Little details about a setting may not have any mechanical impact on the game, but they do work to shape the session by changing the way players think about their situation. A good dungeon delve is always better when there’s something unique about that dungeon that inspires a bit of mystery, fear, or excitement in your players.
Think of these as ways of telling your dungeon’s backstory. I’ve tried to stick to ideas that can be added to an existing dungeon without changing its map.
Let’s look at three features you can use to make any dungeon feel more unique and interesting.
- Noises
- Decorations
- Dimensions
Noises
Noises can easily permeate an entire dungeon and can happen periodically to remind your players of the passage of time. They can also have directionality to draw attention to a certain portion of the dungeon.
- Water rushing, dripping, or splashing might be tied to a trap, the activities of the dungeon’s inhabitants, or simply a natural feature of the area.
- Disembodied screams could be a remnant of past demonic infestation. Screams could trigger when someone passes a certain area, on a schedule, or at random.
- Banging, grinding, or ringing. Is there some activity taking place in this dungeon that might make a sound echo throughout? Maybe there’s a smith banging on steel, a mill wheel grinding, or bells that the inhabitants use to keep time or signal something.
GMs can use these sounds simply to create a mood, or give them a direction and use them to guide the party towards your favorite parts of the dungeon.
Decorations
Bare stone walls might make sense, but if there are sentient creatures living in the dungeon (or there were in the past) then odds are good that there would be some decorations.
- Hand carved words in a language none of your players know
- Relief carvings in the stone depicting scenes of battle, ritual, daily life, or dieties
- Crude cave paintings related to hunting or war
Think about the mood you’re going for and what you want the decorations to achieve. They could be purely for flavor or they could be clues to a puzzle or a secret area.
Dimensions
It’s easy to get used to looking at dungeons on graph paper and thinking of them as all existing on one or more flat planes with 5 foot wide passages and square rooms. But that doesn’t have to be the case!
- Your dungeon could be consistently sloped in a certain direction. Maybe it’s a natural feature, or maybe it was engineered that way for some reason. Whatever the case, it could set the stage for some unusual trap effects that take advantage of the differing altitudes–flood traps, gas traps, and rolling boulders for instance.
- The ceilings could be extra low or high, and passages might be wide or narrow. If the dungeon is a constructed area, what kind of creature built it? What kind of dimensions would they have made things, and how might later inhabitants change things?
- Maybe the floors aren’t very flat or smooth–this could slow down your party while providing no difficulty to flying creatures.