In a discord, a question came up about adventures that are more social and mystery oriented than dungeon focused. This made me wonder about the best adventures that contain exactly ZERO dungeons?
Or, maybe to loosen the reins for more answers, which NSR adventures out there are focused on something other than crawling through a ruin?
For the purpose of this, what counts as NSR and dungeon is entirely up to you! No wrong answers in the spirit of the question.
Gardens of Ynn and other depth crawls will easily fall into this
Following this thread. Personally, I don’t enjoy dungeons that much, neither when GMing nor when playing. When I take a look at an adventure that is only a dungeon, I usually don’t take the time to read it. I’m sure I’m losing some gems in the way, but also I’m spending more time looking for those adventures that I enjoy.
Not exactly with zero dungeons, but the adventures or landscapes that I’ve liked the most until now are:
The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford (it’s a classic for a reason)
The Beast of Borgenwold (It feel like the small cousin of Black Wyrm, with less interactive parts for the players and less places to explore. But, on the other hand, the writing is superb and the NPCs and elements have a more gritty tone than Black Wyrm that I like much better. If I were to find a Borgenwold adventure, but with the extension and interactivity of Black Wyrm, I’d be very, very happy)
Nightmare over Ragged Hollow (Still have to finish reading it, but it’s a great region, with several places to visit, and an overarching plot to solve. And a countdown to put pressure on the players. Looks very good for now, an easy Top 3 for adventures)
Night’s Dark Terror (It has a bigger scope than the previous adventures, and the main plot is somewhat railroaded, but I think it wouldn’t be tricky at all to allow some free roaming from the players).
I usually pull from sources outside of *SRs, as most are obsessed with low-level site-based play. So I don’t think there are really any NSR adventures that don’t include crawling around a dungeon, because they all end up fitting the form of a dungeon, even if its not entirely enclosed. I could be wrong here.
For examples of adventures that I think that are non-dungeons, stuff like Warhammer Fantasy’s Night at the Three Feathers, or Dragon Warriors’ Box of Old Bones are great to show more social and investigative styles of play. Quite a lot of Cthulhu adventures can also be adapted for such purposes, although quite a few also include dungeon-equivalents for me (like I count The Haunting as having a dungeon, imo).
well… there are point crawls (that are sorta like dungeons, but with abstracted space), and hex crawls (that are sorta like dungeons where each room has 6 exits that lead to another room with 6 exits), and then there are depth crawls (that are sorta like dungeons with linear random rooms).
but yea, NSR adventures are mostly site based and every site can be a dungeon if you think about it. I will pat myself on the back for making the only non-site based dungeon ever (its a procedure to simulate a trial, in the form of a dungeon).
Like someone above, I’m going to recommend some WFRP adventures. Night of Blood and Rough Night at the Three Feathers are fun social-oriented adventures that I’ve run in Cairn. I recommend them. There are probably a number of other WFRP adventures without dungeons.
The Liminal Horror module Night at the Shelterwood Inn was inspired by Night of Blood and is also dungeon-free, if you’d like a modern setting.
The TSR adventure N3: Destiny of Kings is one I enjoy. It does have castles and an abbey, but they’re more realistic than dungeon-like, so that might also make sense.
Yeah for me, the ones in the NSR ad the newer OSR are all functionally dungeons to me. Like, most of the pointcrawls functionally end up being room nodes connected by edge nodes. All of the hexcrawls (that I’ve seen) are basically the same, but how you mention - they have 6 edges out.
That’s why I mention pulling from external sources, but I could just have a blindspot and have completely missed contrary examples. Hell I bet there’s some “cozy” town setups somewhere in the NSR, I just am unaware of it.
I don’t think you are wrong. I think its an OSR reaction against story/5e kinda stuff. adventures are written in a way that the players are IN SPACE. they GO NORTH. even if they are in the middle of a mystery type adventure.
but certainly the rules don’t require it to be so, as you say.
but wait, pondering here about A Rough Night at the Three Feathers… is it THAT different from Demon Driven to the Maw?
Maybe not, I suppose I’m not familiar with that adventure. I’ll check it out!
I also think someone mentioned Brandonsford which obviously has dungeons, but some of the town stuff is certainly non-dungeony.
A Fist Full of Feathers is purely a wilderness point crawl without any traditional dungeons.
You might want to look at some of Forbidden Lands adventure sites. Some of those are dungeons but not all of them!
Though as others have mentioned you can view everything as a dungeon, but I’m guessing you mean room by room kind of scenarios.
I feel like “dungeonless” adventures is a major strength of the NSR.
A large part informing what I consider to be an NSR module is that spaces folks would often consider to a dungeon aren’t mapped on an OSR 10 ft. dungeon grid for system-specific dungeon procedures, but are transformed into point crawls or other abstracted space. So I guess, just to be clear, I’m looking at a “dungeon” as a dangerous, enclosed adventure site consisting of a defined series of connected rooms, rather than larger abstracted spaces containing several rooms which may still be connected interior spaces.
And because I suffer from MNS (Mothership Nerd Syndrome), that’s what all my suggestions are, except the first one:
The Cloud Empress setting book, Land of Cicadas also has a generous handful of non-dungeon adventure locations (and some dungeons too) across its hexmap.
this is a good point. somehow, since you said “dungeons” I was focused on fantasy genre stuff. step out of the fantasy genre and… OK, well sure, its amazing how many adventures still basically ARE dungeons… but its far from all of them, maybe half?
just want to bring up another one: Crush Depth Apparition. I bring it up because in the fantasy NSR space a lot of people keep looking for nautical rules/procedures, and I think that is a good example of a nautical adventure, with its bespoke procedures, that actually could be slotted pretty easily in a fantasy campaign after some reskinning.
This is cool, I haven’t heard of most of these (aside from Cloud Empress). I’ll have to peek at a few.
I’ll throw Witchburner in the ring.
And The Stygian Library, by the same writer. Or, several of the Trilemma Adventures
gosh it took so long for people to get to witchburner and picket line tango. More recently, Owe My Soul to the Company Store and trouble in paradisa fit the bill.
maybe He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More and Wulfwald count as dungeon less capsules? The undying sea as well, although technically it has dungeons just like randomised ones?
there are a few potentials up for zinequest, although exactly how dungeon less they’ll be is yet to be seen…
I just remembered They Cried Monster by Feral Indie Studio. The framework for running monster hunter/monster of the week style mysteries is pretty good!
I also will say, the Issue>Incident>Escalation>Situation tables could be a hackable framework that can be used to generate any kind of mystery, especially combined with the Important NPC generator.