Blog book club #3.2: Xandering the Dungeon

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This week we are discussing Xandering the Dungeon by Justin Alexander from 2010.

This is a replacement for the intended blog post as at the request of @yochaigal we are going to avoid discussing blog posts from certain figures in the OSR movement. Thanks to @GusL for helping me to select a replacement post that covers a lot of the same ground.

Next week we will discuss How to Awesome-up your players by Jeff Rients. You can see a list of all blog club posts here.

@GusL Would you be willing to repost that long insightful comment you made on the other thread?

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The pathing and dungeon map questions here are useful, they’re one of the aspects of “OSR theory” that has gotten rather contorted through simplification - in that a fundamentally worthwhile concept and consideration has gotten distilled down to “Jaquaysing with looping corridors!”*

This is a bit unfortunate, because if dungeon exploration is a spatial puzzle for the players, excessive looping is almost as choice destroying as linearity. If everything is connected to everything else there’s no risk or decision about finding a path through it.

Of course, yes, maps are important, but without some signposting and clues in the keys they are mostly an annoyance for the players. Likewise maps matter a lot less if random encounters, supply depletion or something else doesn’t make exploring/moving itself a part of play with risks and cost… finding the right path only matters if it avoids risk.

A good dungeon designer will not only be thinking about paths, connections, and secret doors but also about ways the players can understand the dungeon and make educated guesses about how to find their way through. This can be anything from environmental clues (a draft indicates a nearby exit), indications of monster types and presence (signed stone near the dragon lair), old clues left by past expeditions (graffiti or partial maps) and indications of the dungeon’s history and rooms’ former uses (a kitchen will likely have storerooms and maybe a dining room near it).

Anyway, my point is largely that yes, making interesting maps shapes exploration and play. Understanding how players will move through them is helpful to design, but it is not only a mapping issue. I wish the Jaquays’ work on this were better understood in these early discussions, and the purpose of her complex (for 1976) keying and descriptions in Caverns were recognized.

For me looking back at 1970’s map design one sees fairly complex design. The LBB’s suggest complex maps (though perhaps smaller then the results might indicate), and the maps of the era follow suit. What early adventures often suffer from isn’t bad maps, it’s a lack of naturalism or more directly a lack of comprehensibility. What Jaquays’ and Gygax, though using slightly different tools, design brings to mapping and dungeon design isn’t the complexity of loops and sub-levels - it’s description that allows players to guess about the arrangement of the dungeon and content of keyed areas.

I wrote a couple of long articles on how the LBBs might have expected dungeons to look, and how Gygax designed commando raid style dungeons that were dependent on providing players information about the space and its defenders they can use.

On the LBBs Dungeon Design

On Gygax’s Design

*Note: “Xandering” appears to be a product Alexander feeling peeved that Jaquays wanted her name spelled right and then making some weird convoluted changes to support his book launch. I don’t think there was ill intent and it doesn’t detract from the utility of these posts, but I will use the term Jaquaysing cause I think it’s what she would have wanted.

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As I recall, Arneson used loops in his maps. We can refer to it as “Daving” a map, if we wanted. ; )

I’ve always thought the whole “there has to be loops” thinking to miss the point, in a way. I figure that whoever designed the dungeon – in the diagetic sense of somebody in the setting world doing so – had a purpose and the layout should reflect that purpose. The loops are there to make it easier for those who were intended as the primary users to be able to get around easier. It made more sense for me to design with that in mind than to design with adventurers in mind.

Gus makes good points in his blog posts about how secret passages and such made it easier in Gygax dungeons to bypass all the minions and get the to leader directly, if the party figured out there was a secret passage. I’m of a mind that designing with the original purpose in mind would likely result in that sort of layout – the leader of the orc band would gravitate to the largest/most appealing room, which was likely given over to activity by leaders in the original use. Those leaders would have benefited from having easy egress, hence the secret passages and quick way to the surface.

So, the multiple routes possible through a space makes the simulation stronger, as the orginal users would have availed themselves of such. Some of the methods of connecting spaces such as chutes are a bit more difficult to conceive of in a diagetic fashion, though I suppose it’s certainly possible. Not all of the connections would be intended for regular use, even, with emergency bolt holes being designed in, with an expectation that whomever was expected to use it would be able to when it was needed (vertical shaft without ladder or rope, for example, for somebody with access to a fly spell).

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I think you can go too far either way. Too much focus on “why” can distract the designer from the dungeon as a space for a game to take place in.

Of course, the dungeon will be elevated if one can unify design that produces good gameplay with design that upholds fictional versimilitude. But it’s not bad to sometimes start from a list of gameplay features (e.g. Alexander’s list here) and then backform fictional reasons.

And sometimes I may not even get as far as those reasons - the world is stranger than I can imagine, and sometimes I don’t know why the dungeon is the way it is, but that doesn’t mean an interpreter of my design (my players, another GM) won’t come up with an excellent in-fiction explanation.

(Don’t get me wrong - I’m not very keen on monster zoos and other nonsensical dungeon layouts. It’s precisely my desire to have everything make sense (latrines for all monsters! Accurate foodchains!) that has me preaching to myself here.)

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I really enjoyed both your linked articles @GusL. With particular regard to “Gygax’s fortress” it made me realize that a lot of the OSR chat and procedure design I’ve absorbed assumes a fairly neutral exploration-focused dungeon. And this has left me nervous at running the couple of “fortress”-style modules I own. (Some years ago I bought Yrchyn the Tyrant on Bryce’s recommendation and have shied away from running it ever since).

This leads me to some questions:

Are there different procedures to use when running a fortress? Or is it just about that order of battle? If I’m writing my own order of battle (because I’m writing my own module, or because the module I’m using doesn’t include an adequate one) what things should I not forget to include?

I guess more generally, any good blog posts on running fortresses?

Oh, and assuming the players rouse all the defenders against them and have to retreat, is it possible to just fail a fortress scenario altogether? As then the fortress can upgrade its defences / block off the secret passages / etc.? I guess if the players wait long enough though it must eventually calm down again.

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I can’t think of any siege/fortress/commando adventures that are particularly great and have come out recently. I’d say most of Gygax’s early work falls into the category though - to one degree or another.

The only different procedure I’d use is setting conditions for raising the alarm (e.g. a patrol manages to blow thier horn, or a member of it escapes - obvious stuff). Once that happens things get tricky and an order of battle becomes useful as the inhabitants follow a specific script to defend the place. I’d write this defense posture (new guardposts, more defenders on patrol etc) and their tactics out before hand and include it with the order of battle.

I’d also note some conditions for what might cause the defenders to fall apart/break/surrender and where they will go, what they will do.

It’s also helpful to have some indication to how they might shore up the defenses if the PCs retreat and what new traps, guardposts, reinforcements they can gather. Likewise what tactics they might employ once raided … will they counter raid? Pack up a leave? Join up with another faction? Summon demons? etc.

So yeah I think most commando scenarios become much harder the second time around - unless the party has done enough damage to the defenders. That’s fine though, one of the elements of the sort of game these adventures are/were designed for is having more then one set of locations to explore.

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I think the only way the party can fail a fortress scenario is via TPK or capture, or the players just giving up. Other than that, the adjustments the defenders make just become the new status quo the players have to plan for. Time to change up what the PCs do.

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Yes, that’s true as far as it goes, but I was more specifically responding to these elements of Gus’ post:

“In all cases the party is unlikely to survive a direct confrontation with the forces against them”, so the maps “include various opportunities to assassinate or sabotage the foes within the fortress”, and lists examples including:

  • Roof and window access
  • “castle infiltration classics like secret postern gates or drainage channels that lead to a dungeon level”
  • forgotten sections of the dungeon that can allow characters to create hideouts
  • poison the giants’ feast
  • sabotaging the giant’s armory

Summing this up as “Designing the Gygaxian Fortress is more than simply setting up a war game scenario, though this is part of it, it’s creating a space that offers opportunities and clearly defined for player actions and schemes and doing so with a variety of tools.”

Essentially my concern was: if there are limited number of elements in the scenario that allow the underdog PCs to triumph and they “use up” a bunch of those in a failed first or second attempt (e.g. the fortress is now aware of secret passages, they employ a poison tester for feasts) then you might end up in a situation where all that is left to the PCs is a full frontal assault that is very likely doomed to failure.

And I think Gus confirmed that suspicion in his last comment - although as he points out, it’s not necessarily a problem in a sandbox campaign with many locations to adventure in. I just thought it was worth being aware that it is easier to fail a fortress scenario in a way that doesn’t make it possible to just try again with some fresh characters, unlike a more neutral exploration style dungeon.

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Getting back to the original article again, I wanted to phrase my support for this thought. I think the idea of loops is to gamify the dungeon, but it also needs to support it narratively or you are just making complex mazes. I think that’s the true strength of caverns of thracia and specifically dark tower. It has tons of narrative reasons for the maze to exist, even backstory for why the two towers connect to one another.

Compare that to something similar from the time like Palace of the Vampire Queen, it has loops in terms of physical presentation but there isn’t anything more than a table of things in the rooms. The players never find a challenge that requires them to leave and return after delving deeper. In my mind it is the perfect example of a dungeon where “everything is connected to everything else [without] risk or decision making about finding a path through it.”

Three years later and you get dark tower, the difference is wildly stark. Looking at Jennell’s work in the context of her peers really shows you where the magic is, and how far ahead of the curve that work really was.

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I have found some of Jaquays’ interviews regarding videogame level design quite interesting on these topics as well. The Catacomb guide is a mixed bag - decent advice on running a table, and an interesting very “archeological” approach to designing dungeons.

Now I also want to say that the “loops and sublevels” discourse back in 2006 or whenever was useful - these things weren’t popular in 3E - 4E dungeon design, because they don’t gel with a tactical combat focused play style. Basically if set-piece fights are the locus of play in your game - you don’t want maps that favor exploration - but ones that set the players up for a series of escalating but manageable set piece fights.

So at the time this was a bit of a new-old idea and useful idea.

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Just to drive this point home some more, I decided to run some dark sun themed desert stuff in my campaign so I was digging through old modules and everyone should take a glance at a 4e module some time just to see the contrast. I hadn’t looked at one in a long time, and even I was amazed at the 11 back-to-back-to-back fights with troop placements. I had completely forgotten just how forced the whole thing was.

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Yes, what little of what I saw of 4E dungeon was… interesting. I might be screwing up my timelines, but I remember that at the same time there was a bit of a backlash at “quicktime events” in video games, and a beginning to move towards more “open world” content, so the perfection of these sequential events came at a weird time. But to be fair, they were quite perfected, WotC started with them in 3E era and by the time the first bunch of 4E was out, they had a pretty good grasp on how to structure and present them. There’s probably something that can be learned here, even for other approaches…

The most I did that comes close to this was what I would call “vibe-based structuring”. Pick a “scene”, which could be totally visual, or with an actual event structure. So maybe just a McGuffin like a trap, ruin or cool door, maybe a potential combat scene. Picture this as a series of rooms by collecting “perspectives” onto the imaginary centerpiece, jot it down, then connect these to a larger dungeon – and here of course the Jaquaysing comes into play.

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