As we discussed in our first post on megadungeon influences, we want to place a heavy emphasis on complicating exploration. Doors are one of the best places to trigger complications. They provide a level of consistent friction; remind PCs of the danger as they move further from the safe center; and ensure that time and choices matter. One adventurer speaking to another might describe their delve not by how many feet they moved away from safety, but by how many doors they traversed (“I was 13 doors deep, I thought I would never make it back”).
For now, we’ll set aside exploration complications actively created by factions, NPCs, and monsters. We’ll return to those later, but we want to first focus on friction that is more endemic to the dungeon itself, as a place.
We can escalate exploration complications gradually. This is not an exhaustive list, and we will add to it as we go, but it is enough to get us started.
Stuck Doors
Using old-school logic, and assuming that doors are always potentially difficult to open (even if unlocked), and always in danger of shutting behind the PCs (even absent antagonist action) really changes the way they navigate the space. Many players (especially modern-style players, but even many old-school players) will start to move very confidently once they’ve decided that speed, stealth, or magic has permitted them to do this without consequence. Stuck doors that follow this logic call that confidence into doubt.
Stuck doors are the definition of a soft barrier. Players can always attempt to force them, and they can typically be destroyed as a last resort. But this is going to be noisy and time-consuming. So a stuck door is typically a choice: risk noise (and resulting random encounter/events rolls)? Or explore in a different direction and hope to find another way?
We’ll want to ensure that the earliest parts of our dungeon present a lot of soft barriers like stuck doors near Jaquays loops, so that the players engage with this kind of choice early and often.
Secret doors. Secret doors are also a type of soft barrier. Whether adjudicated purely through investigating the fiction, or through the x-in-6 odds of some old-school games, or by ability checks in modern games... there is very little stopping PCs from finding secret doors early.
As with stuck doors, secret doors only make sense in tension with time. Absent time pressure, PCs can brute force the search for secret doors. But in tension with time, the PCs will have to choose where to search, and in a well-designed dungeon, that incentivizes engaging with the factions and history of the dungeon, and deducing the nature of the space.
Deployed intelligently, secret doors (like stuck doors adjacent to Jaquays loops) multiply the choices for exploration. They provide shortcuts to new, dangerous areas, and new routes to loop back to earlier areas. They are a risk, and an opportunity.
Thracia has important secret doors on the first and second dungeon levels. Whether or not the PCs find these doors can radically change their experience of the dungeon. Arden Vul supercharges this idea; listening to the 3d6 DtL actual play, and reading different play reports, it is clear that discovering (or failing to discover) certain secret doors at certain times creates a completely different dungeon feel. Any megadungeon can feature an arbitrarily large number of rooms, even in excess of Arden Vul’s massive total. But a megadungeon will feel huge not because of some arbitrarily high page count or an abstracted decision to include all the monsters, but instead through the depth of the verisimilitude created by the factions, history, and exploratory friction of the space.
Even moreso than stuck doors, we’ll want to advertise secret doors early. Old-school players may intuitively know to look out for them, but players new to megadungeon play may not realize this is something they should be looking out for. Fortunately, there are easy ways to telegraph this in the first series of spaces the PCs explore.
So early on, the party should find some or all of the following:
- “The back side” of a secret door that is only hidden on its “front”
- A damaged or ajar secret door
- Tracks or other disturbances that provide a strong clue to a secret door
- An antagonist who “disappears” after fleeing into a space without any other obvious exits (this is a classic trope from fiction that is fine to deploy in games as well, as long as it happens organically, and isn’t a forced “despite your best efforts, the villain escapes!” cliche)
Locked Doors
A locked door is a hard barrier at the beginning of an adventure that gradually becomes softer as the PCs become more powerful or acquire more tools (literally or figuratively). It is interesting that for a party with a skilled thief, stuck doors will eventually become more of a barrier than locked doors, flipping the two in the hierarchy of barriers.
Locked doors should be liberally spread around the dungeon, but not all locked doors are created equal. We can use the following kind of classifications as a starting point and expand from there. As with landmark-hidden-secret and our three tiers of maps, we can use the rule of three here to make this easy to remember and systematically resonant.
Common lock. A common key could open each door with a common lock in the local dungeon area. Keys of this type may be found in all kinds of places. Easy to pick.
Uncommon lock. A unique key opens only this door, and there are probably three or fewer copies of that key. Typically they’re in the possession of a unique monster or named faction member, or stored in a secure location. Moderately difficult to pick.
Rare lock. A unique key opens only this door, and there is only one copy. Typically in the possession of a major monster or a faction leader. Highly difficult to pick.
Of course, not all of our doors need to be generic dungeon “doors.” We can think of doors as all soft and hard barriers in the dungeon. I really like this kind of post for diversifying locked doors. The virtue of a d100 table is that after the writer burns through all the easy, obvious choices, they have to really work to keep going. It’s easy to get 30 or 40 entries, then a lot of work for the next 40 or 50, before a burst of its-almost-over energy takes them across the finish line to 100. I’ve written a couple d100 posts and found them to be quite productive.
One-Way Doors and Portcullises
Really anything that creates a barrier after passing through a previously traversable threshold. These operate like more extreme versions of an ordinary stuck door. They are much harder to force or destroy, so they strongly incentivize exploring in another direction. Some of the most exciting parts of the aforementioned 3d6 DtL Arden Vul podcasts were the episodes in which the PCs had to explore in an unexpected direction because something prevented them from backtracking. One-way doors, portcullises, and similar barriers are a good way of organically seeding such moments.
One-way portals present good opportunities for counterplay. Stuck doors can be leveraged with Hold Portal or iron spikes, and possessing a key can do the same for a locked door. But one-way portals typically present more an immediate opportunity for tactical exploitation by the PCs.
Teleportation
Eventually the physical constraints of the map – and the distance between points of interest to the PCs – can begin to complicate exploration. It is simply not realistic to traverse from one side of the megadungeon to the other, unless we abstract the time (and random events) involved in doing so; at which point the fundamental currency of the megadungeon has failed. Teleportation offers a more advanced, high-stakes version of the loops and switchbacks that the simpler barriers and obstructions presented earlier.
Arden Vul again models this well. Early on, teleportation is experimental, risky, even potentially deadly. In 3D6 DtL’s Arden Vul campaign, the group’s earliest experiments with teleportation got them in over their heads, and led to PC deaths. By the end of the campaign, mastered teleportation features were critical to completing the party’s goals.
The more the dungeon’s logic and history is understood, the more teleportation becomes an essential way to return to safety and recover crucial resources.
Architectural Manipulation
I must admit that I am personally not a fan of these types of obstructions. Early D&D is awash with disorienting constructions. Building a spinning room or a maze of halls that lead nowhere, simply to confuse adventurers, is fine for a funhouse dungeon. And yes, it is interesting to frame such features as a kind of cultural flex of the dungeon-creators-as-retired-adventurers, hazing the next generation with their deceptively sloping hallway.
But I’m fine leaving these kinds of features in the past. The DM has essentially limitless ability to obfuscate the nature of the physical space – and even without ill intent, it is easy for a lot of these manipulations of the physical space to become a game of “guess what the DM is thinking.”
The shared fiction of an imagined space is always fragile, and my old-school hot take is that the ICI doctrine is a clear improvement on this aspect of traditional play, which was probably always best-suited for tournament play and one shots with a similarly adversarial spirit. In my experience, dungeon exploration sings when the problem is readily apparent, but the solution is not.
Keys as Major Treasure
How valuable is a key as a form of treasure? It depends on how much friction there is in dungeon exploration. Consider the following common options when adventurers encounter a locked door.
| Time? | Noise? | Evidence? | Trap? | |
| Pick the Lock | Y | N | Typically no, although a serious failure might leave a broken piece of a tool stuck in there |
Probably yes |
| Force the Door | N | Y | Probably yes. Definitely yes on close inspection |
Depends on the trap; a lockplate-based trap like a poisoned needle might be ignored, but anything in and around the frame and threshold of the door is probably going to go off |
| Destroy the Lock or Door | Y | Y | Obviously yes |
As with forcing the door, it depends on the mechanism of the trap |
| Use Magic | N | A bit (verbal components of the spell) |
Typically no |
Typically no |
| Use a Key | N | N | N | N |
Keys, like maps, are deeply undervalued treasures, if dungeon exploration is treated as genuinely difficult and dangerous. Possessing the right key is better than magic; no need to speak aloud, no spell slot required.
Backtracking and Level Connections
I felt this when I ran Thracia. There are areas on the first and second dungeon levels in Thracia that my players had to traverse multiple times. Yes, you can and should repopulate previously explored areas with new monsters and threats, and reassess how faction activity has changed over time. But it was hard not to do this without creating friction, when both my players and I were really focused on getting the action to new, as-yet-unexplored rooms. In our discussion of barriers above, we already covered how we should reward exploration with shortcuts, new loops, and new paths for future outings.
But we can go bigger by providing a central and recognizable connection between levels that can be accessed from different places. Arden Vul has a chasm. The Papers and Pencils example quoted above uses an elevator shaft… and we already have a shaft in our dungeon, don’t we? So the most direct way of creating this kind of loop is to provide one-way doors accessible from the “upper” dungeon levels into the shaft (remember, our PCs generally want to go up, so our dungeon is inverted). In addition to providing shortcuts back to the starting point, these measurably and visibly bring the PCs closer to their goal of escape.
In summary, we want to ensure that all our exploration complications are doing at least one of the following things, and ideally more than one at once:
- Creating friction
- Making time matter
- Forcing backtracking via a different route
- Rewarding investigation
- Spotlighting keys and maps as high-status treasure
- Providing shortcuts back to the “home base”
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