The Goal of a Dungeon

It’s occurred to me that not all dungeons (let alone all adventures) have the same end goal, but those goals often aren’t explicitly stated. I’m thinking of writing a blog post about thus, but at the moment I’m still gathering my thoughts.

What I mean by ‘goal’ is the end state or win condition of the dungeon. There’s a few default answers.

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For a typical dungeon in a modern 5e module (I’m painting with a bit of a broad brush, but I think it holds true) the default goal is to clear the dungeon .Explore each room, beat the boss, take relevant loot or quest items. This is one reason that secret areas don’t feature as strongly in these dungeons.

For typical OSR dungeons, which often feature gold-for-XP, the goal is to loot everything. Empty rooms, rooms with treasure-less traps or combat encounters may be safely left behind. Likewise, a small amount of money may be left behind, since it’s likely not worth the risk. For this reason secret areas and hidden treasures feature heavily, to reward clever and thorough play.

But these are far from the only feasible goals. In Castle Xyntillan, for example, its size and degree of secrecy makes looting every gold piece unfeasible, but looting big ticket items, like the Holy Grail, are discrete and attractive objectives. Clearing all the hostile characters from the dungeon would be all but impossible.

I can imagine some other win conditions. In a dungeon ruled by an cursed warlord, curing or redeeming the warlord. In a dungeon which presents a mystery, being able to answer a concrete riddle once you’ve gathered enough information from the dungeon and understand what occurred there. In a deathtrap dungeon, merely surviving to see the end.

What more goals like this can you imagine?

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I tend to run story based quests that involve dungeons along side the player’s omnipresent objective of collecting gold for XP. Recently, my group that’s rather new to OSR had a bunch of NPC’s holding another faction’s group of NPC’s hostage, demanding a very specific unique item or else they’ll start offing the hostages. The PC’s, thanks to some earlier events, knew of the location of this item - it happened to be in an ancient wizard’s lair. They decided to take a trip to this lair.

The party had the story incentive to rescue the group of NPC hostages since they were apart of a faction they favored, but also knew this wizard lair might be packed with magical items and treasure. Once the party was in the lair, I had the clock ticking right off the bat with some environmental events that were going to destroy the entire area as a result of the party entering the lair. They knew they didn’t have much time deal with the magical sentries that the wizard set up and Spectators that the wizard summoned long ago, but wanted to snag as much treasure as possible… and, if they have time, grab that specific item that will save the hostages.

My party was able to grab the item in question, with a good amount of treasure, but were only able to grab some of the treasure before the liar imploded. They chose to sacrifice gather more treasure to grab the quest item. But, go figure, that special item was stolen by a group of Boggles on their travels back to the hostages after they left the lair. Will the party track down that group of Boggles to get the item back? There’s no guaranteed treasure in that… and since our session ended there, who knows?

I might bait the players with some obvious treasure in some cases, sometimes I might completely rely on story elements to peak their interest, but usually the side quest’s goal remains the same regardless of hurdles I throw at the party. This seems to make it easy to mentally track. They are free to explore the infinite number of other opportunities in the world at any point, and perhaps something else is appealing to their treasure seeking oriented minds, so I’ll create new goals around that.

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I think this depends a lot on your style of play. The dungeon itself may don’t even have a clear goal (if you are pursuing an evil warlord, you are pursuing them as much in the wilderness as in a dungeon) and just be an obstacle. On the other hand, dungeons are dangerous places, filled with traps, curses and monsters, so just getting out alive is a goal on itself and whatever you bring back from it might just be an extra.

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Like some, I prefer to think of the dungeon as ‘simply there,’ an environment that is purpose-neutral. Goals/agenda belong to groups: to the PCs, depending on what they want out of this particular dungeon, to whatever group/creature/entity is responsible for creating the dungeon in the first place - what was it made to be/do, and how does its design reflect those aims? - and to the group/entity/creature(s) currently occupying the dungeon (why are they there, and what will they do with anyone they catch in their crib?).

Naturally, there is usually a reason that I as GM have included that dungeon in my play session/campaign, which is what I think you’re getting at, OP - but my own GM agenda is separate from those other in-fiction agendas - and, ideally, my own GM agenda should flex and bend in conversation with the players as they discover and reveal their own agendas.

I don’t usually run games that are pure loot-crawls though, so this could be much simpler with a different group.

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Where did you find the artwork?
I also like mega dungeons or nega. I like the idea of dungeons being living and players can always return.

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I literally just looked up ‘dungeon illustration’ as an afterthought to give the post some color. It’s from here https://www.facebook.com/Moonrootart/posts/1446284268847011/

I’d say castle Xyntillan shares some features with the megadungeon (it’s smaller than many others though). The negadungeon on the other hand implies a very different goal; namely, that you are not expected to succeed. The ‘win’ condition is ending the game on the bleakest, nastiest TPK possible, assuming we’re thinking of the same sort of negadungeon.

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Oh hey that’s Moonroot! He’s an amazing guy, he did my band’s logo! Does amazing commission artwork as well (real paints).

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Huh, I had no idea. Also had no idea you had a band.

Just looked it up, you might want to rethink your branding if the first results for ‘invariant band’ are physics textbooks. Unless you’re going for a niche nerdcore audience.

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Mapping the dungeon can be an interesting goal maybe if someone just bought a piece of “haunted” property and wants to know what’s in it.

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I like this one. Also encourages the use of secret areas to reward clever and thorough play.

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Oh, we haven’t fully launched yet, we mainly only have our Instagram as of now.

Ah yes, we have no chance against a math term that’s googled all the time for physics and such but we’re not aiming for the top, it’s a relatively niche genre we’re apart of. Thank you for the advice though!

Didn’t mean to hijack your thread though, back to the goal of the dungeon!

Oh very spooky ! I just started designing my own dungeons. There’s a lot of great content for that. I will be reviewing one I used this week for a game.

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A goal I am fond of (becaue it immediately creates a tense atmosphere) is places you cannot leave once you’ve entered. Exploration is driven by the wish to escape.

Something rather meta but still a driving goal is to simple see the dungeon and what it has to offer. Play around with it. This is most true for the “negadungeon” or funhouse-category.
The character doesn’t want to go into that old forsaken place because it will kill them. Too bad because the player wants them to die for their entertainment!

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My longest running online/PbP campaign (and I’m planning on restarting it soon in a new form) had everyone appear directly in the middle of a procedurally generated megadungeon. Played on-off for almost twelve months and only got through a couple floors. Escape was definitely a deal, but so was finding what was at the bottom

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