There are many sorts of dungeon. One sort is a Ruined Dungeon. These dungeons are dangerous places, interesting to adventurers because the former inhabitants are gone, having left much of their valuable stuff behind. The classic published example is module B1, In Search of the Unknown.
I've been working on a few of these lately and I have a process for putting them together. I make a list of the monsters to be used, divided into three classes:
1) Visitors: bandits, adventurers, dwarves etc., when placing these monsters you need to have a clear path by which they have entered
2) Squatters: these are monsters that have made the ruins into their homes. For example, a goblin shaman and his followers might take up several rooms. These also must have some route to go out of the dungeon to steal stuff and raid the countryside
3) Varmints: these are bugs, rats etc, that might have wandered into the dungeon. I don't really worry about their travel routes, assuming that they can crawl through holes in the walls unusable by humanoids.
The "Visitors" are are part of the adventure that was really common in the old school encounter tables, and the monster/treasure assortments etc., but really have disappeared from the more modern games. I've had to make up a collection of NPC parties for such encounters (a good exercises to get re-familiar with the rules). I remember that these encounters were very often the most memorable and exciting ones.
You mentioned NPC parties, and I was reminded of an old mega dungeon type setting I have somewhere. Basically it gave the DM a couple of competing adventurer parties to throw against the PCs. The one I really liked was a bunch of medium to high level adventurers that got attacked and killed by bunch of monsters, only to be reincarnated by the high level druid in the group. The paladin became a pixie (whose magic horse died of laughter), the thief became a centaur, the mage became a giant badger, and the party's druid got drained of levels, so he couldn't cast reincarnate anymore. It was supposed to be a humorous adventure, so these guys kind of fit, but still it cracks me up to think about it.
ReplyDeleteI have an old dungeon magazine that has an adventure in it that's a good example of visitors, squatters, and vermin. It's an old wrecked castle that used to belong to a wizard. The wizard's demonic son comes back (with friends) to dig out his father's lab, looking for loot and spell books. They discover the lab has a couple of dragons or something trapped in it, and the rest of the castle is inhabited by the assorted undead remains of the wizard's followers.