The Outdoor Dungeon: Boring Dungeon-Crawl ‘Theory’

There’s something about the dungeon adventure that just works. 

 

You’re in a room. The room has a thing in it. You do the thing, then ya kick down the door and do it all over again in another room. Easy for players to grok, easy for DMs to run.

Some people say all adventures are dungeons, but I’d go the other way. All dungeons are adventures. Or another way, all dungeons are story, and we, as humans, gravitate to story on some weird, primal level. Stories are made of scenes and each scene is packed full of conflict. The hero’s in a scene, they’re doing something, saving something, fighting something, all the while we’re wondering 'what’s going to happen next?'. And then, the scene ends, we find out what happens, the tension resolves and there’s a transition to the next scene. And dungeons, with their scene by scene room by room structure aren’t too far off from that.

Ok, bit of a tangent. Let’s start over.

 

Dungeons work because you’ve got walls and halls. The walls define the encounter space or the ‘scene’, and the halls lead or ‘transition’ you from one scene to the next. So how the heck can you have all the excitement of a dungeon outside, where there’s no walls to keep the fun encounters in, or halls to lead players to the next encounter? What’s to keep the players from wandering off into the unexplored (and more importantly, unmapped) outdoors where nothing’s going on? They’re not even still in the ‘dungeon’ at that point!

I think that’s all less important than you think. I know adventures games never actually go past level 3ish, but a team of high enough wizards can stray from your walled corridors as easy as one can step off the forest path. Or what if your players get enterprising and start bringing mining equipment and explosives into your dungeons?

There are reasons players stay on the path underground (namely, convenience). There are reasons you use the path when you go for walks through the woods (you occasionally stray, yes. We’ll get there. All in good time.). And there should be reasons for players to stay within the ‘soft’ walls you create for your outdoor dungeon.

But like I said, that stuff’s not so important. 

Earlier I misled you. I said dungeons work because they've got walls and halls. But there's something else. One more oft-overlooked thing, integral to a dungeon's structure, that tends to get rolled into the ‘halls.’ And being intentional about the inclusion of this thing is going to be the key to creating our outdoor dungeon.

Dungeons have doors. And doors are important.

Next week we’ll start with the first of our ‘rules’ for making an outdoor dungeon.

The Outdoor Dungeon: Intro

I’ve been obsessed with the idea of an outdoor 'wilderness dungoen.’

Allow me to channel my inner Ron Swanson for a bit.

I’m worried what you just heard was, ‘I’ve been obsessed with the idea of a wilderness hexcrawl’ or ‘wilderness pointcrawl’ or more generally ‘wilderness adventure’ of which there are several excellent examples. But what I said was, “I’ve been obsessed with the idea of a wilderness dungeon.”

You know the room by room, moment by moment, suspense-packed crawl through the depths of a dungeon? Where there’s time for the dungeon master to really get across the sense and feel of the rotting mansion corridors, or the musty undisturbed in a century halls of a crypt? Where there’s that joy of poking around at a setting detail and discovering something hidden? Or the sense of victory you get when you navigate a trap or terrain hazard?

Yeah, all of that. But outside.

I heard somewhere that Shigeru Miyamoto, when he created the Legend of Zelda, was trying to recapture the sense of wonder he got from exploring as a child, straying from the beaten path to discover secret caves, or rounding the bend to find a hidden lake. (I also heard that he didn’t think he achieved that with his early Zelda games, but hey, we try and try some more. I wonder how well he thinkg Breath of the Wild hits the mark.)

So I’ve started designing one, and for my own sake as well as anyone else’s, I’ll be chronicling the journey, writing down any insights I gain as I go. I’ll say right now I don’t know if it’s even possible to do in a fully satisfying way. There’s a reason (multiple, even) that hexcrawls and pointcrawls have become the standard way to structure adventures outdoors. But they’re not quite scratching the itch. And I have some thoughts on how it might be possible. 

The plan is to take a look at some basic elements of 'normal dungeons' like doors and rooms, and consider how we might, and more importantly, why we should, translate them into a form that works for dungeoncrawling in the outdoors. Let's call it... a terrain-crawl for now.

So hang onto your cloaks. Wouldn’t want to lose them in the woods. If I suddenly stop posting, assume that the experiment was a failure and you can go back to your regularly scheduled hexcrawls and pointcrawls.

New posts every week. Or so.