Gygax's Dungeon Design

Theory of Games said:

Mz. Nasty!

Back to the topic, I always saw the dungeons a lot like how Pac-Man is played: get as much of the goodies as possible while avoiding threats as much as possible. Also when you compare something like Gary's Caves of Chaos to WotC's Wave Echo Cave (LMoP), there's clear differences. Mainly, newer dungeon designs seems more "compacted" or "congested" due to lacking the long corridors older dungeons had. That change makes avoiding unwanted encounters more difficult for PC parties. But, that's what WotC seems to want: more combat.

I like Gygax's use of diagonal passageways, empty spaces and transporters. I used a lot of trap doors and magical elevators myself, but I'm impatient. Gary's use of "Room-Labyrinths" and how he designed them is iconic, hence the term "Gygaxian Dungeon Design". Also, Gygax's 'Dungeon Geomorphs' were pretty cool for the time.

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Gus L said:

Now as to Gygax's dungeons.... His published work does not include especially large or complex maps, and his focus is not navigation. His original and home games may have used megadungeons, but we don't have any decent examples we can really ascribe to him. However, they are larger then many contemporary dungeons ... but of course serve an entirely different play style. The empty space found in older dungeons doesn't really work with modern systems (both Contemporary Traditional and many Post OSR ultralights) as there's no cost to exploration, so all they accomplish is wasting everyone's time. Nor are these sort of dungeons especially unique to Gygax - the style is common to most early dungeon design.

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Some folks got to play in his Castle Greyhawk at conventions in the 2000s, and there are a fairly well known photo or two of level one and the (minimal) key for it. It is more of a room labyrinth. And as ToM alludes, the published dungeon geomorphs set 1 (Basic Dungeons, 1976) did give us a sample of Gygax's denser, more mazelike mapping style. Which when paired with the Monster & Treasure assortments does seem to add up to a similar design as we see on those photos of level 1 of Castle Greyhawk. But it's hard to draw many firm conclusions based on that relatively minimal data. Which is why so many folks in the OSR have been impatient to see more of CG.

The recent release of Greg Svenson's Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg gives us a 10 level megadungeon designed by one of Dave Arneson's original players in 1973, prior to the actual published release of D&D. Here we can see a lot of concepts which are very true to OD&D and the original random dungeon generator tables from issue 1 (Spring '75) of The Strategic Review (reproduced and expanded in the 1979 DMG). Tons of diagonal passages for example, and many vertical level connections, which are somewhat in contrast to L1 of Castle Greyhawk's room maze and the low level dungeon geomorphs. Navigation is definitely a primary challenge here, as Svenny and Mike Mornard (another of Dave's players) often described when they were participating in OD&D and Blackmoor discussions in recent years.

That being said, while there are a few later exceptions like Gus noted in his article (S3 Expedition to the Barrier peaks, S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, though the latter is an expansion of a 1976 tournament module), already in the 1970s and early 80s we saw a fairly rapid shift from "emptier" dungeon design like we saw recommended in the 1974 original set ("As a general rule there will be far more uninhabited space on a level than there will be space occupied by monsters, human or otherwise.", The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, p6), with its instructions to place a few important treasures and monsters on each level, then to randomly fill the remainder, 1/3 of the remaining areas having monsters, half of those with treasure, and 1/6 of non-monster rooms having hidden treasure. As many of us have discussed in OSR circles, this emptier style does create more opportunities for PCs to evade and circumnavigate tough monsters and try other areas. Or use empty rooms to try to set ambushes. The random dungeon generator article from TSR #1 has 60-65% of rooms plain empty, as opposed to the "far more"

Mike Carr's B1 In Search of the Unknown famously is a somewhat sprawling labyrinth of a map with mapping challenges included, like a teleporter. But Gary's replacement for it, B2 The Keep on the Borderlands makes much tighter monster lairs with very simple layout. It seems to me that even by the time B2 came out in 1979 there was already some shift in emphasis away from more mazelike, emptier, exploration-focused megadungeons and toward more compact, action-focused lairs. And that's not just a change from Gary to modern designs, that's a change from Dave's designs and what Gary originally advocated. Gary himself changing focus.

In 1981 B/X we see Tom Moldvay's stocking guidelines shift correspondingly to a somewhat higher density design. First place specials, then random content 1/3 monsters, 1/6 traps, 1/6 tricks, and only 1/3 empty. Not actually that far from the instructions in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, but definitely denser.

Mannahnin said:

Some folks got to play in his Castle Greyhawk at conventions in the 2000s, and there are a fairly well known photo or two of level one and the (minimal) key for it. It is more of a room labyrinth. [...] Which is why so many folks in the OSR have been impatient to see more of CG. [...] Navigation is definitely a primary challenge here, as Svenny and Mike Mornard (another of Dave's players) often described when they were participating in OD&D and Blackmoor discussions in recent years.

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My own reading of the impact of this style is that A) it represents a break with and adaption of the style of dungeon design suggested in the LBBs. B) The OSR, as it often did, interpreted, perhaps over interpreted, these sparse clues and the claims, memories, fabrications, and desires that both its members and original sources on the first few years of play put forth. However they did it in a very interesting way that I suspect varies a fair bit with the actual first campaigns and their dungeons. I call this OSR interpretation the "Mythic Underworld", and because I can't actually ascribe it to Gygax, Gold, or Arneson - really none of the people who were producing stuff in the 1970's, I tend to see it as a product of the OSR. Starting with Philotomy's musing on through the various OSR Megadungeons (even my beloved fave ASE, but not Arden Vul perhaps - that's a magnificently and disfunctionally huge Jaquaysian Ruin for me) and ultimately coming to rest in the "Depthcrawl" which randomizes dungeon creation during play.

ADDED: Now what might Greyhawk and Blackmoor castles have actually played like? I don't really know, but the impression I get, mostly from reading "First Fantasy Campaign", play reports in "Alarums & Excursion", and "Temple of the Frog" is that they had a lot more larger scale/skirmish style combat involved. Yes there was sneaking and exploration of dungeon corridors and random encounters with Sir Fang ... but the antagonists were often big warbands of humanoids, and the players were expected to combat them with alliances, fireball spam, or big bands of their own mercenaries and retainers. This may just be my own impression, and I can't really say it's true - which goes back to the first point.

Mannahnin said:

That being said, while there are a few later exceptions like Gus noted in his article (S3 Expedition to the Barrier peaks, S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, though the latter is an expansion of a 1976 tournament module), already in the 1970s and early 80s we saw a fairly rapid shift from "emptier" dungeon design like we saw recommended in the 1974 original set [...] As many of us have discussed in OSR circles, this emptier style does create more opportunities for PCs to evade and circumnavigate tough monsters and try other areas. Or use empty rooms to try to set ambushes. The random dungeon generator article from TSR #1 has 60-65% of rooms plain empty, as opposed to the "far more"

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I tend to think of Barrier Peaks as the work of someone else, and I was recently informed that Lost Caverns was also heavily influenced by another designer. This is something that makes talking about Gygax hard. Now Barrier Peaks is a big dungeon, and messily so, but Lost Caverns, while it has plenty of passageways, doesn't have that many keys in the passage themselves - 44 or something like that 42? It's also a higher level adventure so those distances matter less with continual light, magic glowing weapons and create food and water largely eliding the supply issues that are part of making long passages a threat. Lost Caverns somewhat uniquely for Gygax (see the claim - and one I'm not sure to what degree I believe - that it was ghostwritten by Kuntz, much like Barrier Peaks.) has no wandering monsters in the published version. Essentially the tunnels exist as annoyance only - the party can stroll about as much as they want, much like a 5E adventure ... this is a fundamental problem with mid/high level dungeon crawling where the supply issue is covered by character tools and combat tends to be a conflict of spells, saving throws and magic items - meaning wanderers are either so tough they push the party out of the dungeon or so weak they aren't even a speedbump.
Lost Caverns rather deserves it's own discussion, but it strikes me as outside the Gygax "raid adventure" canon to a degree.

Mannahnin said:

Mike Carr's B1 In Search of the Unknown famously is a somewhat sprawling labyrinth of a map with mapping challenges included, like a teleporter.

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B1 - also an interesting choice - both the map and teaching aspect seem to point to that pre-TSR/OD&D style design, at the time of publication almost a throwback to the past even...

Mannahnin said:

But Gary's replacement for it, B2 The Keep on the Borderlands makes much tighter monster lairs with very simple layout. It seems to me that even by the time B2 came out in 1979 there was already some shift in emphasis away from more mazelike, emptier, exploration-focused megadungeons and toward more compact, action-focused lairs. And that's not just a change from Gary to modern designs, that's a change from Dave's designs and what Gary originally advocated. Gary himself changing focus.

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Absolutely agreed - part of the reason I wrote the blog post was to look at the TSR era of design and point out how it worked really well for a specific scenario - one I enjoyed playing in the 80's, but one that I don't generally see a lot of OSR or POSR attention going towards. I do think that by real contemporary standards - either the scene based 5E dungeon or the POSR/ultralight densely interactive 5-10 room one B2 is a big dungeon, even if it's not a big adventure. It's far less dense then most modern stuff - regardless of play style.

Thanks for the post Mannahnin - this is the kind of discussion of old games I miss.

Mythic underworld concepts were definitely in the air in the mid to late 1970s, but I will be darned if I can think of specific sources now. As you say, @Gus L , it wasn’t Gaga’s or Arneson…maybe someone like Ed Simbalist? Anyone got a 1st or 2nd edition Chivalry & Sorcery to check? Definitely M.A.R. Barker, though o don’t recall if he used the term “mythic” in particular; certainly the underworlds beneath Tekumelani cities were extraordinary.

A related conversation was going on in fantasy at the same time, thanks to folks like Moorcock, Leiber, Vance, Bryant, and Harrison (M. John, not Harry) poking at when and how to get down with their own bad mythologizing selves. Not to mention the Silmarillion coming out and making eyes at us all.

Autumnal said:

Mythic underworld concepts were definitely in the air in the mid to late 1970s, but I will be darned if I can think of specific sources now. [...] Definitely M.A.R. Barker, though o don’t recall if he used the term “mythic” in particular; certainly the underworlds beneath Tekumelani cities were extraordinary.

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What I'd note here is that the "Mythic Underworld" is more then just a big, singular dungeon (as suggested in OD&D and adopted by most early cultures of play) -- it's a specific sensibility about dungeon design. Philotomy, when he wrote about it is often seen as reaching back to the early hobby (a claim made by lots of OSR stuff), and he did, but his interpretation is I think new.

The Mythic Underworld is the conception of the dungeon as a potentially endless space, largely generated quickly and sparsely, without little concern for ecology or coherency - instead it's "mythic", a space where things don't make sense because they are beyond mortal ken, the project of a hostile god, a living dungeon that hates surface life, or whatever. Mechanically it's a design technique and in game it's a justification for a dungeon that doesn't have to make any sense. It's not mythic in the sense that its tied to a mythological construct or secret history - because that's hard to do in a mostly procedurally generated space without a lot of work (See Miranda Elkin's Nightwick Abbey - one of the real new design idea of the G+ era of the OSR).

I see Barker (and really most early designers - Gygax and even Arneson) as going very much the other direction, wanting their dungeons to increasingly make sense. Gygaxian Naturalism, faction conflict, Jaquays secrets and history. My guess is that Barker is also in this group, though I am unfamiliar with the specifics of his dungeons. It all of it moves away from the Mythic Underworld as Philotomy describes it.

At least that's my impression - if there were folks in the 1970's intentionally building that sort of megadungeon on the quick I'd love to see what they came up with?

Autumnal said:

A related conversation was going on in fantasy at the same time, thanks to folks like Moorcock, Leiber, Vance, Bryant, and Harrison (M. John, not Harry) poking at when and how to get down with their own bad mythologizing selves. Not to mention the Silmarillion coming out and making eyes at us all.

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Yeah there is certainly a break in fantasy around Tolkien with more complex and coherent fantasy worlds. Again I think this moves away from the "Mythic Underworld" as a dungeon design concept, but that's just my immediate impression?

I think the Mythic Underworld of modern rpg talk seizes on a subset of stuff being talked about in the ‘70s as an interconnected whole. “Beyond our ken” is a good hook to hang things on, but this often involved depths of time in which makers and purposes were lost and would never be recovered in more than the merest scraps. In Tekumelani underworlds you have legacies going back hundred of thousands of years, to planetary conditions and societies genuinely unimaginable to people of present-day Tsolyanu. Likewise with Jack Vance’s Dyimg Earrh and, a few years after this particular moment, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. And get this, the opening of the first Elric story:

FOR TEN THOUSAND years did the Bright Empire of Melniboné flourish—ruling the world. Ten thousand years before history was recorded—or ten thousand years after history had ceased to be chronicled. For that span of time, reckon it how you will, the Bright Empire had thrived. Be hopeful, if you like, and think of the dreadful past the Earth has known, or brood upon the future. But if you would believe the unholy truth—then Time is an agony of Now, and so it will always be.

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This too is mythical even if it’s not Myrhical by someone’s definition. Likewise Roger Zelazny’s mid-1960s stories “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” and “The Doors of His Face, The Lanp of His Mouth”, set in pre-Mariner/Pioneer versions of Mars and Venus, weaving together pulp traditions, then-modern rigorous technical details, and lush evocative New Wave prose. It’s overly (and wildly admired) mythopoesis.

That’s what we were swimming in.

ETA: the ‘70s talk was very much about testing possibilities: what could making things mythic mean in practice? What kinds of myths? In conception (smaller-scale versions of the transformation James Joyce worked in Ulysses), in environs, in modes of presentation, in events? Now we have the befit of another half century’s experience and can say “this is what making it mythic means”, if we’re so inclined.

Autumnal said:

I think the Mythic Underworld of modern rpg talk seizes on a subset of stuff being talked about in the ‘70s as an interconnected whole. “Beyond our ken” is a good hook to hang things on...

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Agree completely with the idea that conceptually a good chunk of 70's/80's RPG design, including Tekumel were interesting in setting that had "mythic" undertones.

The distinction I'm aiming at is one of formal dungeon design - as in the form of the dungeons these folks were designing. The "Mythic Underworld" was an early OSR proposal by Philotomy/Jason Cone about the nature of dungeon design in OD&D. What he suggests is two part: A) The mechanics of the design, the form and B) An in world justification.

The form is a that of a sprawling "underworld" style mega-dungeon, with minimalist keying. It is quickly produced through using random tables.

The justification is that the underworld is "mythic" and weird, a break with the rational overworld and inherently hostile to the players.

These two ideas work together well, as the scale allowed by A reinforces the concept of B, while the concept of B covers up for the lack of coherence in A.

Autumnal said:

That’s what we were swimming in.

ETA: the ‘70s talk was very much about testing possibilities: what could making things mythic mean in practice? What kinds of myths? In conception (smaller-scale versions of the transformation James Joyce worked in Ulysses), in environs, in modes of presentation, in events? Now we have the befit of another half century’s experience and can say “this is what making it mythic means”, if we’re so inclined.

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I don't disagree that this was the goal of many early designers, especially the West Coast style stuff, but ultimately TSR and Lake Geneva as well. They didn't seek to do it using the techniques I just described though. Instead they increasingly created a dungeon design form that had maximalist keys and relied on player engagement with those fictions. The "Mythic Underworld" of the OSR is a rather closer to a board game or hack n' slash computer game, it's a way to get maximum dungeon size efficiently and relies on emergent narrative rather then the built up layers of fictional history and secrets that TSR and West Coast adventure design start moving towards.

I hope the distinction is clear, because obviously the term mythic can have a few meanings. I'm trying to use it to describe a design style that I am pretty sure is invented in the late 2000's and ultimately produces things like Stone Hell. The closest original sources for this type of design would be something like Palace of the Vampire Queen.

Here's a link to Philotomy/Cone's Musings if you are unfamiliar.

Gus L said:

Agree completely with the idea that conceptually a good chunk of 70's/80's RPG design, including Tekumel were interesting in setting that had "mythic" undertones.

The distinction I'm aiming at is one of formal dungeon design - as in the form of the dungeons these folks were designing. The "Mythic Underworld" was an early OSR proposal by Philotomy/Jason Cone about the nature of dungeon design in OD&D. What he suggests is two part: A) The mechanics of the design, the form and B) An in world justification.

The form is a that of a sprawling "underworld" style mega-dungeon, with minimalist keying. It is quickly produced through using random tables.

The justification is that the underworld is "mythic" and weird, a break with the rational overworld and inherently hostile to the players.

These two ideas work together well, as the scale allowed by A reinforces the concept of B, while the concept of B covers up for the lack of coherence in A.

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It's more than just that, though. It's also a way of rationalizing and justifying certain rules idiosyncrasies of OD&D.

Like the fact that dungeon doors are stuck by default, but ONLY for PCs. Monsters/inhabitants of the dungeon move through them freely and with ease. And that doors slip free and close on their own, even when spiked open, 1/3rd of the time. (Book III, page 9).

Or the fact that all monsters in the dungeon can see in the dark, but ONLY as long as they are not serving a PC. (same page).

My observations match yours, that Gygax and pretty much all the other designers chose to move increasingly away from these kinds of rules and towards making their dungeons more naturalistic. As exemplified by the "Let There Be a Method to Your Madness" article on dungeon design by Richard Gilbert in Dragon #10 (Oct '77), and similar comments by Gary on dungeon design in the AD&D DMG two years later. Gygax increasingly embraced a design philosophy that rules should be symmetrical, as in his comments about critical hits on DMG 61. But the rules for doors being stuck for PCs but not a problem for the dungeon's inhabitants did hold on into AD&D, see DMG 97.

This is a very fascinating discussion and gave me a lot to think of. I will read the original blog post that started this topic (GYGAX'S FORTRESS).

I have been preparing to run The Lost Dungeon of Tonisborg and I do see a lot of features as mentioned. I'll add that not only angled corridors but also a three-dimensional aspect of stairs connecting different levels. I have not yet decided how I will run this aspect - my players usually are aloof of such details, more character focused and I wish to introduce these concepts for them.