How far from town is the dungeon?

[Red Baron]

I see advantages to each option.

-In/under town provides interconnectivity and multiple entrances within town
-A few hours away means that the party can easily travel back and forth, but still offers the possibility of wilderness encounters and makes the dungeon feel remote.
-Several days travel offers players multiple routes to the dungeon, and choices like this are great fun for players. (Do we go by the hills or forest? Do we take a boat or walk?)

[talysman]

Why not all three?

• dungeons beneath the town have vermin and criminals, maybe a tiny amount of treasure for the latter, plus some hard-to-reach secret areas that allow access to expansions as needed
• dungeon a few hours out of town is the actual starter adventure and is low-level
• dungeon a few days away is either specific quest destination or entrance to megadungeon

-

[retrorob]

Depends on town and dungeon, but I recommend to have all three.

[doublejig2]

Me too! Maybe also add a rival adventuring party (or 2) into the expansive core area.

[Vile Traveller]

All three, but worthwhile
dungeons become less common the closer they get to town. The Underworld is everywhere, but there won't be much to see if it's easily accessed from a major city. That's why finding a new entrance is a big deal, and best kept secret for as long as possible.

[gemini476]

Another alternative is, of course, to have all three in the same dungeon. Perhaps the most obvious entrance is in the castle ruins an hour out from the city, but some miles away there's a mountain cave that links to the Halls of the Mountain King on the 7th level and the 3rd level has a connection to the sewers beneath the city. It's really easy to make a big dungeon by taking multiple smaller ones and connecting them together through tunnels, portals, rivers, whatever.


Each type of entrance offers its own advantages and disadvantages, of course.
The dungeon beneath the town, your Undermountains, is excellent for those who don't care for the wilderness game. It's very useful for the "you begin the session at the dungeon entrance" style of play.

The dungeon just outside the town is very similar, in that you can have wilderness exploration if you want but can also easily skip past it. In this case, the exterior of the dungeon is also easily integrated into it: Castle Greyhawk had a random hollow stump as a secret entrance if I remember correctly.

When the dungeon is far from civilization, wilderness adventure is almost inevitable. The path to and from the dungeon is almost certainly going to be important, if only as an excuse for why rest and recuperation are difficult.

It's not wrong to say that these increase in level of difficulty, but that's mostly just because of the danger of the D&D wilderness. If your dungeon is hours away but the path there is safe, it could suit 1st-level PCs as well as it could 14th.

[doublejig2]

Aug 24, 2019 11:02:27 GMT -6 gemini476 said:

Another alternative is, of course, to have all three in the same dungeon. Perhaps the most obvious entrance is in the castle ruins an hour out from the city, but some miles away there's a mountain cave that links to the Halls of the Mountain King on the 7th level and the 3rd level has a connection to the sewers beneath the city. It's really easy to make a big dungeon by taking multiple smaller ones and connecting them together through tunnels, portals, rivers, whatever.


Good advice...

[Zakharan]

My campaign uses a mixture of the three--several dungeons were found through wilderness exploration--but I generally assume the majority are within a day's travel to-and-fro to keep focus on the destination.

[delta]

I think this is a great question! I've wrestled with this a lot (including very recently).

I think the real crux of the problem is the starting dungeon for 1st-level PCs. On the one hand, having the dungeon (one both accessible & achievable by low-level folks) very close to a village raises questions about how it is that it hasn't been looted by other people already (link). On the other hand, having the dungeon far away forces those PCs to interact with the incredibly dangerous by-the-book OD&D wilderness encounter rules -- I've estimated those to be balanced for around 8 10th-level PCs on average (link).

I've hit on two solutions recently that I'm fairly happy with.

One is to interpret a few OD&D rules to say that wandering monsters are waived within the area of a barony around a settlement; e.g., see Vol-3 p. 15 on Castles (occupants encountered at 0-2 hexes distance), and p. 24 on Baronies (up to 20 miles distance kept clear of monsters). You can fill this in to say that strong patrols keep the area clear, and the castle owners can safely tiptoe through the tulips (hunt/fox/hawk, hunt for spell ingredients) as in Arthurian stories. Then a dungeon can be placed on the border of this area, not a place villagers usually want to go to, but the passage is free from wilderness monsters (like 40-400 goblins or 1d4 dragons or 1d6 balrogs).

A second strategy is to adjust things so that PCs can interface with the wilderness at the campaign inception, and this frees you to place the starting dungeon anywhere (and make use of both dungeon and wilderness features of the game). This would be a two-pronged adjustment to boost PCs and reduce wilderness risk. (a) Boost the PCs by starting at 3rd or 4th level, as both Gygax and Arneson did at different points. (b) Reduce wilderness danger by taking Arneson's advice in FFC that the full Vol-2 monster numbers are only for in-lair appearances, and actual wandering groups are only about one-third those sizes (10-60%). Putting that together, my analysis is that the outdoors wandering encounters are then on average balanced for 5 4th-level PCs, i.e., a starting party has some ability to confront them without immediately being murdered all the time.

Two of my recent blog articles have really been motivated by putting the latter pieces together to solve exactly this problem (one, two).

[tkdco2]

I'm toying with the idea of having the PCs use portals to teleport to locations near dungeons and other adventure locations. I haven't worked out the details, however.

[doublejig2]

Don't forget the trip back from the dungeon. Patrols might want a cut of the loot. Bandits certainly will.

[Scott Anderson]

Aug 28, 2019 13:24:13 GMT -6 tkdco2 said:

I'm toying with the idea of having the PCs use portals to teleport to locations near dungeons and other adventure locations. I haven't worked out the details, however.

The early MMO Aherons Call used this mechanic to good effect.

[Zenopus]

Aug 28, 2019 14:17:34 GMT -6 doublejig2 said:

Don't forget the trip back from the dungeon. Patrols might want a cut of the loot. Bandits certainly will.

...or a rival adventuring party!

[Zulgyan]

Some ideas:

The dungeon very far away is the classic "module".

The dungeon close to town is the classic campaign dungeon.

The city-dungeon is the most complex scenario a DM can ever create and run.

[Desparil]

Aug 27, 2019 20:32:58 GMT -6 delta said:

I think this is a great question! I've wrestled with this a lot (including very recently).

I think the real crux of the problem is the starting dungeon for 1st-level PCs. On the one hand, having the dungeon (one both accessible & achievable by low-level folks) very close to a village raises questions about how it is that it hasn't been looted by other people already (link). On the other hand, having the dungeon far away forces those PCs to interact with the incredibly dangerous by-the-book OD&D wilderness encounter rules -- I've estimated those to be balanced for around 8 10th-level PCs on average (link).

I've hit on two solutions recently that I'm fairly happy with.

One is to interpret a few OD&D rules to say that wandering monsters are waived within the area of a barony around a settlement; e.g., see Vol-3 p. 15 on Castles (occupants encountered at 0-2 hexes distance), and p. 24 on Baronies (up to 20 miles distance kept clear of monsters). You can fill this in to say that strong patrols keep the area clear, and the castle owners can safely traipse through tulips (hunt/fox/hawk, hunt for spell ingredients) as in Arthurian stories. Then a dungeon can be placed on the border of this area, not a place villagers usually want to go to, but the passage is free from wilderness monsters (like 40-400 goblins or 1d4 dragons or 1d6 balrogs).

A second strategy is to adjust things so that PCs can interface with the wilderness at the campaign inception, and this frees you to place the starting dungeon anywhere (and make use of both dungeon and wilderness features of the game). This would be a two-pronged adjustment to boost PCs and reduce wilderness risk. (a) Boost the PCs by starting at 3rd or 4th level, as both Gygax and Arneson did at different points. (b) Reduce wilderness danger by taking Arneson's advice in FFC that the full Vol-2 monster numbers are only for in-lair appearances, and actual wandering groups are only about one-third those sizes (10-60%). Putting that together, my analysis is that the outdoors wandering encounters are then on average balanced for 5 4th-level PCs, i.e., a starting party has some ability to confront them with immediately being murdered all the time.

Two of my recent blog articles have really been motivated by putting the latter pieces together to solve exactly this problem (one, two).

I think the various printed modules suggest that there's a sliding scale for wilderness encounters that's never really discussed in any of the rulebooks. While they all postdate U&WA, I think they can help clue us in to what Gygax and others thought was reasonable.

If you look at Keep on the Borderlands (Gygax), the friendly keep is described as "one of civilization’s strongholds between good lands and bad" - not a totally safe area, but not overwhelmingly dangerous, either. The Caves of Chaos are only two and a half miles away from the keep as the crow flies, about three if you follow the road as far as possible. The Wandering Monster tables are just an abridged version of the ones in the Basic Set, and if we're being honest the variety of possible encounters make a lot more sense outdoors than inside the dungeon proper. The dungeon itself is a series of humanoid lairs, each on the small end of what it would be possible to roll up, and explicitly without any kind of restocking or reinforcement unless the adventurers retreat for weeks at a time.

Secret of the Slavers' Stockade (Johnson & Moldvay) has a more extensive wilderness trek included. This one is for characters of 4th to 7th level, and states that the hill fort is 120 miles away from the city of Highport. No hex map is provided because the party has a map leading them to their objective, and in the tournament version the overland journey is skipped entirely. Assuming you do play through the trip there during campaign play, though, there is a printed Wilderness Encounter Table. The most numerous encounter possible is 5-30 goblins, and the most dangerous would be 1-3 wights, griffons, ogre-magi, or hill giants. The chance of an encounter is lower in the plains near Highport than it is in the hills that make up the majority of the distance, but technically it's possible to have these encounters even on your very first day outside of the city.

The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (Gygax) are located in a mountainous region that is disputed by Ket, Perrenland, Iuz, and Bissel, but cannot be decisively claimed by any of them. It is surrounded on all sides by civilization and there is a gnome stronghold nearby, but is nevertheless not a part of anything one could call civilized lands. It is the former realm of an evil sorceress and has a reputation for danger, for those seeking Iggwilv's treasure rarely return and those who do have thus far come up empty-handed. It's described as been a week's journey from central Bissel, and the caverns are another 45 to 50 miles away from the edge of the map that you start on. Encounter frequency is a bit strange, since rolls only occur if the party wanders off the trails, whereas on the trails there are specific hexes that call for rolls (or DM selections) on the Wilderness Encounter Table. In any case, every encounter falls within the lower half of the dice ranges given in the Monster Manual, and many within the lowest quartile; probably the most dangerous group is the 80 or so hobgoblins (assuming the party isn't foolish enough to pick a fight with the dwarfs or elves), but note that even this is in the lower half of the 20-200 numeric range suggested by the MM.

I find the last example especially noteworthy since it's for quite a high level, 6th to 10th. Like A2, it also mentions that the wilderness portion was not part of the original tournament, and gives the roster of the original tournament characters.

Half-elven fighter/magic-user/thief 4/4/5
Elven fighter/magic-user 4/9
Halfing thief 9
Human fighter 8
Human cleric 7
Dwarf fighter 6

However, it even goes a step further and suggests that adding on the wilderness section calls for a slightly stronger party, suggesting that either the last four characters listed above should each be one level higher, or else two additional characters of 5th or 6th level should be added to the party. It also makes particular mention of the possibility of preparing smaller, portable spell books and packets of components in order to allow for re-memorizing used-up spells while on the road.

So my interpretation would be that the full numbers of humanoids are only really appropriate in a "Lands of Chaos" type area - Mordor, Pict lands, the Great Steppe in Nehwon, or the like.