Editing Dungeon (section)

==How to Dungeon==
If you play in a group of fairly stab-happy people who care only for the three moments of "bust in door", "kill shit" and "loot the bodies", how a dungeon looks may not be so important, but to the rest, a dungeon has to make sense. Since we don't really have large caverns and ruined castles filled with monsters in the real world, it can seem strange and unrealistic to delve into one in a tabletop game. There's a few things one can do to make them feel more fit for the setting:

First, make sure the dungeon's general layout serves or served a purpose. Any old maze will feel weird if we're told the dungeon is an old, decrepit fortress - a fortress is laid out in certain ways that makes them easy to defend, so reflect that. If you wanna mix things up feel free to add obstacles, cave-ins and broken walls but for Pelor's sake, don't just map a bunch of random rooms and paths. Dungeon delving is also story-telling through showing. At best, the players can even make logical assumptions based on your design - If it's a fortress dungeon, there's got to be a armory filled with weapons somewhere, right? Players love to be rewarded for making good leaps of logics, so make sure they can do so comfortably through your dungeon design.

Second, there are monsters in dungeons, but not random ones. Whatever critters you wanna fill your death-maze with, make sure to have some background for them. Is that [[Owlbear]] the players just encountered looking for food in the cavern, or does it live there? What about the [[goblin]] tribe back some rooms; where they hiding from the Owlbear - and so on and so forth. Again, dungeons tell stories. What makes that particular dungeon a great place to hide out in for the monsters? You can even indicate this to the players by seeding plot hooks about it - the local town ousted a cult, who fled eastward to the old, abandoned manor on the hill, or maybe tracks of boots are spotted going back to the glacier where the next dungeon hides? There's a bunch of options.

Same with traps and puzzles - don't add a poison spike trap in a dank swamp cavern if there's no one in the cavern that could or would make one. If your players delve into a lost bandit hideout, traps are unlikely, but a kobold nest will be rife with traps of the nastiest kind. Traps doesn't have to be created either - old, unstable floors that break underfoot or bubbling pools of acid can serve as just as much a challenge than any trap you found in your Dungeon Master's Guide. Remember Moria of LoTR fame; it was treacherous mostly because it was falling apart and because any noise would attract goblins in droves of thousands.

So, basically always remember the ''How'' and the ''Why'' of your dungeon - How was it created and Why is created that way? How did your monsters find their way into the dungeon, and why?