Building Dungeons with D&D's Mike Mearls

One of the most important aspects to Dungeons and Dragons can be the actual dungeons you create or that you have to face as a player. A dungeon can be a slow crawl to your inevitable demise, the labyrinth you have to navigate to reach a highly sought after magical item, or just a maze of traps and monsters that the party must escape to survive another day. Mike Mearls and I sat down to talk about about several ways you can approach any dungeon.

Mike: The classic way of bringing a good story to a dungeon is you just make a unique dungeon. It has something about it has something about it that no one's seen before. I think back to Ravenloft the original adventure, it really is just a giant dungeon, it's a haunted castle but it has an interesting story of the vampire who lives there.

Mike: You can use something gimmicky, you can have a dungeon that's flooded, you could have dungeon in a volcano and all that other stuff. And that's been done a lot and that's a reason it's been done a lot is 'cause it works. Now the challenge is just coming up with something unique but luckily for most dungeon masters you're not trying to publish an adventure, you're trying to impress your players so as long as they haven't seen it before, it doesn't matter how many times it's been done, it's unique to your group so therefore it's going to be interesting.

Mike: The other way you can make the dungeon interesting is by making it part of a narrative of your campaign. It's a place the players have to go. Because they want something there or there's someone or something there they want to defeat. So if the players know there's a dragon that's been causing them trouble since first level, they finally track its lair down, well that's a dungeon right? And even if it could be a fairly standard dungeon but if the players they really want to find that dragon and defeat it, that dungeon's now interesting to them.

Mike: The third way (there's a billion ways I just have three to talk about) is to have a dungeon for a location, the Tomb of Horrors being a great example of that. It has a reputation and a place in your world's mythology that makes it memorable, makes it stand out. That's tricky to pull off because you have to reinforce it again and again without getting too obvious to the players. But that's the kind of dungeon where when the players find they have to go there they go, ooh right, it's a interesting, oh are we going to be able to even find it? Or we know it's deadly.

Mike: I think the long and the short of it is when you talk about the story of a dungeon it's not just here's a narrative, it's just what's the stuff around the dungeon that went before, during and after you played it that'll make it memorable to the players. In a lot of ways it's like what makes a good story. What are the things that just make this stand out?