why the dungeon?

[codeman123]

so i was thinking today? why was the "dungeon" the main staple for d&d games? what really inspired the bringing about of the giant magical underworld?

[ffilz]

My thought, based on what has been shared about the Blackmoor campaign is that the dungeon scenario was not suitable for armies. Thus began more focus on the individuals rather than armies (with individual leaders and heroes). A curious side thought, when did video games start having "levels"? Because another thing that strikes me about the way dungeons are explained in D&D is that they fit well with the leveling up nature of the game (so more experienced characters go to deeper levels of the dungeon for greater challenge).

The dungeon also allows for some constraints on exploration while still allowing lots of player freedom. Also, tricks, traps, and puzzles tend to work better in dungeon scenarios than wilderness scenarios.

Frank

[Finarvyn]

Some of the classic pulp stories take place in "dungeons" -- John Carter in the pits below a city or Conan wandering through narrow passages deep underground. There is also a sense of being trapped, kind of like in horror movies, where options and resources are limited.

[ewilen]

home.tampabay.rr.com/gsvenson/FirstDungeonAdv.html is an account of the first dungeon adventure.

Elsewhere you can find Dave Arneson saying that the dungeon gave the GM a way to prepare an environment without having to give up complete control. "A dungeon is nice and self-contained. Players can't go romping over the countryside, and you can control the situation." (From the recent Wired article on Gygax.)

[tavis]

Jul 14, 2008 17:42:34 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Some of the classic pulp stories take place in "dungeons"

Looking just at pre-1974 fantasy / sword & sorcery fiction I find that much less true than I'd expect. Maybe it's just because the examples are so obvious - e.g. the Mines of Moria - that I tend to overlook them, or maybe because I've not been taking a broad-enough sample of pulp. Still, I think it's undeniable that sword & sorcery heroes prior to D&D did much less adventuring underground than in wildernesses, lost cities, etc.

Of all of the books specifically listed as inspirational reading in the AD&D DMG, the one that has the strongest "dungeon" flavor to me is Margaret St. Clair's _Sign of the Labrys_, a truly strange Wiccan science fiction novel set almost entirely underground. From this site:

Sign of the Labrys begins, "There is a fungus that grows on the walls that they eat. It is a violet color, a dark reddish violet, and tastes fresh and sweet. People go into the clefts to pick it."

By the second paragraph, the reader is into a familiar scenario of Cold War-era science fiction: a post-catastrophe world where huge underground shelters were constructed and "never actually occupied, and there had been no need for peace to be made for them to be abandoned entirely. People live in them now because they are quiet, even luxurious."

Sam Sewell, the narrator, lives in "the tier called E3" under an unnamed city in the former United States...

_Sign of the Labrys_ is unique in my experience of the DMG reading list in presenting many of the essential concerns of dungeoneering - going from sub-level to sub-level, finding ways to bypass strange traps (even a teleporter), encountering and mastering magical-seeming powers, and eating fungi. There's an inordinate amount of fungus in this book, which seems to me reflected in D&D's love of shrooms and oozes.

Like the quote above says, there's plenty of other post-apocalyptic SF set in multi-level underground complexes. So I feel like if the dungeon had a literary inspiration (rather than just emerging from its excellent properties as an adventuring locale), it was likely inspired by the SF Arneson and Gygax were reading - which was inspired in turn by the Cold War society that was in fact actively building enormous underground bunkers.