Dungeon as a living entity

Santiago Caruso

The Dungeon isn't a really place built by people, though parts may be added on by mortal hands, or something made by mortals may become a Dungeon. It is something that grows from the world itself. The Dungeon is the inevitable decay of Law towards an entropic state, it emerges when things begin to break down. The Dungeon has its own mind, its own plans, its own desires & processes. It moves and changes by subtly bending smaller-scale living things to its will. The Dungeon is patient and plotting.

This is why traps reset themselves, why the architecture makes no logical sense, why doors open for monsters but are stuck for players, why everything is trying to kill you. The Dungeon is itself a living ur-trap, with bait to lure and teeth to gnash.

The Dungeon's desires: to Lure, to Harvest, to Grow

 How dungeons grow
Dungeons start out as a sharp rock in a wasteland, or a forest about to catch on fire, or a sinkhole. It catches some prey, feels and tastes its blood and screams, and wants more. It harvests their suffering and uses the magical energy to establish itself. It changes the landscape bit by bit via evolution, adding a vine here or a cave there. The more and smarter things it kills and eats the more it grows. Eventually it finds a way to attract manflesh, then the game is really one. The older and deeper a dungeon the craftier it gets.

Each body caught in a pit, strangled, slashed, burned, beaten, within its walls issues a life force which is consumed by the Dungeon.

Kris Kuksi

Corridors emerges and stretch and shift, taking the shape of something of a sympathetic nature to the surrounding area. Damp cold stone crawling with roots and insects. Hand-cut marble and brass trim. Tile mosaics depicting dolphins and men having sex. Highly detailed carved soapstone tentacles wreathing and tangling together. The Dungeon is a touch artistic and inventive in its architectures, it wants to inspire curiosity.

For this reason too Dungeons bury themselves in the ground, hiding spooky entrances, with rusted gates and skulls. Foreboding but speaking to an inner lust of curiosity and tale it knows all sapient races have.

dungeon as the in-between
Not all dungeons grow from a dangerous piece of the landscape. The most dangerous and horrible ones grow out of loneliness. A tomb constructed to house a king, stuffed with his magic spoon and mythrile sword and precious wives, and left to rot. The stinking vapor of his failed career and laments of the trinkets desiring a new master coalesce and take shape.

A family lives in an old house for generations. They store their most treasured belongings in the attic. Grandpa's gun, great-grandma's love letters, a locket containing the umbilical cord of a stillborn child, a box of weird shit belonging to some forgotten uncle collected during the war and never spoke about but he hid it and secretly looked through it and reminisced, forgotten under a floorboard.

The family died out, the house passed through various hands, most of the stuff cleared out, but some of it was left. The attic wasn't used as much and the stuff sat there and grew lonely, it missed being reminisced over. Eventually that part of town gets blighted, falls into ruin, the house is left standing, delapidated.

All horror movies are about dungeons. You were attracted by something, now you can't escape, and there's a thing that wants to give you a fate worse than death for its own confusing and malignant satisfactions.

Places that were known, used, then forgotten can grow into dungeons. The creepy stairs leading to your cellar is an embryo. The pile of stones that look like a house in the woods is mimicking something. Dungeons grow where things are lost or forgotten, unlooked at by human eyes. They collect in the dust and rot and grow like bacterial colonies where the fresh air doesn't reach to clear it out.

If you don't do spring cleaning, open up and air out your house the rot might set in. You'll start having bad luck, have to move out, then the house will be vacant and the poison can grow.

Dungeons don't exist in physical reality. Dungeons can be measured from the outside but not the inside. A torn apart ancient monastery with a creepy staircase that made up its own lies about a sacrificial cult, twisting the echos of the good natured old monks into something it can use. Behind the door is a different reality created by the dungeon.

treasure as lure
dungeons get their treasures by luring in idiots, eating them, and keeping their stuff to use to lure more idiots. sometimes it does this by spreading rumors on the wind like pollen to attract adventurers. sometimes it does this by being on a layline or having some resource to attracts wizards and dwarfs to embiggen it and manufacture fancy trinkets, before constructing their doom.

that's why we laugh at wizards and dwarfs. there's inherent folly built into their cravings. They build and search and hunt and experiment while what they make is actually the fertile soil for a dungeon to grow. Wizards and Dwarfs are the worms that turn mountains and caves and metal and gold into dungeons.

Wolfgang Grasse

monsters as symbiotic parasites
Monsters are like gut flora, or part of a root microbiome for dungeons. The Dungeon gives them a place to live away from the light and infest and be horrible, and in return they help it kill things and keep them from leaving.

Goblins move in. Kobolds infest. Hobgoblins form a stronghold. Ogres seek shelter. Oozes seep out. Every dungeon needs an ecosystem of lesser creatures to aid in digestions.

looting dungeons
It doesn't want to be looted, its loot is its stored nutrience, but to give the impression that it is lootable. It can't just snap its jaws on every person that walks in or people would stop going in. If you take magic stuff out of it some of the mystery that keeps it going is lost.

The Dungeon doesn't want you to leave, but as you do, loaded with sacks of cold, it smiles coldly to itself, for others will be coming soon.



A universe dies when it becomes one enormous dungeon, sprawling for infinite, before collapsing on itself back into singularity.