just for dungeons! Use it for small spaces or even battle-maps and it can still improve your game.

Doors & Pools

Dungeon design ethos of having doors and pools in the dungeon, and rules for how they work that everyone understands. You can look at door rules from early D&D and pool rules from roguelikes to see what I mean.

This isn’t really about doors, per se, or pools, per se. It’s about having repeated motifs that your players understand how to deal with, to help them gain a sense of competency in navigating a space. If your dungeon has an in-dungeon merchant show up every floor, if your dungeon is filled with sarcophagi until players have a really good understanding of what sorts of things sarcophagi might contain, but 0 doors and 0 pools, you’re doing Doors & Pools right.

Mythic Underworld

A dungeon that obeys its own laws – weird, otherworldly, and apart from the natural order. The term comes to us from Jason Cone’s Philotomy’s Musings (2007). This is a really big deal. It’s one of the main pillars of the OSR. Everybody who reads this essay comes away with their own understanding and that’s okay, that’s part of what’s so cool about it. Here’s an excerpt to show you how cool it is.

There is a school of thought on dungeons that says they should have been built with a distinct purpose, should “make sense” as far as the inhabitants and their ecology, and shouldn’t necessarily be the centerpiece of the game (after all, the Mines of Moria were just a place to get through). None of that need be true for a megadungeon underworld. There might be a reason the dungeon exists, but there might not; it might simply be. It certainly can, and perhaps should, be the centerpiece of the game. As for ecology, a megadungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place where normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken. Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer…

…For example, consider the OD&D approach to doors and to vision in the underworld: Generally, doors will not open by turning the handle or by a push. Doors must be forced open by strength…Most doors will automatically close, despite the difficulty in opening them. Doors will automatically open for monsters, unless they are held shut against them by characters. Doors can be wedged open by means of spikes, but there is a one-third chance (die 5-6) that the spike will slip and the door will shut…

…Notice that all characters, including those which can see in normal darkness (e.g. elves, dwarves) require a light source in the underworld, while all denizens of the place possess infravision or the ability to see in total darkness. Even more telling, a monster that enters in the service of a character loses this special vision. Similarly, characters must force their way through doors and have difficulty keeping them open; however, these same doors automatically open for monsters. This is a clear example of how normal rules do not apply to the underworld, and how the underworld, itself, works against the characters exploring it.

Of course, none of this demands that every dungeon need be a mythic underworld…nevertheless, the central dungeon of the campaign benefits from the strange other-worldliness that characterizes a mythic underworld.

DUNGEON TAXONOMY

Monster Hotel/Motel/Zoo

A monster hotel is a dungeon where monsters sit in their own rooms, waiting to be discovered. It’s just a collection of monsters all stuffed into a ‘hotel’, basically. They don’t really leave their rooms or do much of anything, just sit there waiting for you to go in to fight them. Very “baby’s first video game” sort of vibe.

Examples:

• Palace of the Vampire Queen
• B9: Castle Caldwell & Beyond

Gygaxian Naturalism

Definition:
Gary Gygax tells us that we should care about ecology and realism enough that players can appreciate thought went into both, but we don’t have to go beyond that. He basically says, and I’m not joking, do too little and your players won’t believe in the world, but do too much and you’re super lame. You can see why Gygax’s words always cause many arguments.

Examples:

• B2: Keep on the Borderlands and G1-G3: Against the Giants. Specifically, the introduction of women monsters, children monsters, and pets. Most infamously, orc and kobold babies have spawned morality debates to this day.
• The Ordning. Gygax laid the groundwork with a set hierarchy of giants; Troy Denning formally named it in AD&D 2^nd Edition. The Ordning is considered a crowning example of Gygaxian Naturalism.
• Dungeon Cleaners. The gelatinous cube is Gygax’s original “clean-up crew”, created to explain why dungeons aren’t buried in filth. The Carrion Crawler fills the same ecological niche, feeding on corpses. Holmes carried them forward, reinforcing this piece of ecology.

Megadungeon & Kilodungeon

Definition:
A megadungeon is a dungeon large or complex enough to support an entire campaign by itself, that employs Gygaxian naturalism. A kilodungeon is a small megadungeon – roughly 100-300 rooms instead of several thousand or whatever. A megadungeon exceeds a kilodungeon in both subsections and rooms but it’s not a very clear boundary. Also! Some older “megadungeons” have a pretty low room-count but get called megadungeons cuz they’re legacy. It’s like ageism where older dungeons get more street cred, basically.

Examples:

• Megadungeons: Castle Greyhawk, Caverns of Thracia, Stonehell Dungeon
• Kilodungeons: Secrets of the Nethercity, Pestilence at Halith Vorn

Funhouse Dungeon

Definition:
A goofy dungeon with ecology tossed out the window. Expect rooms of monsters and treasure, yes, but a heavier emphasis on traps and puzzles. Countercultural reaction to megadungeons being too serious.

Examples:

• S2: White Plume Mountain
• X2: Castle Amber
• Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak

Negadungeon

Definition:
A dungeon built to shift the genre of play from fantasy adventure to horror. Not meant to be difficult, per se, but definitely end up pretty fucking hard a lot of the time. What the dungeon is for is making the characters victims of something greater than themselves, forcing them to choose between horrific acts or horrific outcomes as they reach the climax. In practice…everything will curse you, trigger traps that screw you over, unleash unspeakable horrors into the world, or all of the above at once. The negadungeon is a horror story setpiece, and you are in a horror movie. Countercultural reaction to megadungeons being too rewarding.

Examples:

• S1: Tomb of Horrors doesn’t quite qualify – the point is the challenge, not genre – but it’s an obvious proto-example and inspiration
• Death Frost Doom
• The Isle by Luke Gearing

Jewelbox Dungeon

Definition:
A miniaturized megadungeon. Think dense room keys, few or no empty rooms, an increased focus on interactive stuff, and a tendency towards non-standard fantasy settings. Countercultural reaction to megadungeons taking too long and being too empty.

Examples:

• Tomb Robbers of the Crystal Frontier
• The Curse of Mizzling Grove

Rough Distributions

Not all dungeons have room contents rules. Actually, only megadungeons and classic dungeons really have rules, I did some back-of-napkin maths for Monster Hotels and Jewelbox Dungeons.

Room Contents	Monster Hotels	Megadungeons	Jewelbox Dungeons
Empty	25%	33%	0-20%
Monster	70%	33%	40%
Trap	2.5%	16%	16%
Special	2.5%	16%	20-40%

Empty Room

Sorry, “empty room”, in the OSR, isn’t literally an empty room.

They just don’t have monsters or traps or really impactful contents. They can still have foreshadowing, random non-valuable stuff, set dressing, that kinda thing.

Dungeon types without clear best practices

Some terms crop up a lot but aren’t very fleshed-out. Here they are.

Beginner Dungeons: Dungeons where you start here if you’re new. The OSR is fragmented so what people think you need when you’re new are all over the place. So beginner dungeons don’t actually have too much in common with each other.

Examples:

• Hole in the Oak
• Sailors on the Starless Sea
• Tomb of the Serpent Kings
• B3: Palace of the Silver Princess, Orange Cover

Escape/Survival Dungeons: Dungeons where you’re trying to get out rather than get in, and where there’s no Town & Dungeon setup. Often requires house-rules to make these work, and again don’t have too much in common with each other as far as how they’re designed, best practices, etc.

Examples:

• B4: The Lost City
• C1: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
• S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
• Lair of the Lamb

ICI Doctrine

Information, Choice, Impact. Three words to just repeat to yourself and hopefully your games will be better.

LHS

Landmark, Hidden, Secret. Three ways to think about the Information part of ICI, above. To oversimplify:

• Landmark information is basic immediately obvious stuff about a space you enter.
• Hidden information is stuff you have to look for.
• Secret information is stuff you have to look for and even if you do the right thing you have to roll dice and may fail to find it and have to cope.

By itself, just a way to categorize information in your head…but you can label things L, H, S as you key a dungeon too, and if you see people talking about this in conversations about dungeons that’s what they’re talking about.

Non-Dungeon Dungeons

These aren’t dungeons in the OSR sense, but they come up, so here they are.

Location-Based Adventures: An adventure in some place. Used in contrast to “scene-based adventures”, which are structured without defining a sense of space. So, if an adventure is in a specific place, if that place doesn’t have all the extra rules that make dungeoneering gameplay different from just doing combat on a battlemap or just theater of the mind yapping, then that place isn’t a dungeon. I use the term to sort of split off a lot of modern “dungeons” from OSR dungeon discourse, and when I give advice I can say I’m not truly giving dungeon-crawling advice, more location-based adventure advice.

Five-Room Dungeon: A formula for making location-based adventures that goes like this:

• Room 1: Entrance & Guardian
• Room 2: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
• Room 3: Red Herring or Setback
• Room 4: Climax, Big Battle or Conflict
• Room 5: Plot Twist

Monster Lair: Location-based adventure site where a monster lives. A lair can be a dungeon but by default it isn’t one. It needs a lot of rooms and intentionality to become a dungeon.

Gauntlet Dungeon: A hack-and-slash-enabling structure, where a location funnels players through custom-made combat encounters. Used in contrast to “labyrinth dungeons” which is a vague word that non-OSR people use to describe OSR dungeons. Gauntlet dungeons are “not that sort of dungeon”, basically. Which, yeah, I agree with – they’re not dungeons at all, just more location-based adventure sites.

And…We’re Done!

Whew – this post was so much faster. It is, like, only 2000 words.