Ideas from Earthsea

Dungeon design is a tricky art for those who want to take it beyond the standard encounter key and graph paper used by most gamers. The dungeon crawl has gotten quite a reputation as the playground for hack n' slash gaming devoid of any character oriented gaming opportunities. In this article, I am going to use Ursula LeGuin's The Tombs of Atuan as an example of a dungeon setting that transcends the typical dungeon crawl. I'm also going to talk about using what I call "temp characters" to add a little variety to your game.

Dungeons for Role Players

The Tombs of Atuan is the second book in LeGuin's Earthsea series. The Earthsea books follow a young man named Ged as he rises from wizard's apprentice to archmage. In The Tombs of Atuan, Ged journeys to a distant land to recover an ancient artifact. The artifact is held within the treasure chambers of the Tombs of Atuan, a series of caverns beneath an ancient temple dedicated to the worship of deities known as the Nameless Ones.

Now, if I had offered to run an RPG based on that description, you'd probably have visions of the typical dungeon crawl running through your head. Heroes find dungeon, battle monsters, dodge traps, defeat the boss monster (to steal a video game term) and carry off the treasure. If a writer of any lesser talent than LeGuin had tackled the subject, then perhaps that's how The Tombs of Atuan would have played out. But in LeGuin's capable hands, the scenario follows a much different path.

First off, the Tombs of Atuan are not stuffed to the gills with monsters and guardians. Instead, the treasures of the tomb are hidden in a labyrinth rife with traps and accessible through only one door, which can be locked from the outside. Thus, any intrepid explorers must not only worry about getting lost in the maze, but should they alert anyone to their presence, the temple guardians need only lock and barricade a single door to trap them within.

So far, we've basically traded a combat oriented adventure for a problem solving oriented one. That's not that big of a leap. Replace orc with pit trap in any dungeon and you can do that, too. But here's where things get a little interesting: Suppose that in order to get through the labyrinth, the characters need the help of an antagonist. In The Tombs of Atuan, the story does not focus on Ged but on Tenar, the High Priestess of the temple of the Nameless Ones. Instead of Ged's adventures, the story concentrates on Tenar and her slowly dawning realization that she wants to know of life beyond the walls of her temple. She comes to discover that the she no longer wishes to serve the Nameless Ones. Ged's greatest challenge lies not in besting the tricks and traps of the labyrinth but in convincing Tenar that there's something more to life than the Tombs, and that with his help she can escape and begin life anew.

Dungeons should serve as a setting for your plot, not as a substitute for one. The typical graph paper and encounter key dungeon is scripted and linear by nature, making for a rather boring scripted and linear plot. Plots need to be flexible in order to succeed. They need to take unexpected turns to hold your players' interest. Too often, dungeons are anything but surprising. Room one is the guardroom, room two is the storage room, room three is the common room, room four is the leader's room, and so on. Design a dungeon just like you'd design a forest or a town. If your PC's entered a tavern at noon, would they find the same scene and people as when they entered at midnight? Hopefully, the answer is no. (If it is yes, you either have a very bizarre campaign or need to learn the basics of world creation.) Create a community or an ecosystem of some sort and draw up a logical and coherent history for it. Then, using your dungeon map, figure out how your orc tribe or what not would make use of their space. Don't simply assign orc X to room Y, but draw up a plan of defense. Assign each room a use, not occupants. Give the inhabitants personalities and motivations just like you'd do with a town mayor or the local master thief.

If your players prefer role playing over combat, they're not going to be too keen on the idea of frontally assaulting your dungeon. But now that you've created a system instead of an encounter key, you've hopefully generated some plot hooks, either accidentally or intentionally. Your players no longer have to approach the dungeon as conquerors but as ambassadors, explorers, or thieves. And when they get there, they'll have three dimensional characters to deal with.

The key to creating an interesting dungeon is to ditch your preconceptions of dungeons. Dungeons don't have to be linear and they don't have to exist in a bubble, exerting little influence over your world beyond their walls. In the early days of RPGs, this was the case. But don't let that stop you from using dungeons in your game today. With a little creativity and planning, a dungeon can provide a lot of role playing opportunities.

Send in the Temps!

Another unique feature of The Tombs of Atuan is that most of the story isn't about the series' main character. Ged might be the main character in the series as a whole, but in The Tombs of Atuan, he plays an important but secondary role to Tenar. There's a lot of potential here to use a similar set-up in an RPG. Most everyone has played a Great Escape-type scenario, where the characters are somehow imprisoned and have to come up with a plan of escape. Well, what if we turn that situation on its head? Instead of the characters coming up with a cunning plan, what if someone else came to rescue them? That might not sound like much fun, and if the GM just uses NPCs to do it, it isn't. But whoever said that the line between PC and NPC had to be so clearly defined?

Let's say that the characters are trapped by their enemies. Instead of leading them through an escape plot, why not hand them temporary characters, maybe spies who have infiltrated the enemy camp and must now free the PCs. This offers an interesting change of pace, perhaps allowing your players a chance to play characters much more powerful than ones they are used to handling or to try out different classes or skills. Many novels shift scenes and change their focus from one character to another. Why not try that in an RPG?

There's a few hurdles that you'll need to clear for this idea to work, and it isn't appropriate to every circumstance. The temporary characters' actions must have a direct influence on the main characters. If you hand out characters that have nothing to do with your players' regular ones, your game will lose a lot of its meaning. The players may not feel all that happy about losing their characters, if only temporarily, unless they have a clear sense that what they do with their new characters will have an obvious impact on the lives of their regular ones.

Keep your players in mind when designing characters. If you know that your players prefer brawny barbarians, don't stick them with bookworms and spell slingers unless you either get their OK first or don't plan on using the characters for more than one session. Part of the fun of using this idea is springing it on your players unexpectedly. But this could easily turn disastrous if you make characters that no one wants to play. Keep in mind your players' styles and personalities when creating their temp characters.

Be flexible. Give your players some room to modify the characters you make for them. You can't give them exactly what they want, so give yourself some breathing room to cater to their needs. The worst thing a GM can do is dictate to his players what they're going to play and how they're going to play it. Nothing turns players away faster.

Once a PC, always a PC. If your players show any interest in their temp characters, keep avenues open for them to reappear on a semi-regular basis. Hopefully, if everything goes well, they'll become attached to their temps and take some interest in their lives beyond the game in which they used them. Of course, any self-respecting GM will use that to get the PCs into all sorts of trouble. Maybe the temps have been kidnapped by a villain, or perhaps they've departed on some expedition and haven't been heard from in weeks. If you've done a good job with your temps, you've just created a whole new set of plot hooks.

Finally, don't take control of your players' regular characters any more than you have to. It might be funny to make Rob's smooth talking space pirate stammer and fall flat on his face, but Rob sure as heck isn't going to like it. Leave the regular PCs off stage for the duration of the temps' stay. If you find that the scenario you designed with temps in mind requires a lot of contact between the temps and the regular PCs, you should probably reconsider the use of temps.

Temporary characters can provide a nice change of pace and put a little spice into a campaign. They can also help prolong a campaign's life span by increasing the variety of challenges available to your players. Everyone is used to playing a single character, which gives you even more of a reason to break that tradition. Just as it is with life in general, variety is the spice of RPGs.