I would image: In a world with dragons and similary things in the air, would it be more likely, to hide underground. Or, to live in forest, where the trees cover the air. Or, to not live, where dragons hunt (by there standard size is it likely, that they hunt bigger beeings. Questionable, if human would be on there eating list (more or less small and thin, whe would probably be more the prey for smaller dragons)
I could image that adult dragon may let their offspring live in their territorium as the adult’s aura would keep out predator big enough to kill a young dragon while the young dragon could guard the ness against predator to small for the adult notice or be to time consuming
All it would take is one canny green dragon and your underground fortress is gassed like a wasp's nest before the polymorphed dragon wanders in, removes the bodies and helps it'self to an all you can eat human buffet.
@Quotheraving The question would be, if a Dragon would even look into the caves for food. First: would the entrace maybe be to small for them (ok, they lives in caves to). In addition is the path maybe to long, as that the poison Gas would reach the underground bases. Second: Would it probably much easier, to hunt bigger targets on the surface. Large animals, like bears/owl Bears or horses, as example.
@ShizaruBloodrayne yeah but on the other hand you kinda need a tutorial at least to learn the controls (well I've heard the new UI is more discoverable, but it also sucks hard)
"Oh, is this a dungeon? It looks like some kind of blasted hellsca- What the-" "Welcome to Boatmrdered, here's your pickaxe, here's your chore list, go go go go!" "Oh no, this wasn't a dungeon, this was a Dwarf Fortress! :o "
Medieval fantasy is based on the middle ages. The dark ages. The period of time between the high points in civilization and development that were the Bronze Age and the Renaissance. As a result, all Medieval fantasy settings need at least one lost ancient civilization that made all the magic artifacts and ruins the PCs/main characters are scavenging for. There are dungeons everywhere because the ancient lost civilization built structures everywhere, and they left their trash everywhere. This isn't a 5-room dungeon. It's the basement of an ancient three story villa that no longer exists. This isn't a mega dungeon. This is the underground complex built by the umbrella corporation right before they "ended" the world. This isn't just any crypt. This is the necropolis that holds all the dead warlords of the lost age and the most elite members of their warbands.
I am pretty sure one of the guidebooks straight up says that without modifications, the DnD world is full of ruins of old empires that has come and gone hundreds and thousands of years ago, and that most of the wilderness is unexplored and full of monsters
Most medieval fantasy has pretty much naught to do with the actual Middle Ages and far more to do with pulp fantasy and 18th century, and American frontier/Victorian society and thinking.
@@alalalus7692I find the presumptions of the D&D past to be amusing, because most of the conceits of player abilities assume science fiction post scarcity rather than post apocalyptic grim darkness.
Someone's played Dwarf Fortress a little too much! These are great ideas though and useful to guide both the necessity of dungeons in a society and the implementation of them in a historical and cultural context to the game world. Thank you for these videos as always!
It also provides some useful alternatives to the wizard tower, considering how long they're able to extend their lives for. Ancient wizards that have lived so long, their earliest homes, that they may or may not still live in, being such long-lost subterranean hideaways before they were powerful enough to not need it.
I have a different take on the classic dnd dungeon with seemingly random rooms, winding corridors, traps, puzzles, etc. In my homebrew world I'm working on, there are great eldritch worm-like creatures from the far realm that tunnel through reality like termites in wood. Their otherworldly nature causes the tunnels they leave behind to warp and shift chaotically, even bleeding through to other planes of existence. One of the byproducts of these creatures are reality cores, large motes of pure creation that can do all sorts of wonderous things that several factions of intelligent beings compete for. My players are pretty excited about it.
wow this a masterpiece! You not only had the opposite view as I thought you would on the odd abundance of "dungeons" in a fantasy setting but you did a fantastic job at defending their existence. Bravo! Can't wait to see what you think up next! You are extraordinarily creative and insightful and I have loved watching every video you make. Also great twist ending with an actual real world example!
@@highlorddarkstar What are Hobbits? Do you mean Halflings? Which are absolutely legally distinct from and are NOT Hobbits? Halflings live alongside other races, integrating into their societies.
Another gem of food for thought! Regarding the covered chimneys illustrated, maybe thatch would be a natural choice of material, allowing smoke to filter out while performing as a great cover. I could imagine them being covered or woven with branches and such for camouflage. I would imagine that most humanoid civilization would use a combination of above and below ground construction, with many food sources needing light and being easier to maintain in the open air. Excavated stone may mean more solid surface dwellings and fortifications but i still think that the ease of construction would mean plenty of traditional homes would still be made, such as wood, wattle and daub, etc. Tornado alley is a prime example of such flimsy housing being quickly rebuilt despite ongoing threats, with most relying on a bunker like escape option. In addition to cultural changes, i see warfare being significantly different, with settlements that could retreat entirely underground, cavalry would be usefull for catching opponents before they go below, then utterly useless after that. Siege would be the next consideration, blocking entrances to starve or suffocate occupants in their cramped, smokey holes but breaking in would require some elite, one on one tunnel fighters that would be at risk from deliberate cave-ins, encouraging a plethora of heroic individuals to defend or assail the underground civilization. Defenders would no doubt want plenty of hidden exits to avoid entrapment or suffocation. Failure to do so could create a grisly dungeon to explore, especially if necromantic magic was involved!
There are plenty of historical examples of underground living in history. Ruins typically found in desert areas that also had plenty stone to carve in. Also often found in or near water eroded canyons but later abandon often because of weather changes and water drying up. Which often had people wondering why such huge structures and settlements were built in the middle of no where but geological records show that during the time they were made the land was more fertile and had flowing water in the area. A lot of times in fantasy they often have stories of some great war or dramatic event that lead to the ruins but a lot of times it is mundane things. Like water flow changing so river becomes a creek and then nothing. Or land going bad such as locals unintentionally putting toxics in the soil resulting in crop failures. Or getting hold of toxic metals like Lead and more direct poisoning by mistake. Other times a natural resources dries up so no more gold/silver/etc and town dies. Or trade routes shift and an important trade hub because the back end of nowhere once again. Even if a civilization is still around and didn't fall or have some other major negative event the civilization is an organism like an ant colony. You see clusters of ants stemming out in multiple directions the way a city might with trade routes to nearby farms/mines/etc. As those resource nodes dry up it branches to new areas. If the area becomes too hostile the whole colony may simply pack up and move leaving behind the many pathways it has carved. Time marches on and such places are not considered useful which is why they were abandon to begin with and eventually forgotten to time. I think having more places like this simply forgot to time make a setting feel more real and lived in rather than the, oh another ruin before the ancient mage war or cataclysm or whatever. It's like nope just an old copper mine that's abandon. Or old underground trade city ruins from back when the pass through mountains was the main trade route before underground highway, magic teleport, water routes, or whatever took over.
So basicly primitive humans in a fantasy world were like early mammals in the age of the dinosaurs😅😅😅 But jokes aside, this does make a lot of sence when you think about it. In a world populated by Dragons, Giants, Trolls, Roc's, Giant spiders and all maner of other monsters, early human development and culture as we've experiaced on out own earth would be inposibble. It makes sense that early man ( and likely a lot of other humanoid races) would have there initial development in more isolated secluted regions, or ( as this video explains) underground " dungions" and then start to for kingdoms and widespread civilization in the open once there technological and magical advances far enough down the line.
Id quite enjoy a setting where the only humanoids around are burrower types like goblins and the world is full of giant dangerous things bad for thier health. Highlight tennacity and cooperation
You are disregarding the possibility that Intelligent Powerful Beings may have aided, guided, and protected early Humans. Perhaps Ancient Highly Magical Elves or Ancient Good Dragons or some Fey Beings. Therefore with that the Humans developed more rapidly or in a different way.
My problem with dungeons is not whether they would be built, but whether they would be preserved. If it's not a structure that is constantly inhabited in maintained, it will tend to deteriorate. Walls will crumble due to erosion, natural tremors, or broken by tree roots, corridors will be filled with rubble or sediments (if an underground stream find its way inn), etc. The result may end up being disappointed from a fantasy adventurer. Imagine that you're set to recover an ancient artifact that is essential for saving the realm, only to discover that the place where it was kept has crumbled, and you need to dig through tons of rock and rubble or sift through layers of sediment to get to it.
Absolutely true, and a fair consideration. We'd only see structures survive that were built to last. Invasive roots and water would likely be very common in certain regions, but there's a reason 2 of my examples were worked into stone - because that's what remains, more often than not. I think there's room for a mix of excavation and preservation, but my undercities video makes a good case for the former.
I already made a comment, but bad guys go underground to hide from the normal guys above. So these systems would be maintained by monsters and dark magics. My main example of this is all of HP Lovecraft. Usually his characters form manic obsessions. They will spend all their time and money building their lairs or labs or whatever. Usually they also always get minions to do their bidding. If an old lair was abandoned usually his characters will just refurnish them for their needs. I am trying to think of all examples, but he had stories of necromancy where zombies were being hidden underground, demon type monsters, ghouls, etc. Usually if there are legit RUINS they are well maintained because they use some alien materials or some unholy demonic materials. There are too many to even reference. He has stories about underground cities to worship dead gods, he has cities that has sunk over time, cities that have been plunged into the ocean, cities frozen in ice, cities under the desert, he has underground cults.... It goes on and on. Usually modern towns end up getting built over the ruins of some ancient civilization.
Dungeons are not the ONLY way adventurers discover such treasures, anyway. What you described is doing so through archaeology. (ie. Indiana Jones style) Not to mention the adventurer past-time of doing so through outright crimes like grave-robbing or theft.
According to the rulebooks for 2014 (I forget which), a dungeon is more or less any somewhat enclosed environment which players can explore. It needn't be underground. A building which is above ground and is filled with enemies could still act as a dungeon.
Sure, makes sense. At least for high-magic (Well, high-monster) fantasy settings. As you move away from that Classical Dungeons make less and less sense, but, while I know you deliberately weren't going this route with the video, I think it's worth stating: From a game design perspective - from a running games perspective - dungeons are any physical location that confines the scope to a single location. If the party can't just turn the other way and leave, you have a dungeon. Which, yes, includes classic D&D dungeons, catacombs and the like, but also hospitals in Silent Hill, haunted houses, so knowing how to design good, enjoyable, dungeons for the purpose of gameplay is useful if you run more grounded settings, or the game you're making isn't going for a high magic fantasy setting.
Great video, perhaps you could start a whole series with other justifications for dungeons, since there are a lot of options here. "THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOUR" is one of my favorites for 5e specifically, since in a world with tons of artifacts and anctient evils, some places will have to be safes for wizards, guarded by their gelatinous cubes.
We also have real life examples of many underground structures. Of course there's subways and modern (or premodern) sewers but also older examples such as the Paris catacombs, other tombs and many underground temples. A setting thousands of years old, more magical and less populated might have more unoccupied 'dungeons'. And they're not just in fantasy but also post apocalyptic settings such Fallout shelters and Metro tunnels.
I always figured with many fantasy worlds being post apocalyptic, six or seven times over, there would be more ruins about then scratch built settlements. If a particular city, first settled in the stone age, changed hands between cultures over a hundred times, burned down several times from accident and monster attack, and even utterly destroyed by an invading army a couple times before being resettled, then there might be a dungeon or two in the area as while you can tear down walls and houses, it's a lot more work to completely fill in underground structures in the area. Them being underground, used or not, might be the main things that survive when compared to stuff on the surface that are more easily recycled, reused, and destroyed by uncaring foes. A region might become littered with underground graves and stores and siege tunnels and bank vaults and safety rooms, and long abandoned settlements who have, typically, dug into each other during construction, and walled off others that don't need to be accessible.
So i base my world in faerun. But 800 or so years after everything that has happened. Gone through a couple golden ages and reverted back due to the mortals falling out. But the last remaining grand cities are the sea elves, and dwarves+gnomes (pretty much for the reasons you state) most other cities either have a dark secret or magical intervention to keep them safe from big threats. It makes great plot hooks for when the party arrives at a new, seemingly normal to us, town
I have two types of dungeons in my games. "Strongholds": a vaguely fortified location littered with enemies and treasure. Not strictly a dungeon per-se, just a point of interest. "Dungeon" (capital D): a rift in space that opens into a classic dungeon format. These are often far more threatening than Strongholds, if only because the monsters aren't actual monsters. They're magical constructs that... respawn. Like antibodies trying to force the would-be conquerers out. They're living beings, like a Bag of Devouring.
"Lair" = a nest of monsters that need to be erradicated. Usually migrated from _The Underground™_ biome. "Spire" = a structured training ground with progressivly harder challenges separated onto each floor. "boss monsters" on each floor to give adventurers a feel for the difficulty level of higher floors.
I cant believe you haven't talked about Derinkuyu!! Both in your underground city video and in this one it is so relevant!!! If you don't know, please look it up, it's fascinating! Derinkuyu is an ancient underground city in Turkey. It was cut into very soft stone and was part of a series of underground cities that were all connected through a series of tunnels. They had several exits and an advanced ventilation and water system to ensure they could not be poisoned from the surface but rather could shut off access from above. It was huge and could house several thousands of people and had everything a city would need. Storage, schools, stables, all of this!! It's so cool!! It was "lost" for several hundred years but was found again by a farmer whose chicken accidentally walked into one.
Derinkuyu wasn't a self contained habitation. It contained a stables, pens and stores but was clearly intended as a refuge. Livestock was grazed outside, food was grown outside and the majority of the populace probably lived outside as well given that it was surrounded by villages. It may have been proof against the human raiders it was intended to stymie but to claim that it would be proof to a poison gas attack in a time when the best a desert raider could manage was smoky fires seems too great a leap. Both Derinkuyu and Kaymakli would very much be prone to lightning attacks by predators picking off the villagers and do not have ventilation sufficient to support an industry (wine presses don't count). In short although both are good examples of fortified underground dwellings neither provide the required protection against constant predation or unconventional forms of attack.
@@QuotheravingThere are multiple places in Turkey that were mentioned by Classical Greek and Roman historians and geographers as famously building their homes into the rock. There are places in southern Italy that do the same thing, and its not that rare globally. Sure some are just poor outskirts or refuges from danger, but a lot were just taking advantage of the right kind of rock being in a livable place and saving the time, effort and resources from building completely from scratch
Dungeons started out as tombs and other such, wealth filled secure places for cultures long passed. Adventurers delve in and collect the treasure. Then, to keep their treasure safe, they build their own dungeons. And adventurers try to plunder them. Thus creating the dungeon adventure cycle and explaining why dungeons often have so many traps and wacky puzzles
Ooooh, this video gave me a lot to think about. So far, I've only shown one settlement in my story; a town build into a cave system in an oceanside cliff. Since its residents are semi-aquatic, it doesn't matter to them that the extreme tidal forces of this world flood the whole town on occasion. This is the kind of town that would eventually turn into a dungeon if left vacant. And the more I've thought of this world's natural conditions and creatures, the more clear it's become to me that its humanoid people are not in positions of great control over their environment. The people of this world would need highly defensible settlements, and the magic system was literally made for terraforming, so carving settlements into the ground is probably commonplace.
We are talking about fantasy here so what I will say obviously does not apply for the video. In real life there is one HUGE engineering obstacle to living underground: Heat dispersion. Simply because there is no free atmosphere where one can vent the heat away. Modern life uses and insane amount of energy and despite our best efforts heat is still a major inefficiency that is always created. The earth/soil/ground can absorb the heat but it does it very very veeeeery slowly and very limited in capacity and once it did absorb the heat it will radiate the heat back. This isn't very problematic close to the surface but the deeper you go the more sever the problem becomes. Unless great amount of construction effort and care is dedicated when constructing underground habitats to venting the excess heat and keeping temperature under control deeper underground habitats will inevitably overheat over a long time and become very uncomfortable live in that can take years or even decades to cool down on their own. Thus energy cost to remove the collected heat will only rise. And producing more energy will only produce more heat and the vicious cycle continues. So any energy infrastructure must be placed on the outside the habitat itself. At which point it is easier to live on the surface.
thank you for perfectly answering a very good and sensible question that never even occurred to me was an issue until now please keep doing so, you're awesome at it
Of course there is another answer very much used in RE Howard's Conan stories: Ruins of previous civilizations. Seems like half his adventures included some forgotten ruin. So even if your previous civilization was mostly surface dwelling, they'd still have subterranean service tunnels, sewers etc.
The actual techniques needed to overcome heating, cooling, ventilation and plumbing can be hand waved in a world where magic exists. One thing g that could be a great addition to this world building is to ask what sorts of supernatural creatures people would create a symbiosis with. Maybe we befriend some form of fire elementals for keeping furnaces and kilns hot. Maybe earth elementals aid in our tunneling. But then, these creatures might replace tigers and bears as our predatory concerns.
Heating and cooling isn't an issue. Caves have a pretty consistent temperature all year round. Thick layers of rock or dirt acts quite well as insulation. The symbiotic relationships is a good idea. It doesn't even have to be "befriending", it might be creatures that aren't overly intelligent, and can be "domesticated". Humans are very good at domesticating animals and plants when the opportunity arises. Which makes me think of plants and not just animals... there are plenty of plants where we eat the parts underground. Potatoes, carrots, peanuts... I could imagine people domesticating and selective breeding these plants to get the roots going deeper and deeper, so they can harvest the food from within the cave.
Hell, I go out of my way to put a ton of vast old ruins into any fantasy story I come up with, because I genuinely love ruin exploration and dungeon crawling. In one I'm working on now there's this absurdly huge underground superstructure spanning continents and nobody knows who built it. In another setting the gods once fought a huge war that rearranged the whole world so people are still finding old buried fortress complexes full of weird stuff from the old times, and dungeon crawling for old artifacts is an actual job. I even had this one idea where the _whole setting_ was just a seemingly endless series of structures and caves, and as far as anyone could tell it constituted that entire universe. Of course it's contrived, but that can be said for a lot of stuff in fiction. What matters is that it's something you put into the setting because that's part of the story.
Especially in a High Magic Fantasy setting, the Humans could build in Stone including their houses within Walls. Therefore, Dragonfire wouldn't be as concerning. Also the walls could be designed in a way that makes climbing them harder. What's more; if there are also Good Dragons/Powerful Beings they could aid, guide, & defend the Humans as well as other Lesser-Races. Finally, above ground structures/ruins could be considered Dungeons as well. With your River concern you could design structures that are on Stilts/Floatable which works with flooding. In fact if you built your city within the middle of a huge lake that adds very good additional protection from many enemies especially in a Magical Fantasy Worlds.
I personally love the Morrowind and Skyrim use of underground tombs because they say a lot about their cultures and how they treat the dead (mostly, they revive their ancestors in some way to guard the tombs from looters and necromancers), then there are abandoned mines, abandoned "farm" mines, natural grottos and very rarely, purpose-built shelters meant for living, bunkers and stock rooms.
This is a great exploration of ideas I've skirted before. My next step is to try to figure out an evolutionary path for humanoids amongst monsters like that. Of course, magic complicates natural evolution, but still, there are interesting takes to be found in working out all those kinks. Basically, the question is "How do humanoids even evolve in the first place if there are so many monsters around?" My answer falls into two categories: 1. Many monsters are magical corruptions of humanoids, so they didn't exist before humanoids. 2. Humanoids and/or the monsters came from somewhere else when humanoids had already evolved most of the way to their modern forms.
You can look at how animals differ in size in the real world and scale that up to your fantasy setting. If you assume humans to be the size of common rodents, then dragons become the size of cats and foxes, with the truly ancient ones reaching the size of lions. The bigger giants would then be the size of human toddlers. You can go on from there to infer how people would live when confronted with super predators like these. Perhaps revisiting Guliver's Travels is in order.
Just for the record, few apex predators feed mainly on other predators. It usually just means they don't have pradators above them. Prehistoric humans were not apex predators because they were often eaten by other, bigger predators, not because we hunted herbivores.
Prehistoric humans were apex predators. While a lion or bear might have occasionally killed a lone, unarmed human, there were no animals that were regularly able to prey upon humans.
@@gregpartridge7554 The problem with that argument is that, again, mesopredators are not the main part of the diet of apex predators. At least on land. By that logic badgers are apex predators. Predators, even small ones, are a bad choice for main prey. They are usually few and far between, are usually armed, and riddle with parasites of their own prey. Humans might have been rarely hunted compared to prey species, but they were eaten every so often by larger predators, more than say a lion, a polar bear or an adult crocodile that are nearly never targeted for predation by other predators.
@@Rodrigo_Vega Grizzlies and mountain lions have been known to kill and eat each other on rare occasion; that does not prevent either of those from being an apex predator. Likewise lions and crocodiles. Prehistoric humans were infrequently killed and eaten by large predators such as the above, and also sometimes hunted those large predators. But neither would have been a normal part of the other's diet.
@@gregpartridge7554 Adjusting the odds for time and space shared in the wilderness, it seems much more likely something like a leopard or a couple of wolves/hyenas to attack a lone woman fetching water, or a kid sleeping in a hut than a bear or a lion. And these species are not even at the top of their biomes like in your own examples. _Most_ humans are not armed men in their prime, and animals know when it's safe for them to attack. People that lived and walked in the wilderness fear these animals because they ate them with some frequency. In some areas they still do.
Couldn't agree less. Underground fortified dwellings have more disadvantages than advantages. Firstly there's carbon monoxide or other gasses which have the tendency to pool in the depths and could kill entire settlements. Secondly there's the many burrowing creatures that could easily bypass your bottlenecks. Third there's the fact that burrows without multiple exits are deathtraps allowing hungry beasts to corral or contain large numbers of people and burrows with exits or chimneys are harder to defend. In short, no underground fortresses have ever really worked in practise and would be even more of a disadvantage in a fantasy world.
Underground spaces can indeed have bad air. Mines are probably worse than natural caves. Natural caves were typically formed by flowing water or flowing rock (in lava tubes), or wave action in sea caves. Through-flows imply both entrance and exit, and a possibility of natural air flow. Also, some caves and tunnels "breathe" due to changes back and forth in the air pressure outside them. I suppose a fantasy burrowing creature could also get under and past a town wall or castle wall readily enough. A defense might be to settle on a small island far offshore, supposing the tunneling critters do not fly or swim. I agree that multiple ways in and out are valuable. This is true of surface installations too, to a lesser degree. Historically, some settlements or strongholds have been in caves or hollows in the faces of cliffs. See Mesa Verde in the USA. Quite a few castles employ natural caves when they can, Predjama in Slovenia being a prime example. As for underground fortresses, I submit that France's Maginot Line was so imposing that it was not ever seriously attacked. Did it "really work in practise"? Sort of. Bear in mind that it was not completed as planned. And the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in the USA is a fortress of sorts, definitely underground and also never yet attacked. And the military tunnels of Gibraltar must be counted as an underground fortress, with historical success against attack.
@@davidtownsend8875 All good points. And yes burrowing creatures like Purple worms or Umber Hulks are potentially a problem for any stronghold. The only advantage Forts may have is that they are typically built on raised ground which may be off-putting for a burrowing creature as it would feel like a cull-de sac to their tremor sense. Additionally being largely composed of stone blocks there would be less direct contact with the bedrock muffling the signs of it's inhabitants. Militarily speaking tunnels and underground fortresses are very different. Tunnel complexes such as Gibraltar or more recently Gaza are more about concealment and movement than just defence, while the tunnels used in the World wars were mainly used for attacking across no-man's land. You could also have mentioned Bunkers such as Nuclear shelters though in this case the threat is very different. I've said it before but for a standard 'Dungeon' to exist it must already have failed as a fortress.
In my DnD homebrew setting, dungeons were slowly working their way up to the surface just about anywhere. Many were not built, but spawned, cropped off, or left behind by huge living, moving, megadungeons deep under the Underdark.
Those concepts for old subterranean settlements are really creative. I imagine that any subsequent settlers would repair and retrofit the old tunnels to fit their own needs. Definitely using these ideas in my game
I find the concept of dungeons in fiction very comfy and I love the countless different takes and twists on it. Endless hellish labyrinth where people have to live? Ruins of a Fallen empire, twisted by some foul dark magic? "Living" dungeons, that grow and devour eachother, attracting monsters and adventurers to feed on them? Bandit/secret organization hideout? Or simply a den of monsters, such as wild animals, or tribalistic goblins/orcs? We've got it all, and I love it all.
Imagine living in a city underground were if one person burns something or starts a fire in the wrong space it burns up all the O2 in some areas and entire blocks and rooms of people start to die
Great video. Dungeons suddenly make a LOT more sense. It also made me rethink how I'll be designing future dungeons. Laying them out more like a settlement will.create some.really interesting designs I think.
I was kind on the fence about this idea, but the example of Derinkuyu (and the other underground cities in Cappadocia) really convinced. I hadn't heard of them before, and they're really cool, so thanks for making me aware of them!
I've once done a basement tour in a city in germany. The old basements, dug in the stone are connected with small tunnels. We basically went through half of the old city without going up to the surface.
There's something worth thinking about that I have honestly really never seen addressed in any fantasy setting - Mining tails. The more you dig underground, the more tails there should be. A really big mine in the vain of moria would have created a whole massive mountain of loose stone.
They could have used those for other structures, perhaps it was a combination of Quarries & Mines. Maybe separate the stone from the ores in a precise way, and sell what that mining Race aren't using to other Races.
You know, I wasn't fully sold until you said "and then when the humans who were once chased into burrows rose to the surface, the monsters fled to their now-abandoned burrows." But that's just so incredibly evocative.
22:58 They did this in Ethiopia! You should check out the rock cut churches there, very cool! Also I can see above ground dwellers living in communities of sod houses that provide a bit of protection from fire and camouflage, like I have in my campaign. The valley that does that might have a reason for doing it other than cultural, you have inspired me, maybe there was a REALLY bad Dragon attack.
I remember reading somewhere that -before FR was adopted as the 'default' setting- dungeons were periodically created by the god of magic to introduce magic (items) into the world and drive up his own worship, or something like that
@17:25; Coating the inside of the walls with fiber-reinforced clay, one could simply light the whole place on fire after construction, baking the clay and reinforcing the walls. Cobb houses have stood for centuries without being fired, as well.
Real examples for your other two scenarios: * Mountain? The Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, USA. Population topped out around 100 people, which is a respectable neolithic village. * Riverside? The sod houses common to the ancient British isles. Grass still grew on top and its roots helped hold the structure together. Chimney hole in the center of the roof, and a single doorway-presumably closed with a hide blanket or loose-fitting wood door-that kept air circulating. The small ones would sleep a dozen or so humans, especially if they were close together for warmth. Good odds that from a distance, the village would look like just another few hills and a smoldering underground peat fire.
Stone age people absolutely did dig massive tunnelsystems for salt and flint and precious stones. They usually filled them back in as soon as a new tunnel needed to be dug over the centuries, but it is quite fascinating to imagine such cramped environments being the first bastions of humans.
One problem with 'hidden underground habitation' is it's a LOT harder to hide agriculture and animal husbandry, which is required for large settlements and - importantly - specialization. Living underground is good for defense, not so much for hiding, unless it's a very small settlement that can import most of its needs (or use magic to replace imports). That said, all the reasons you give for living underground also apply to building stone buildings and strong stone walls (and even solid domes/rooftops of stone). It's less effort to quarry stone from the surface and construct buildings above ground than it is to carve out tunnels into a hillside, at least if the rock you're dealing with is decently hard. Monsters would definitely change how settlements were built (basically all settlements would have a curtain wall) and the effort required would limit the ability of humanoids to expand.
You've basically just described the EarthDawn campaign setting. Though with just the everyday D&D monsters instead of an invasion of the extradimensional Horrors. It's the same principle, though. Living on the surface is a lot less feasible when man-eating monsters are roaming the land, so big underground shelters are the way to go.
Gotta keep in mind that waters travels in weird ways underground… it’d have to be closely observed throughout the whole process of settling in and would result in your rooms having different shapes than the bunker-looking one you showed.
There are other reasons to dig in though. One would be extremes of weather. The Dark Sun setting has people surviving on a planet that survived a magical apocalypse. Temps were up to 130 degrees F. A cave system would be both shelter and defense. Also its easier to build in some scenarios. For instance, in the American West they build dugout homes because they were cheap, fast, hidden, and comfortable temperature wise. So you could conceivably build a whole town that way with connecting tunnels and escape routes. Also consider Japanese and Vietnamese underground tunnel networks. I'd bet anything a lot of those tunnels are still down there in Vietnam.
Maybe the reason dwarves still live underground and in the mountains is because they're so stubborn and stuck in the old ways, and refuse to abandon that lifestyle. Also, one thing I was wondering was how the farms would work and be maintained. It seems like farming would be a pretty dangerous job because it requires going outside where the monsters are. How are the crops protected from pests and other animals trying to eat them? And wouldn't they expose the underground settlement that they're trying to hide?
If you haven't already, you should probably look into Dungeon Core stories. It sort of has a different solution to the dungeon problem: they are magical, predatory genus loci with a crystalline gem as a heart, and all of the structures, traps, and monsters are defenses. Sometimes they need to feed, sometimes it's just a bonus. Sometimes the loot is just bait for people or made from creatures and stuff Monster Hunter style, sometimes (usually in LitRPT versions), it's sort of necessary or a biproduct. Similarly, if you have society on a truly epic scale, Warhammer 40k's underhives and space hulks might also serve as good ideas for dungeon origins. Underhives being the forgotten and abandoned remnants of hive cities, the new buildings built on top of them similar to a Tet mound (hope I'm using the right word), while space hulks are void ships lost to the warp, fused together into a chaotic mismatch of wrecks by that nightmare realm, and now just randomly drifting through space, occasionally being sucked back into the warp and spat out somewhere else in the galaxy.
Thank you for justifying the part of my current fantasy novel that I've been most worried I'd get flak for writing---multiple dungeon crawls through abandoned underground towns and facilities belonging to three different ancient civilizations.
An interesting way I have found to integrate these into fantasy stories without it being intrusive is to let the antagonists deal with them in a few scenes when there is downtime for the protagonist PoV, and for what lays at the end to be part of the protagonists' objective too, so the antagonists end up handling the dungeon grind while the protagonists swoop in near the end to try and steal their reward.
Very interesting. I just started to wonder, "Under these surface pressures, how did humans even survive to the point that they were able to create their underground refuges?"
The ultimate expression of this would be Jules Vernes' Journey To The Center of the Earth. A hollow planet - the Underdark dialled up to 11. That would take some serious elemental magic to work.
in my current game dungeons are indeed everywhere. They are former shelters build to withstand end of the world but they got corrupted by said end of the world and hence the monsters. and yes. the world died but someone attempted to bring it back to life by planting a "Tree of life" which kinda restarted the life in the world. but it also reactivated all the magic and monsters from those dungeons.
Great trick to hide the smoke, would be to have a lonely cabin or small ruin built over the chimney. So any smoke would be attitude to a traveler or the like staying there occasionally.
The thing about intelligent creatures’ settlements in fantasy is that they are capable of adapting to challenging environments by implementing complex solutions and techniques to maintain their homes. What this means for these as explorable ruins is that without maintenance, they could be harder to find or explore compared to a settlement built by the instincts of a less-intelligent animal (of similar size ofc)
I've personally started to become a fan of the idea of a dungeon being an entity, which is getting popular in a lot of fantasy and isekai anime. It varies in nature between anime, but the idea is that the dungeon is a place that is naturally or supernaturally occurring, and takes shape because of various universal rules, or the whims of gods, or willed into existence by the spirit of adventure itself. Sometimes a creature becomes the master of the dungeon and gains the power to shape the space magically, sometimes it's a magical ecosystem that's living and growing on it's own, sometimes they're actually symbiotic parasites that spreads via spores and that generate monsters and treasure in order to draw in adventurers and feed on their magic essence like a multilayered pitcher plant for humanoids. Just a neat answer to "who built this and why?"
THREE alternate explanations: 1) “Underground Biome” Burrowing animals can use geomancy - it is as simple as that. If you think it is impressive what some humans could do in a decade, imagine what an entire eco-system could do in a million years. The ecosystem can be in constant turmoil due to flooding / air flow / food scarcity / migration paths / etc This explanation works well for *“Lairs”* (as they are often called). A monster species has set up a nest in a local cave system, and now the adventurers have to exterminate them. 2) Training grounds. A world full of monsters and magic, Yes. But also, a world with XP and levels? If outside the city walls are dragons and leviathans and the dreaded arboreal Spinosaurus… humans will want a safe way to “level up” in a controlled environment. A structured environment with the easiest challenges on one floor, then the challenges get progressively more difficult as you go through the *“Spire”.* Some spires could be small and simple, while others are more realistic - with large open-world levels to explore. Roaming each floor are a few “boss monsters”, which give the adventurers a taste of the difficulty level of the next floor. Bonus lore: The human civilization has forgotten how to build towers. And the towers are starting to fail. 3) Fortress of immortals. Okay, grab a drink and some snacks for this one…… The age of the Shaman > Once upon a time there was only 1 immortal. But, wanting to have others like him, he searched for a way to share his immortality. He found it… but the process was slow. Only 1 new immortal per year or something. The age of the Pantheon > When a person gains immortality, they naturally grow in social status. They’ve got the time to learn and can cash in on long term investments. Eventually they all become rulers, and eventually they are treated like gods. >> The age of humanity > Eventually humans turn against the immortals. First immortals are killed on the streets, so the immortals retreat to their palaces. Then the humans siege their palaces, so the immortals retreat underground. Then the humans send teams to hunt underground, so the immortals invest in traps. The immortals thought they could wait out the riots, or out-live the offended humans. It didn’t work for the immortals. The age of the Demi-Human > the immortals started creating loyal demi-humans to worship them. Some were made as weapons (Goblins), others were made as idealised humans (Elves / Dwarfs), and others were made as further attempts to spread immortality (werewolves / vampires) … anyway, this is when the immortals fight back with armies. Then there is the age of the magus (the first immortal made magic more accessible via “the system”), the age of prosperity (utopia future), the age of zombies (a new means for immortality via “the system” had unintended side effects), and the age of stars (escape the zombie world to travel the stars). … oh, right… Dungeons… There are immortals hiding in dungeons because humans are rather fanatical about hunting them to extinction.
I think I'd like to see some dungeons become make shift towns. Like originally it was a last ditch place for the poor and such to find refuge and over time they managed to either tame the monsters in it or clear them out, over time building it into a actual town.
It also seems likely that most fantasy game settings are technically post-apocalyptic in nature, meaning that at some point in the past there were widespread and, relatively, advanced civilizations. The "Dungeons" then are simply ruins of one or more previous civilizations that retained enough structural integrity to remain potentially habitual even once they had been covered by natural forces or other, lesser, civilizations building on top of them over time. Such "structures" would be ideal for any monstrous species that discovered it which would eventually create a monstrous ecosystem. Likewise, such hidden structures would make for ideal hideouts for bandits or evil sorcerers or warlords seeking to gather an army in secret, possibly incorporating the monsters already inhabiting the "dungeon" into their growing secret army.
There was a post-post apocalyptic SCP story where former containment facilities filled the roles of dungeons, and that was a pretty fun concept. Albeit, they were a little toooo dangerous. The mortality rate for dungeon delving in that setting was 100% as far as I remember.
Its fun. The only explanation I need. I also run non-dungeon maps because they can be fun, too. Again , the only reasoning I ever needed. Wilderness is fun too - as long as the game does not drag on in an endless sea of grass, desert, forests, bore-alls. Go along trails and roads to fun places. Including fun but not underimagined wilderness encounters. Variety is fun.
I like how Stephen Erikson handles it in Malazan Book of the Fallen, where there's a history of tens of thousands of years and varied civilizations who were "dominant" at different times. Thus, the current human city is built atop the ruins of older cities that may have been built by some other race during its ascendancy - and thus what thousands of years ago were the streets and buildings of a bustling city are now deep underground. Particularly ironic given that the fact is simply stated, and there's not really any "dungeon delving" taking place in the series. And then the Forgotten Realms setting itself, where many of the so-called "dungeons" are actually ancient remnants of civilizations of elves, giants, or even "extinct" races like the sarrukh.
I immensely enjoy your archaeological approach to fantasy world building and like to apply it myself. My only problem with it is that it prevents me from actually getting any world building done, because I'm drowning in detail
Even without monsters, in a world with Passwall spells, it makes sense for sensitive things to be kept underground instead of in surface fortifications. And when you think how long it took for humanity to surpass the technology of the Romans in certain areas, it's not unreasonable to find ancient advanced technology down in some forgotten dungeon
With this world building idea, Humans and Dwarves would either have a much closer relationship, or become bitter enemies fighting over the available spaces that most fantasy relegates to Dwarves.
I've always felt that the economy in fantasy games, where random shopkeepers keep a stock of relatively strong healing potions, armor, and weapons, makes a lot more sense in a world where adventuring is a common profession. If there are threats in the world, and unexplored places, great enough for there to be a market of decentralized independent mercenaries, bounty hunters, and explorers for hire, it makes sense for shopkeepers to cater to that market. And where do those threats hide? Well, goblins live in caves and often fortify them. Dragons live in caves as well. Dwarves build underground structures not unlike dungeons, which can often become infested with kobolds; worse, the dwarves might go feral in the deep dark and start posing a threat to the realm.
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Dragons. In a world where Dragons exists above ground. Making shelters underground makes a lot more sense.
That's a solid idea for a setting. A dragon empire above ground and a humanoid civilization in a megadungeon below ground
I would image:
In a world with dragons and similary things in the air, would it be more likely, to hide underground. Or, to live in forest, where the trees cover the air.
Or, to not live, where dragons hunt (by there standard size is it likely, that they hunt bigger beeings. Questionable, if human would be on there eating list (more or less small and thin, whe would probably be more the prey for smaller dragons)
I could image that adult dragon may let their offspring live in their territorium as the adult’s aura would keep out predator big enough to kill a young dragon while the young dragon could guard the ness against predator to small for the adult notice or be to time consuming
All it would take is one canny green dragon and your underground fortress is gassed like a wasp's nest before the polymorphed dragon wanders in, removes the bodies and helps it'self to an all you can eat human buffet.
@Quotheraving The question would be, if a Dragon would even look into the caves for food.
First: would the entrace maybe be to small for them (ok, they lives in caves to). In addition is the path maybe to long, as that the poison Gas would reach the underground bases.
Second:
Would it probably much easier, to hunt bigger targets on the surface. Large animals, like bears/owl Bears or horses, as example.
this is basically a Dwarf Fortress beginner strategy guide
No the real way how to teach that game is "dying is fun" hahaha
@ShizaruBloodrayne yeah but on the other hand you kinda need a tutorial at least to learn the controls (well I've heard the new UI is more discoverable, but it also sucks hard)
"Oh, is this a dungeon? It looks like some kind of blasted hellsca- What the-"
"Welcome to Boatmrdered, here's your pickaxe, here's your chore list, go go go go!"
"Oh no, this wasn't a dungeon, this was a Dwarf Fortress! :o "
Well it's about time, I suck at dwarf fortress
Reminds me of a quote for Minecraft: "By day we build, By night we dig."
Diggy hole.
I'm working on a sci-fi setting that uses wrecked spaceships and abandoned asteroid colonies as "dungeons."
I used an abandoned Dwarven citadel, which in Spelljammer is an asteroid spaceship, as a megadungeon.
I LOVE this! I want to create such a world as well! 🌟
No gravity hard sci-fi dungeon would be a ton of fun, I imagine.
With a Thing like monsters 🤤
Sounds like a fun setting, hope the game you run it goes well.
Destiny (2) does this pretty well.
Medieval fantasy is based on the middle ages. The dark ages. The period of time between the high points in civilization and development that were the Bronze Age and the Renaissance.
As a result, all Medieval fantasy settings need at least one lost ancient civilization that made all the magic artifacts and ruins the PCs/main characters are scavenging for.
There are dungeons everywhere because the ancient lost civilization built structures everywhere, and they left their trash everywhere.
This isn't a 5-room dungeon. It's the basement of an ancient three story villa that no longer exists.
This isn't a mega dungeon. This is the underground complex built by the umbrella corporation right before they "ended" the world.
This isn't just any crypt. This is the necropolis that holds all the dead warlords of the lost age and the most elite members of their warbands.
I am pretty sure one of the guidebooks straight up says that without modifications, the DnD world is full of ruins of old empires that has come and gone hundreds and thousands of years ago, and that most of the wilderness is unexplored and full of monsters
Most medieval fantasy has pretty much naught to do with the actual Middle Ages and far more to do with pulp fantasy and 18th century, and American frontier/Victorian society and thinking.
I was just thinking that dungeons could be anything that used to be important, but are now home to monsters
@@alalalus7692I find the presumptions of the D&D past to be amusing, because most of the conceits of player abilities assume science fiction post scarcity rather than post apocalyptic grim darkness.
Between the Bronze Age and the Renaissance? Buddy, you're missing around 17 centuries of history there.
Someone's played Dwarf Fortress a little too much! These are great ideas though and useful to guide both the necessity of dungeons in a society and the implementation of them in a historical and cultural context to the game world. Thank you for these videos as always!
It also provides some useful alternatives to the wizard tower, considering how long they're able to extend their lives for. Ancient wizards that have lived so long, their earliest homes, that they may or may not still live in, being such long-lost subterranean hideaways before they were powerful enough to not need it.
I have a different take on the classic dnd dungeon with seemingly random rooms, winding corridors, traps, puzzles, etc. In my homebrew world I'm working on, there are great eldritch worm-like creatures from the far realm that tunnel through reality like termites in wood. Their otherworldly nature causes the tunnels they leave behind to warp and shift chaotically, even bleeding through to other planes of existence. One of the byproducts of these creatures are reality cores, large motes of pure creation that can do all sorts of wonderous things that several factions of intelligent beings compete for. My players are pretty excited about it.
What did you pull that from I remember reading some great books with that set up. But can't remember the name
Nice!
Stealing and incorporating this
This is a really cool concept, thanks for sharing
AWESOME! 💥
wow this a masterpiece! You not only had the opposite view as I thought you would on the odd abundance of "dungeons" in a fantasy setting but you did a fantastic job at defending their existence. Bravo!
Can't wait to see what you think up next! You are extraordinarily creative and insightful and I have loved watching every video you make.
Also great twist ending with an actual real world example!
Elves live in forests camouflaged with the trees, dwarves live in mountains, gnomes live in hills... humans are kinda getting edged out so...
Humans live in the plains and grasslands, you know, like how we first did irl.
@@polarknight5376I’m just trying to figure out hobbits. Do they fight humans for land or do they separate by habitat somehow?
@@highlorddarkstar What are Hobbits? Do you mean Halflings? Which are absolutely legally distinct from and are NOT Hobbits? Halflings live alongside other races, integrating into their societies.
@@polarknight5376 so a commensal species?
@@highlorddarkstar sure, though some may consider them more as parasites.
The best Fantasy story ever had a dungeon with an epic boss battle at the end of the dungeon. YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
❤🔥
>Best Fantasy
>T*lkien(bum)'s work
Berserk, Kirkbride ES, Malazan and Dresdenverse: LMAO.
I don't think the classic dungeon would start out as a dungeon but when the inhabitants move out or die they would become them
Grandma
Another gem of food for thought!
Regarding the covered chimneys illustrated, maybe thatch would be a natural choice of material, allowing smoke to filter out while performing as a great cover. I could imagine them being covered or woven with branches and such for camouflage.
I would imagine that most humanoid civilization would use a combination of above and below ground construction, with many food sources needing light and being easier to maintain in the open air. Excavated stone may mean more solid surface dwellings and fortifications but i still think that the ease of construction would mean plenty of traditional homes would still be made, such as wood, wattle and daub, etc. Tornado alley is a prime example of such flimsy housing being quickly rebuilt despite ongoing threats, with most relying on a bunker like escape option.
In addition to cultural changes, i see warfare being significantly different, with settlements that could retreat entirely underground, cavalry would be usefull for catching opponents before they go below, then utterly useless after that. Siege would be the next consideration, blocking entrances to starve or suffocate occupants in their cramped, smokey holes but breaking in would require some elite, one on one tunnel fighters that would be at risk from deliberate cave-ins, encouraging a plethora of heroic individuals to defend or assail the underground civilization. Defenders would no doubt want plenty of hidden exits to avoid entrapment or suffocation. Failure to do so could create a grisly dungeon to explore, especially if necromantic magic was involved!
There are plenty of historical examples of underground living in history. Ruins typically found in desert areas that also had plenty stone to carve in. Also often found in or near water eroded canyons but later abandon often because of weather changes and water drying up. Which often had people wondering why such huge structures and settlements were built in the middle of no where but geological records show that during the time they were made the land was more fertile and had flowing water in the area.
A lot of times in fantasy they often have stories of some great war or dramatic event that lead to the ruins but a lot of times it is mundane things. Like water flow changing so river becomes a creek and then nothing. Or land going bad such as locals unintentionally putting toxics in the soil resulting in crop failures. Or getting hold of toxic metals like Lead and more direct poisoning by mistake. Other times a natural resources dries up so no more gold/silver/etc and town dies. Or trade routes shift and an important trade hub because the back end of nowhere once again.
Even if a civilization is still around and didn't fall or have some other major negative event the civilization is an organism like an ant colony. You see clusters of ants stemming out in multiple directions the way a city might with trade routes to nearby farms/mines/etc. As those resource nodes dry up it branches to new areas. If the area becomes too hostile the whole colony may simply pack up and move leaving behind the many pathways it has carved. Time marches on and such places are not considered useful which is why they were abandon to begin with and eventually forgotten to time.
I think having more places like this simply forgot to time make a setting feel more real and lived in rather than the, oh another ruin before the ancient mage war or cataclysm or whatever. It's like nope just an old copper mine that's abandon. Or old underground trade city ruins from back when the pass through mountains was the main trade route before underground highway, magic teleport, water routes, or whatever took over.
So basicly primitive humans in a fantasy world were like early mammals in the age of the dinosaurs😅😅😅
But jokes aside, this does make a lot of sence when you think about it. In a world populated by Dragons, Giants, Trolls, Roc's, Giant spiders and all maner of other monsters, early human development and culture as we've experiaced on out own earth would be inposibble.
It makes sense that early man ( and likely a lot of other humanoid races) would have there initial development in more isolated secluted regions, or ( as this video explains) underground " dungions" and then start to for kingdoms and widespread civilization in the open once there technological and magical advances far enough down the line.
Id quite enjoy a setting where the only humanoids around are burrower types like goblins and the world is full of giant dangerous things bad for thier health. Highlight tennacity and cooperation
You are disregarding the possibility that Intelligent Powerful Beings may have aided, guided, and protected early Humans. Perhaps Ancient Highly Magical Elves or Ancient Good Dragons or some Fey Beings. Therefore with that the Humans developed more rapidly or in a different way.
My problem with dungeons is not whether they would be built, but whether they would be preserved. If it's not a structure that is constantly inhabited in maintained, it will tend to deteriorate. Walls will crumble due to erosion, natural tremors, or broken by tree roots, corridors will be filled with rubble or sediments (if an underground stream find its way inn), etc. The result may end up being disappointed from a fantasy adventurer. Imagine that you're set to recover an ancient artifact that is essential for saving the realm, only to discover that the place where it was kept has crumbled, and you need to dig through tons of rock and rubble or sift through layers of sediment to get to it.
Absolutely true, and a fair consideration. We'd only see structures survive that were built to last. Invasive roots and water would likely be very common in certain regions, but there's a reason 2 of my examples were worked into stone - because that's what remains, more often than not.
I think there's room for a mix of excavation and preservation, but my undercities video makes a good case for the former.
The monsters are the ones maintaining the dungeon. They live there, after all, of course they'd want to keep the place in good shape.
I already made a comment, but bad guys go underground to hide from the normal guys above. So these systems would be maintained by monsters and dark magics. My main example of this is all of HP Lovecraft.
Usually his characters form manic obsessions. They will spend all their time and money building their lairs or labs or whatever. Usually they also always get minions to do their bidding.
If an old lair was abandoned usually his characters will just refurnish them for their needs.
I am trying to think of all examples, but he had stories of necromancy where zombies were being hidden underground, demon type monsters, ghouls, etc.
Usually if there are legit RUINS they are well maintained because they use some alien materials or some unholy demonic materials. There are too many to even reference. He has stories about underground cities to worship dead gods, he has cities that has sunk over time, cities that have been plunged into the ocean, cities frozen in ice, cities under the desert, he has underground cults.... It goes on and on.
Usually modern towns end up getting built over the ruins of some ancient civilization.
Dungeons are not the ONLY way adventurers discover such treasures, anyway. What you described is doing so through archaeology. (ie. Indiana Jones style) Not to mention the adventurer past-time of doing so through outright crimes like grave-robbing or theft.
I would point out that some of the catacombs under Rome were only rediscovered in the _1950s_ , after more than a millenium of neglect.
According to the rulebooks for 2014 (I forget which), a dungeon is more or less any somewhat enclosed environment which players can explore. It needn't be underground. A building which is above ground and is filled with enemies could still act as a dungeon.
Sure, makes sense. At least for high-magic (Well, high-monster) fantasy settings. As you move away from that Classical Dungeons make less and less sense, but, while I know you deliberately weren't going this route with the video, I think it's worth stating:
From a game design perspective - from a running games perspective - dungeons are any physical location that confines the scope to a single location. If the party can't just turn the other way and leave, you have a dungeon. Which, yes, includes classic D&D dungeons, catacombs and the like, but also hospitals in Silent Hill, haunted houses, so knowing how to design good, enjoyable, dungeons for the purpose of gameplay is useful if you run more grounded settings, or the game you're making isn't going for a high magic fantasy setting.
Great video, perhaps you could start a whole series with other justifications for dungeons, since there are a lot of options here. "THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOUR" is one of my favorites for 5e specifically, since in a world with tons of artifacts and anctient evils, some places will have to be safes for wizards, guarded by their gelatinous cubes.
Oh my gods "This is not a place of honor" is one of my favourite tropes.
We also have real life examples of many underground structures.
Of course there's subways and modern (or premodern) sewers but also older examples such as the Paris catacombs, other tombs and many underground temples.
A setting thousands of years old, more magical and less populated might have more unoccupied 'dungeons'.
And they're not just in fantasy but also post apocalyptic settings such Fallout shelters and Metro tunnels.
I always figured with many fantasy worlds being post apocalyptic, six or seven times over, there would be more ruins about then scratch built settlements. If a particular city, first settled in the stone age, changed hands between cultures over a hundred times, burned down several times from accident and monster attack, and even utterly destroyed by an invading army a couple times before being resettled, then there might be a dungeon or two in the area as while you can tear down walls and houses, it's a lot more work to completely fill in underground structures in the area.
Them being underground, used or not, might be the main things that survive when compared to stuff on the surface that are more easily recycled, reused, and destroyed by uncaring foes. A region might become littered with underground graves and stores and siege tunnels and bank vaults and safety rooms, and long abandoned settlements who have, typically, dug into each other during construction, and walled off others that don't need to be accessible.
That people who play D&D are against dungeons is beyond me.
So i base my world in faerun. But 800 or so years after everything that has happened. Gone through a couple golden ages and reverted back due to the mortals falling out. But the last remaining grand cities are the sea elves, and dwarves+gnomes (pretty much for the reasons you state) most other cities either have a dark secret or magical intervention to keep them safe from big threats. It makes great plot hooks for when the party arrives at a new, seemingly normal to us, town
I have two types of dungeons in my games.
"Strongholds": a vaguely fortified location littered with enemies and treasure. Not strictly a dungeon per-se, just a point of interest.
"Dungeon" (capital D): a rift in space that opens into a classic dungeon format. These are often far more threatening than Strongholds, if only because the monsters aren't actual monsters. They're magical constructs that... respawn. Like antibodies trying to force the would-be conquerers out. They're living beings, like a Bag of Devouring.
"Lair" = a nest of monsters that need to be erradicated. Usually migrated from _The Underground™_ biome.
"Spire" = a structured training ground with progressivly harder challenges separated onto each floor. "boss monsters" on each floor to give adventurers a feel for the difficulty level of higher floors.
I cant believe you haven't talked about Derinkuyu!! Both in your underground city video and in this one it is so relevant!!!
If you don't know, please look it up, it's fascinating!
Derinkuyu is an ancient underground city in Turkey. It was cut into very soft stone and was part of a series of underground cities that were all connected through a series of tunnels. They had several exits and an advanced ventilation and water system to ensure they could not be poisoned from the surface but rather could shut off access from above.
It was huge and could house several thousands of people and had everything a city would need. Storage, schools, stables, all of this!! It's so cool!! It was "lost" for several hundred years but was found again by a farmer whose chicken accidentally walked into one.
Derinkuyu wasn't a self contained habitation.
It contained a stables, pens and stores but was clearly intended as a refuge.
Livestock was grazed outside, food was grown outside and the majority of the populace probably lived outside as well given that it was surrounded by villages.
It may have been proof against the human raiders it was intended to stymie but to claim that it would be proof to a poison gas attack in a time when the best a desert raider could manage was smoky fires seems too great a leap.
Both Derinkuyu and Kaymakli would very much be prone to lightning attacks by predators picking off the villagers and do not have ventilation sufficient to support an industry (wine presses don't count).
In short although both are good examples of fortified underground dwellings neither provide the required protection against constant predation or unconventional forms of attack.
Mentioned at 26:50.
he talks about it in the video... granted it's very long so maybe you didn't watch it, but it's in here
@@QuotheravingThere are multiple places in Turkey that were mentioned by Classical Greek and Roman historians and geographers as famously building their homes into the rock.
There are places in southern Italy that do the same thing, and its not that rare globally.
Sure some are just poor outskirts or refuges from danger, but a lot were just taking advantage of the right kind of rock being in a livable place and saving the time, effort and resources from building completely from scratch
The entire last example of the video is Derinkuyu
Dungeons started out as tombs and other such, wealth filled secure places for cultures long passed. Adventurers delve in and collect the treasure. Then, to keep their treasure safe, they build their own dungeons. And adventurers try to plunder them. Thus creating the dungeon adventure cycle and explaining why dungeons often have so many traps and wacky puzzles
Ooooh, this video gave me a lot to think about. So far, I've only shown one settlement in my story; a town build into a cave system in an oceanside cliff. Since its residents are semi-aquatic, it doesn't matter to them that the extreme tidal forces of this world flood the whole town on occasion. This is the kind of town that would eventually turn into a dungeon if left vacant. And the more I've thought of this world's natural conditions and creatures, the more clear it's become to me that its humanoid people are not in positions of great control over their environment. The people of this world would need highly defensible settlements, and the magic system was literally made for terraforming, so carving settlements into the ground is probably commonplace.
When you think about it, many of the earth and stone shaping magic might have had their origins in the creation of such underground complexs.
Such a lovely and very thoughtful essay! Thank you, Tom!
Oh man I went to Cappadocia years ago and it was so cool, what a perfect example.
Everybody needs a bunker! Some survival hole in the ground.
We are talking about fantasy here so what I will say obviously does not apply for the video.
In real life there is one HUGE engineering obstacle to living underground: Heat dispersion. Simply because there is no free atmosphere where one can vent the heat away. Modern life uses and insane amount of energy and despite our best efforts heat is still a major inefficiency that is always created. The earth/soil/ground can absorb the heat but it does it very very veeeeery slowly and very limited in capacity and once it did absorb the heat it will radiate the heat back. This isn't very problematic close to the surface but the deeper you go the more sever the problem becomes.
Unless great amount of construction effort and care is dedicated when constructing underground habitats to venting the excess heat and keeping temperature under control deeper underground habitats will inevitably overheat over a long time and become very uncomfortable live in that can take years or even decades to cool down on their own. Thus energy cost to remove the collected heat will only rise. And producing more energy will only produce more heat and the vicious cycle continues. So any energy infrastructure must be placed on the outside the habitat itself. At which point it is easier to live on the surface.
The first in the Dungeon typically body-checks the traps they fail to notice...maybe I should come back and watch this later...
there is indeed a sneaky trap somewhere in the video
thank you for perfectly answering a very good and sensible question that never even occurred to me was an issue until now
please keep doing so, you're awesome at it
I think PF2 did that really well by having the star fall cataclysm. Everyone went underground so they didn’t just die.
A shame I can't subscribe twice, these videos provide something to think on well after the video itself has ended.
Of course there is another answer very much used in RE Howard's Conan stories: Ruins of previous civilizations. Seems like half his adventures included some forgotten ruin. So even if your previous civilization was mostly surface dwelling, they'd still have subterranean service tunnels, sewers etc.
Die Hard is a DnD movie now
The actual techniques needed to overcome heating, cooling, ventilation and plumbing can be hand waved in a world where magic exists.
One thing g that could be a great addition to this world building is to ask what sorts of supernatural creatures people would create a symbiosis with. Maybe we befriend some form of fire elementals for keeping furnaces and kilns hot. Maybe earth elementals aid in our tunneling. But then, these creatures might replace tigers and bears as our predatory concerns.
Heating and cooling isn't an issue. Caves have a pretty consistent temperature all year round. Thick layers of rock or dirt acts quite well as insulation.
The symbiotic relationships is a good idea. It doesn't even have to be "befriending", it might be creatures that aren't overly intelligent, and can be "domesticated". Humans are very good at domesticating animals and plants when the opportunity arises.
Which makes me think of plants and not just animals... there are plenty of plants where we eat the parts underground. Potatoes, carrots, peanuts... I could imagine people domesticating and selective breeding these plants to get the roots going deeper and deeper, so they can harvest the food from within the cave.
Hell, I go out of my way to put a ton of vast old ruins into any fantasy story I come up with, because I genuinely love ruin exploration and dungeon crawling.
In one I'm working on now there's this absurdly huge underground superstructure spanning continents and nobody knows who built it. In another setting the gods once fought a huge war that rearranged the whole world so people are still finding old buried fortress complexes full of weird stuff from the old times, and dungeon crawling for old artifacts is an actual job. I even had this one idea where the _whole setting_ was just a seemingly endless series of structures and caves, and as far as anyone could tell it constituted that entire universe.
Of course it's contrived, but that can be said for a lot of stuff in fiction. What matters is that it's something you put into the setting because that's part of the story.
Especially in a High Magic Fantasy setting, the Humans could build in Stone including their houses within Walls. Therefore, Dragonfire wouldn't be as concerning. Also the walls could be designed in a way that makes climbing them harder. What's more; if there are also Good Dragons/Powerful Beings they could aid, guide, & defend the Humans as well as other Lesser-Races.
Finally, above ground structures/ruins could be considered Dungeons as well. With your River concern you could design structures that are on Stilts/Floatable which works with flooding. In fact if you built your city within the middle of a huge lake that adds very good additional protection from many enemies especially in a Magical Fantasy Worlds.
I personally love the Morrowind and Skyrim use of underground tombs because they say a lot about their cultures and how they treat the dead (mostly, they revive their ancestors in some way to guard the tombs from looters and necromancers), then there are abandoned mines, abandoned "farm" mines, natural grottos and very rarely, purpose-built shelters meant for living, bunkers and stock rooms.
This is a great exploration of ideas I've skirted before. My next step is to try to figure out an evolutionary path for humanoids amongst monsters like that. Of course, magic complicates natural evolution, but still, there are interesting takes to be found in working out all those kinks. Basically, the question is "How do humanoids even evolve in the first place if there are so many monsters around?" My answer falls into two categories: 1. Many monsters are magical corruptions of humanoids, so they didn't exist before humanoids. 2. Humanoids and/or the monsters came from somewhere else when humanoids had already evolved most of the way to their modern forms.
You can look at how animals differ in size in the real world and scale that up to your fantasy setting. If you assume humans to be the size of common rodents, then dragons become the size of cats and foxes, with the truly ancient ones reaching the size of lions. The bigger giants would then be the size of human toddlers. You can go on from there to infer how people would live when confronted with super predators like these. Perhaps revisiting Guliver's Travels is in order.
Just for the record, few apex predators feed mainly on other predators. It usually just means they don't have pradators above them. Prehistoric humans were not apex predators because they were often eaten by other, bigger predators, not because we hunted herbivores.
Prehistoric humans were apex predators. While a lion or bear might have occasionally killed a lone, unarmed human, there were no animals that were regularly able to prey upon humans.
@@gregpartridge7554 The problem with that argument is that, again, mesopredators are not the main part of the diet of apex predators. At least on land. By that logic badgers are apex predators. Predators, even small ones, are a bad choice for main prey. They are usually few and far between, are usually armed, and riddle with parasites of their own prey.
Humans might have been rarely hunted compared to prey species, but they were eaten every so often by larger predators, more than say a lion, a polar bear or an adult crocodile that are nearly never targeted for predation by other predators.
@@Rodrigo_Vega Grizzlies and mountain lions have been known to kill and eat each other on rare occasion; that does not prevent either of those from being an apex predator. Likewise lions and crocodiles. Prehistoric humans were infrequently killed and eaten by large predators such as the above, and also sometimes hunted those large predators. But neither would have been a normal part of the other's diet.
@@gregpartridge7554 Adjusting the odds for time and space shared in the wilderness, it seems much more likely something like a leopard or a couple of wolves/hyenas to attack a lone woman fetching water, or a kid sleeping in a hut than a bear or a lion. And these species are not even at the top of their biomes like in your own examples. _Most_ humans are not armed men in their prime, and animals know when it's safe for them to attack. People that lived and walked in the wilderness fear these animals because they ate them with some frequency. In some areas they still do.
Mark my words, this is right up there with Shad's Back-scabbard in revolutionizing fantasy/adventure genre history.
Couldn't agree less.
Underground fortified dwellings have more disadvantages than advantages.
Firstly there's carbon monoxide or other gasses which have the tendency to pool in the depths and could kill entire settlements.
Secondly there's the many burrowing creatures that could easily bypass your bottlenecks.
Third there's the fact that burrows without multiple exits are deathtraps allowing hungry beasts to corral or contain large numbers of people and burrows with exits or chimneys are harder to defend.
In short, no underground fortresses have ever really worked in practise and would be even more of a disadvantage in a fantasy world.
Underground spaces can indeed have bad air. Mines are probably worse than natural caves. Natural caves were typically formed by flowing water or flowing rock (in lava tubes), or wave action in sea caves. Through-flows imply both entrance and exit, and a possibility of natural air flow. Also, some caves and tunnels "breathe" due to changes back and forth in the air pressure outside them.
I suppose a fantasy burrowing creature could also get under and past a town wall or castle wall readily enough. A defense might be to settle on a small island far offshore, supposing the tunneling critters do not fly or swim.
I agree that multiple ways in and out are valuable. This is true of surface installations too, to a lesser degree.
Historically, some settlements or strongholds have been in caves or hollows in the faces of cliffs. See Mesa Verde in the USA. Quite a few castles employ natural caves when they can, Predjama in Slovenia being a prime example.
As for underground fortresses, I submit that France's Maginot Line was so imposing that it was not ever seriously attacked. Did it "really work in practise"? Sort of. Bear in mind that it was not completed as planned. And the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in the USA is a fortress of sorts, definitely underground and also never yet attacked. And the military tunnels of Gibraltar must be counted as an underground fortress, with historical success against attack.
@@davidtownsend8875 All good points. And yes burrowing creatures like Purple worms or Umber Hulks are potentially a problem for any stronghold.
The only advantage Forts may have is that they are typically built on raised ground which may be off-putting for a burrowing creature as it would feel like a cull-de sac to their tremor sense.
Additionally being largely composed of stone blocks there would be less direct contact with the bedrock muffling the signs of it's inhabitants.
Militarily speaking tunnels and underground fortresses are very different.
Tunnel complexes such as Gibraltar or more recently Gaza are more about concealment and movement than just defence, while the tunnels used in the World wars were mainly used for attacking across no-man's land.
You could also have mentioned Bunkers such as Nuclear shelters though in this case the threat is very different.
I've said it before but for a standard 'Dungeon' to exist it must already have failed as a fortress.
In my DnD homebrew setting, dungeons were slowly working their way up to the surface just about anywhere. Many were not built, but spawned, cropped off, or left behind by huge living, moving, megadungeons deep under the Underdark.
Those concepts for old subterranean settlements are really creative.
I imagine that any subsequent settlers would repair and retrofit the old tunnels to fit their own needs.
Definitely using these ideas in my game
Dungeon Core novels can make it make sense. The dungeon is ALIVE and wants to feed upon adventurers to grow.
I find the concept of dungeons in fiction very comfy and I love the countless different takes and twists on it.
Endless hellish labyrinth where people have to live? Ruins of a Fallen empire, twisted by some foul dark magic? "Living" dungeons, that grow and devour eachother, attracting monsters and adventurers to feed on them? Bandit/secret organization hideout? Or simply a den of monsters, such as wild animals, or tribalistic goblins/orcs?
We've got it all, and I love it all.
Imagine living in a city underground were if one person burns something or starts a fire in the wrong space it burns up all the O2 in some areas and entire blocks and rooms of people start to die
This changes the way I am making my homebrew setting. I like the idea of the majority of settlements being underground. It makes sense.
Great video. Dungeons suddenly make a LOT more sense. It also made me rethink how I'll be designing future dungeons. Laying them out more like a settlement will.create some.really interesting designs I think.
I was kind on the fence about this idea, but the example of Derinkuyu (and the other underground cities in Cappadocia) really convinced. I hadn't heard of them before, and they're really cool, so thanks for making me aware of them!
By far my video of yours. Watched it a few times already and taken notes. Will reference again for making dungeons.
That is an adorable dragon plushie you have atop the mysterious soft white orb! I do believe I've used the same pattern!
I've once done a basement tour in a city in germany. The old basements, dug in the stone are connected with small tunnels. We basically went through half of the old city without going up to the surface.
There's something worth thinking about that I have honestly really never seen addressed in any fantasy setting - Mining tails. The more you dig underground, the more tails there should be. A really big mine in the vain of moria would have created a whole massive mountain of loose stone.
They could have used those for other structures, perhaps it was a combination of Quarries & Mines. Maybe separate the stone from the ores in a precise way, and sell what that mining Race aren't using to other Races.
You know, I wasn't fully sold until you said "and then when the humans who were once chased into burrows rose to the surface, the monsters fled to their now-abandoned burrows." But that's just so incredibly evocative.
22:58 They did this in Ethiopia! You should check out the rock cut churches there, very cool! Also I can see above ground dwellers living in communities of sod houses that provide a bit of protection from fire and camouflage, like I have in my campaign. The valley that does that might have a reason for doing it other than cultural, you have inspired me, maybe there was a REALLY bad Dragon attack.
Thanks for posting this is an excellent conversation to have!
Really enjoyed this video! Keep up the content!
Wow! Really insightful video. The potential for Dead Malls as dungeons is potent!
I remember reading somewhere that -before FR was adopted as the 'default' setting- dungeons were periodically created by the god of magic to introduce magic (items) into the world and drive up his own worship, or something like that
@17:25; Coating the inside of the walls with fiber-reinforced clay, one could simply light the whole place on fire after construction, baking the clay and reinforcing the walls. Cobb houses have stood for centuries without being fired, as well.
This is a phenomenal video, thank you!
Another banger, super-inspiring! Thanks Tom!
I like this approach. instead of saying "this doesn't make sense, therefore dumb," you instead come up with a reason for it to make sense.
Real examples for your other two scenarios:
* Mountain? The Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, USA. Population topped out around 100 people, which is a respectable neolithic village.
* Riverside? The sod houses common to the ancient British isles. Grass still grew on top and its roots helped hold the structure together. Chimney hole in the center of the roof, and a single doorway-presumably closed with a hide blanket or loose-fitting wood door-that kept air circulating. The small ones would sleep a dozen or so humans, especially if they were close together for warmth. Good odds that from a distance, the village would look like just another few hills and a smoldering underground peat fire.
I knew there was a reason I always tend to make cave bases in Minecraft
Stone age people absolutely did dig massive tunnelsystems for salt and flint and precious stones. They usually filled them back in as soon as a new tunnel needed to be dug over the centuries, but it is quite fascinating to imagine such cramped environments being the first bastions of humans.
One problem with 'hidden underground habitation' is it's a LOT harder to hide agriculture and animal husbandry, which is required for large settlements and - importantly - specialization. Living underground is good for defense, not so much for hiding, unless it's a very small settlement that can import most of its needs (or use magic to replace imports).
That said, all the reasons you give for living underground also apply to building stone buildings and strong stone walls (and even solid domes/rooftops of stone). It's less effort to quarry stone from the surface and construct buildings above ground than it is to carve out tunnels into a hillside, at least if the rock you're dealing with is decently hard. Monsters would definitely change how settlements were built (basically all settlements would have a curtain wall) and the effort required would limit the ability of humanoids to expand.
You've basically just described the EarthDawn campaign setting. Though with just the everyday D&D monsters instead of an invasion of the extradimensional Horrors. It's the same principle, though. Living on the surface is a lot less feasible when man-eating monsters are roaming the land, so big underground shelters are the way to go.
Gotta keep in mind that waters travels in weird ways underground… it’d have to be closely observed throughout the whole process of settling in and would result in your rooms having different shapes than the bunker-looking one you showed.
There are other reasons to dig in though. One would be extremes of weather. The Dark Sun setting has people surviving on a planet that survived a magical apocalypse. Temps were up to 130 degrees F. A cave system would be both shelter and defense. Also its easier to build in some scenarios. For instance, in the American West they build dugout homes because they were cheap, fast, hidden, and comfortable temperature wise. So you could conceivably build a whole town that way with connecting tunnels and escape routes. Also consider Japanese and Vietnamese underground tunnel networks. I'd bet anything a lot of those tunnels are still down there in Vietnam.
"humans are smart" he said 10 seconds after informing us that some village forgot it had an underground city
Maybe the reason dwarves still live underground and in the mountains is because they're so stubborn and stuck in the old ways, and refuse to abandon that lifestyle. Also, one thing I was wondering was how the farms would work and be maintained. It seems like farming would be a pretty dangerous job because it requires going outside where the monsters are. How are the crops protected from pests and other animals trying to eat them? And wouldn't they expose the underground settlement that they're trying to hide?
If you haven't already, you should probably look into Dungeon Core stories. It sort of has a different solution to the dungeon problem: they are magical, predatory genus loci with a crystalline gem as a heart, and all of the structures, traps, and monsters are defenses. Sometimes they need to feed, sometimes it's just a bonus. Sometimes the loot is just bait for people or made from creatures and stuff Monster Hunter style, sometimes (usually in LitRPT versions), it's sort of necessary or a biproduct.
Similarly, if you have society on a truly epic scale, Warhammer 40k's underhives and space hulks might also serve as good ideas for dungeon origins. Underhives being the forgotten and abandoned remnants of hive cities, the new buildings built on top of them similar to a Tet mound (hope I'm using the right word), while space hulks are void ships lost to the warp, fused together into a chaotic mismatch of wrecks by that nightmare realm, and now just randomly drifting through space, occasionally being sucked back into the warp and spat out somewhere else in the galaxy.
I like making forests as dungeons too. Each 'room' is an area of the dungeon
Thank you for justifying the part of my current fantasy novel that I've been most worried I'd get flak for writing---multiple dungeon crawls through abandoned underground towns and facilities belonging to three different ancient civilizations.
An interesting way I have found to integrate these into fantasy stories without it being intrusive is to let the antagonists deal with them in a few scenes when there is downtime for the protagonist PoV, and for what lays at the end to be part of the protagonists' objective too, so the antagonists end up handling the dungeon grind while the protagonists swoop in near the end to try and steal their reward.
When archaeologists excavated Troy, they found nine Troys, each one on top of the other.
Let that sink in.
Very interesting. I just started to wonder, "Under these surface pressures, how did humans even survive to the point that they were able to create their underground refuges?"
I'm absolutely going to steal at least the first map, but possibly also the second, for my sandbox campaign. The third one is just genius!!
The ultimate expression of this would be Jules Vernes' Journey To The Center of the Earth. A hollow planet - the Underdark dialled up to 11. That would take some serious elemental magic to work.
I knew you would eventually mention the real life underground city!
in my current game dungeons are indeed everywhere. They are former shelters build to withstand end of the world but they got corrupted by said end of the world and hence the monsters.
and yes. the world died but someone attempted to bring it back to life by planting a "Tree of life" which kinda restarted the life in the world. but it also reactivated all the magic and monsters from those dungeons.
Great trick to hide the smoke, would be to have a lonely cabin or small ruin built over the chimney. So any smoke would be attitude to a traveler or the like staying there occasionally.
The thing about intelligent creatures’ settlements in fantasy is that they are capable of adapting to challenging environments by implementing complex solutions and techniques to maintain their homes. What this means for these as explorable ruins is that without maintenance, they could be harder to find or explore compared to a settlement built by the instincts of a less-intelligent animal (of similar size ofc)
I've personally started to become a fan of the idea of a dungeon being an entity, which is getting popular in a lot of fantasy and isekai anime. It varies in nature between anime, but the idea is that the dungeon is a place that is naturally or supernaturally occurring, and takes shape because of various universal rules, or the whims of gods, or willed into existence by the spirit of adventure itself. Sometimes a creature becomes the master of the dungeon and gains the power to shape the space magically, sometimes it's a magical ecosystem that's living and growing on it's own, sometimes they're actually symbiotic parasites that spreads via spores and that generate monsters and treasure in order to draw in adventurers and feed on their magic essence like a multilayered pitcher plant for humanoids. Just a neat answer to "who built this and why?"
I imagine cellars and bunkers would be common in a dnd setting. You would live above ground but have safe places from flying monsters
THREE alternate explanations:
1) “Underground Biome”
Burrowing animals can use geomancy - it is as simple as that. If you think it is impressive what some humans could do in a decade, imagine what an entire eco-system could do in a million years. The ecosystem can be in constant turmoil due to flooding / air flow / food scarcity / migration paths / etc
This explanation works well for *“Lairs”* (as they are often called). A monster species has set up a nest in a local cave system, and now the adventurers have to exterminate them.
2) Training grounds.
A world full of monsters and magic, Yes. But also, a world with XP and levels?
If outside the city walls are dragons and leviathans and the dreaded arboreal Spinosaurus… humans will want a safe way to “level up” in a controlled environment. A structured environment with the easiest challenges on one floor, then the challenges get progressively more difficult as you go through the *“Spire”.*
Some spires could be small and simple, while others are more realistic - with large open-world levels to explore. Roaming each floor are a few “boss monsters”, which give the adventurers a taste of the difficulty level of the next floor.
Bonus lore: The human civilization has forgotten how to build towers. And the towers are starting to fail.
3) Fortress of immortals.
Okay, grab a drink and some snacks for this one……
The age of the Shaman > Once upon a time there was only 1 immortal. But, wanting to have others like him, he searched for a way to share his immortality. He found it… but the process was slow. Only 1 new immortal per year or something.
The age of the Pantheon > When a person gains immortality, they naturally grow in social status. They’ve got the time to learn and can cash in on long term investments. Eventually they all become rulers, and eventually they are treated like gods.
>> The age of humanity > Eventually humans turn against the immortals. First immortals are killed on the streets, so the immortals retreat to their palaces. Then the humans siege their palaces, so the immortals retreat underground. Then the humans send teams to hunt underground, so the immortals invest in traps. The immortals thought they could wait out the riots, or out-live the offended humans. It didn’t work for the immortals.
The age of the Demi-Human > the immortals started creating loyal demi-humans to worship them. Some were made as weapons (Goblins), others were made as idealised humans (Elves / Dwarfs), and others were made as further attempts to spread immortality (werewolves / vampires) … anyway, this is when the immortals fight back with armies.
Then there is the age of the magus (the first immortal made magic more accessible via “the system”), the age of prosperity (utopia future), the age of zombies (a new means for immortality via “the system” had unintended side effects), and the age of stars (escape the zombie world to travel the stars).
… oh, right… Dungeons… There are immortals hiding in dungeons because humans are rather fanatical about hunting them to extinction.
I think I'd like to see some dungeons become make shift towns. Like originally it was a last ditch place for the poor and such to find refuge and over time they managed to either tame the monsters in it or clear them out, over time building it into a actual town.
It also seems likely that most fantasy game settings are technically post-apocalyptic in nature, meaning that at some point in the past there were widespread and, relatively, advanced civilizations. The "Dungeons" then are simply ruins of one or more previous civilizations that retained enough structural integrity to remain potentially habitual even once they had been covered by natural forces or other, lesser, civilizations building on top of them over time. Such "structures" would be ideal for any monstrous species that discovered it which would eventually create a monstrous ecosystem. Likewise, such hidden structures would make for ideal hideouts for bandits or evil sorcerers or warlords seeking to gather an army in secret, possibly incorporating the monsters already inhabiting the "dungeon" into their growing secret army.
There was a post-post apocalyptic SCP story where former containment facilities filled the roles of dungeons, and that was a pretty fun concept.
Albeit, they were a little toooo dangerous. The mortality rate for dungeon delving in that setting was 100% as far as I remember.
We finding another entrance to Blackreach with this one
Its fun. The only explanation I need. I also run non-dungeon maps because they can be fun, too. Again , the only reasoning I ever needed. Wilderness is fun too - as long as the game does not drag on in an endless sea of grass, desert, forests, bore-alls. Go along trails and roads to fun places. Including fun but not underimagined wilderness encounters. Variety is fun.
I like how Stephen Erikson handles it in Malazan Book of the Fallen, where there's a history of tens of thousands of years and varied civilizations who were "dominant" at different times. Thus, the current human city is built atop the ruins of older cities that may have been built by some other race during its ascendancy - and thus what thousands of years ago were the streets and buildings of a bustling city are now deep underground. Particularly ironic given that the fact is simply stated, and there's not really any "dungeon delving" taking place in the series.
And then the Forgotten Realms setting itself, where many of the so-called "dungeons" are actually ancient remnants of civilizations of elves, giants, or even "extinct" races like the sarrukh.
I immensely enjoy your archaeological approach to fantasy world building and like to apply it myself. My only problem with it is that it prevents me from actually getting any world building done, because I'm drowning in detail
Even without monsters, in a world with Passwall spells, it makes sense for sensitive things to be kept underground instead of in surface fortifications. And when you think how long it took for humanity to surpass the technology of the Romans in certain areas, it's not unreasonable to find ancient advanced technology down in some forgotten dungeon
With this world building idea, Humans and Dwarves would either have a much closer relationship, or become bitter enemies fighting over the available spaces that most fantasy relegates to Dwarves.
I've always felt that the economy in fantasy games, where random shopkeepers keep a stock of relatively strong healing potions, armor, and weapons, makes a lot more sense in a world where adventuring is a common profession. If there are threats in the world, and unexplored places, great enough for there to be a market of decentralized independent mercenaries, bounty hunters, and explorers for hire, it makes sense for shopkeepers to cater to that market. And where do those threats hide? Well, goblins live in caves and often fortify them. Dragons live in caves as well. Dwarves build underground structures not unlike dungeons, which can often become infested with kobolds; worse, the dwarves might go feral in the deep dark and start posing a threat to the realm.