For the first time in what feels like YEARS (and is definitely at least “years” if not “YEARS”), I started running an actual dungeon in one of my Dungeons and Dragons games. For a long while now, as I’ve tried to explore more expansive storytelling and dealt with groups more interested in narrative than mechanics, I’ve avoided putting my players in what one might consider a stereotypical dungeon. I’ve had some dungeons, sure! I had my players run through a dungeon-esque wizard’s tower that was actually a testing site for traps and puzzles to be used in other dungeons. I trapped my players in a nightmare realm where they had an “ever-renewing” eighteen hour period to solve the puzzle of this time-and-space-locked demiplane. I’ve even made proper dungeons that wound up not getting explored by my players because they chose a different route forward. I think the last time I had a proper dungeon was back in 2019 or 2020, the last time I had a “classic” Dungeons and Dragons group with a “classic” mix of characters played by players who were interested in what it meant to be a D&D Party and to play their classes, specifically. Which is a bit funny to admit because, once upon a time, I loved nothing more than a good dungeon. I was scattering those things every which way. You’d think that would have still happened even in my more expansive play style now, if it was something I cared about, right?

The problem is that the second to last proper dungeon I ran ended in a total party kill (or TPK). Years ago, back when I was still running games in Dungeons and Dragons’ 3.5 edition, I had a years-long campaign that came to a screeching halt when my players encountered a cult in the desert that should have raised massive alarm bells (a “god” no one had heard of, even when the Paladin rolled a 35 on his Religion check; a charismatic leader that the believers conflated with said god; mysterious rituals that don’t really add up; a town in a desert that shouldn’t be able to support the people who lived in it; a lot of hinky shit that made all the players and their characters nervous about the cult leader and her primary guard; and LITERAL hallucinogenic cactus juice, complete with strange visions of the “god” who strangely looks a lot like said charismatic cult leader). It was rough-going, since the party got split up when they sent the rogue in alone and then had to Hit Point their way through a bunch of traps that had been designed by the enemy rogue that had out-rogued the party’s rogue when they’d been isolated. Even then, they could have won if they’d decided to flee, saved some spells, or used the magic item that would have let the Paladin fly over the horde of weak enemies to absolutely destroy the cult leader. It was a rushed, awful experience as my players literally picked the single path through that cult and its aftermath that guaranteed their deaths and I, for a long time, blamed my love of dungeons for what happened. If I hadn’t bee trying to get clever with my traps. If I hadn’t been trying to challenge the cleverness of the party’s rogue and the attention to detail of the rogue’s player. If I’d been less interested in the technical mechanics of dungeon building and D&D in general… My players might have survived and, who knows, maybe we’d have kept playing together rather than let the game drift apart during the early days of us playing D&D 5e…

I know it’s not my fault. I know that it is just a mix of bad luck and poor decision-making on everyone’s part, but it was difficult not to see that result as partially a failure on my part when I realized that the party had a bunch of weak points that would be devastating should they ever be exposed by, say, taking the character specialized into finding and disarming traps away from the party right before they had to go find and disarm a bunch of traps (or find secret doors to bypass them). The experience left me leery of doing anything that relied heavily on one player character in particular, an ethos I still practice to this day, even if I do still occasionally wind up hanging large narrative elements on one player character in particular, in a way that often bites me in the ass when that player can’t make it to our game. You’d think I would learn.

Anyway, I took a break from dungeons after that. Explored overland travel, base building, and the conflicts of legacy and tradition. Learned a lot about how to break D&D 5e. And then eventually settled back into a campaign where I dipped a toe into dungeon building before beating a hasty retreat when it wound up killing a player character due to some back luck in the final combat encounter with the dungeon’s boss. After that, I gave up on “formal” dungeons and really invested myself in some non-traditional dungeon-esque experiences and mechanical encounters. Environmental stuff, navigational challenges, survival mechanics, and so on, all culminating in the time loop that was the pinnacle of my encounter-building skills. All of which has lead me back to where I am now, designing a stupidly huge maze for my players to go through as a living dungeon, encouraged by how much everyone loves Delicious in Dungeon (myself included) to finally make a long-held idea into reality. I’ve modernized and improved the design, along with the dungeon’s reasons for existing and hooks, but this is an idea I’ve been sitting on since I was a teen, building my first TTRPG out of numerical lists, a giant handful of every d6 I could get from my family’s board games, and a very poor understanding of statistical likelihoods. Now my players get to solve a nightmare maze (I used to draw mazes for fun when I was a kid and still retain my ability to quickly, at little more than a glance, solve all but the most intricate top-down mazes). After all, all the easy adages for how to solve a maze fall apart if there is more than one correct path through it and it’s huge as hell with multiple ways to change levels. If not everything has to connect up and some things can never connect up, you might wind up missing the turn you needed because you didn’t find the right secret door or let yourself get chased down the wrong hallway by the horrible acidic slimes that scour the maze clean between Adventurer Incursions.

I don’t even care if all my players think it’s derivative of Delicious in Dungeon. That is a cool-as-hell concept and it would be an honor to be compared. I just gotta make sure I can stick the landing. There’s a lot of stuff to consider, after all, and I’m not sure I can keep track of it without doing more preparation than I have the time to do. I am but a single person with a relatively low spoons count, joint and muscle pain, and the inability to sit comfortably at a desk for more than a couple hours because I might be developing caporal tunnel as a weird offshoot of my muscle issues (they’re both much stiffer than usual and weaker than usual, which apparently contributes to my developing symptoms). I have a pretty harsh upper limit on how much stuff I can do in a day and, between how demanding work has been and trying to get back into a healthy writing habit (rather than my “fall behind and the rush to make up for it” habit I’ve been in for the last couple months), there really isn’t a lot of time for incredibly detailed and minute dungeon-crafting. There’s some, of course, but considering how many hours it takes to make a maze map for an online D&D game, I’ve got my next few weeks of spare spoons cut out for me. At least it’ll be a lot of fun while I’m doing it. I love this crap. All the little details. The things to think about in order to build a largely self-sustaining dungeon ecology. What to put in there that would keep bringing people back beyond the reports of whatever is at the bottom… And unknowable and ever-expanding series of possibilities and decisions. My favorite!