More on making dungeons interesting...

Some time ago, an Australian gaming blogger decided to run his party through the iconic D&D adventure, Keep on the Borderlands. This had been on his bucket list for a long time. [thread]

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After several brutal sessions, his group abandoned the dungeon. One of the reasons was boredom. They found the dungeon dull. Each cave had a different species, but they followed the same pattern of a chief, lieutenants, guards, commoners.

He saw no potential for roleplay in the dungeon, saying, "the caves themselves play more like a boardgame, with the only viable tactic being to ‘kick-in-the-door'."

I'm sympathetic to his reasoning, but it also shows another area where the modern game plays pretty differently to the old days.

There is a secret to making the Caves of Chaos come alive, and it can be summed up by the word "Factions".

Old school playing does not see a dungeon as a series of balanced combat encounters to be overcome. Rather, the various inhabitants are meant to exist in a relational mosaic, and the party is expected to participate in that dynamic.

Keep on the Borderlands does not give you a lot of prompting in this area, I admit. But it does mention the rivalry between the varying monster species, which is something the party can leverage.

An essential tool for making this work is found in the rulebook. It looks quite naive these days, but the old adventures don't work very well without it (or an approximation of it).

It is called the Monster Reaction Table:

Now, the adventure text sometimes overruled this sort of thing, but in theory it was always possible to have a range of relationships with the monster.

So the goblins in Cave D might attack you, or they might smile and say, "We are pleased you are here! We need your help!" And then perhaps you forge an alliance with the goblins in Cave D to take down the hobgoblins in Cave F.

Now, I have to be honest and admit that when I first played this adventure as a 12yo, we certainly kicked down a lot of doors. And it was great fun! But even back then we occasionally had different interactions with monsters, especially when we ran into something too tough

By the time you get to B4, they have laid the factions out on a platter for you. There are 3 rival groups in the temple and it almost becomes the default to align yourself with one of the groups. When I ran my young sons through it years ago, they also naturally made alliances

There are limits on this. You need a reasonably big dungeon for a start - you can't really have competing factions in a 5-10 room dungeon. And the old school dungeons didn't always do it well. A lot of this stuff seems to have been assumed rather than spelt out.

I spoke before about adding magic and wonder into your dungeons. Factions are another tool you can use to make large dungeon crawls interesting.

Finis

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Appendix: I speculate that one reason Sunless Citadel 3e was more highly regarded than Forge of Fury 3e is that Sunless Citadel really leaned into factional play, whereas Forge of Fury was mostly "kill the monsters".