The usual approach to dungeons is, toughest monsters at the bottom. The deeper you go, the worse the trouble.
Generally, because it's more fun that way. It's not going to be a good game if the dungeon's dragons and demon princes guard the door and the goblins hide in the back, even if that would make sense from another perspective. The baddest-ass monsters are down the furthest.
Here is a roundup of reasons (read: rationalizations) I've cooked up, found elsewhere, had suggested by my players or friends, or otherwise glommed on to. I'm not linking to sources because none of these really come from one specific place, they're more of general themes.
Why are they down so deep?
The dungeon keeps going until it reaches hell itself. Pretty self-explanatory. Stands to reason the really bad dudes are in hell. Maybe killing the ones up top just re-allocates them down to the hell levels as fodder there.
The dungeon is hell itself. The upper levels are just the upper reaches of hell. Serves you right for opening that door and going in.
The underground is where you hide from the eyes of God. Or "the gods." Or whatever. The deeper you go, the safer you are from the eyes of God. This works really well with pantheons of gods who live up on mountains, or in the sky. So the tough, evil monsters - the ones most to fear from a just and angry god - go down the deepest where they can do the most evil unmolested by god.
It got buried by time. Cthonian weirdness buried for millions of years is down there; it's all stuff that started on the surface but slowly got buried. It just hasn't (or doesn't want to) worked its way back up.
They fear the men and their light. Simply put, the more monsters fear light (or even fear contact with humans and humankind), the deeper they'll want to go.
They need the heat. Deep down in the earth the temperature goes up - perhaps the worst monsters are also those who most need the warmth of the dark depths.
I'm sure I missed some good reasons to put the tough monsters down deep instead of up by the huntable humans and their wealth. Please let me know in the comments.
Maybe there are fairy dwarves and gnomes deep down in the Earth and they mine gold, platinum and gems and then manufacture magic items like golden thread , magic swords and armor and even coins. The deeper down in the Earth there are large stock piles of treasure to steal so that the most powerful monsters are there guarding their treasure and then less powerful ones are farther from the sorce because the most powerful ones are selfish and chase them away.so that the upper levels of the dungeon have less treasure than the deeper ones. Treasure moves from deep bellow on upwards. Just an idea that is different.
ReplyDeleteI like that.
DeleteIn my game world the fairies often live underground away from the church. They make most of the magic and treasure that is in a dungeon. The fairy are the wonder part of dungeon delving because humans always wonder if they can find their treasure and be rich or have wondrous magic. Leprechauns are thought to hide pots of gold underground and surely other fairies try to hide their treasures underground as well. Monster occasionally find their treasures and either steal it or kill them and take it. Monsters rarely make good treasure because they are lazy and dirty and do a poor quality job. The fairy are in contrast to the ugliness of monsters and demons. The fairy make beauticul and artistic items that make it worth the risk of going into filthy dungeon. In my game world the fairy are immortal and make items even the greatest of wizards can not make that is why many adventurers delve into dungeons.
DeleteMaybe fairies even built the dungeons. Who else would put rooms with magic pools or magic fountains? Maybe those are what remain after the monsters moved in and took over. I mean why would monsters make anything helpful like a fountain that heals those who drink it? But without fountains that do good things then none of the delvers would try to drink from the fountains to see what happens. That sort of takes the mystery out of the game. If there are good things in the dungeon as well bad it makes the game more interesting. Maybe megadungeons are built by fairies and now monsters occupy them. The fairies could make different types of levels for their own amusement with talking statues and magic doors and magic portals. Maybe Castle Felltower built a dungeon that connected to a fairy megadungeon but eventually monsters moved in and killed the fairies and took their treasure.
DeleteBesides dwarves and gnomes the sidhe could also have constructed their palaces underground and decorated them with gem encrusted thrones, beautiful tapestries, golden staues, etc. Later they were defeated by evil fairies like goblins, trolls and ogres led by even more powerful fairies like dragons, dark elves, duergar etc. The treasure vault and throne were at the deepest depths of the dungeon and that is where the dragon sleeps. The upper levels have various evil fairies like ogres and trolls who might have some treasure because the dragon paid them to guard his lair. The upper most level might have weak evil fairies like goblins who are paid to keep an eye for adventurers coming into the dungeon.
DeleteIn any case there are a lot of fairy races besides gnomes and dwarves that live underground. The sidhe were said to live underground and so were the pech. Most of the fairies were said to live underground in fact.
There's also the idea of the dungeon as the mythic underworld, apparently first put to paper by Philotomy Jurament in his D&D musings. Basically, the monsters are tougher down deeper not necessarily for any internal causative reason, but because the dungeon is the embodiment of our underworld myth. The cause is on the spiritual level rather than the physical.
ReplyDeleteThat's partly where the "the dungeon is hell" comes from. Also Greek myth and other places (Diablo, the video game, also does this.) It's "the deeper you go the further from the world and man and further into the world of evil you go." While I did read Philotomy's stuff, it really made me think of the Aeneid more than anything else - "Oh, yeah, hell is underground, just like in Virgil."
DeleteThe one that sticks out the most for me as a reason is simple ecology: the deeper you go, the less contact with adventurers the monsters had. Less contact means they had more chance to prey on one another and grow fatter. The ones at the top levels know this and avoid the lower levels like the plague.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be surprised if a dragon deep down has some brutal lizards that go up the dungeon to bring back tasty goblin morsels.
The depths are filled with foul air. The deeper you go, the less it mixes with the wholesome air of the surface. The foulness breeds evil.
ReplyDelete"Before you lie the stairs down. Make a HT roll, it's hard to breathe here." Heh.
DeleteMaybe all monsters are a single species, that gets badder and tougher the older it lives, with successive metamorphoses. Given that the upper levels are more subject to the predations of Adventurers, you only find juvenile specimens there (goblins, orcs, etc), but the farther down you go, the older the monsters are, and so they are in later stages of their life cycle. Monsters are notoriously territorial, and will eject their young, that's the reason you no longer see weak monsters deep underground.
ReplyDeleteAnother reason could be that civilization imposes order on reality weakening the possibilities of magic and the supernatural. Man is a force of the mundane and so the most fantastical and magical creatures must live far from him. Orcs and goblins are the most mundane of monsters and live on the upper levels close to man while dragons, chimerae, and liches are more magical so they live deeper down and further from man. The adventurers have magical powers but they are also on the outskirts of civilization looking for dungeons in remote locations thus they are less affected by the ordering effects of civilization.
ReplyDeleteThe deeper you go, the more resources you have (kind of b-dog's first idea)
ReplyDeleteDown there is more gold, more diamonds and even some exotic riches. And the tougher you are, the better caves you can guard and take profit from.
It all spawned down there (rationalization of hellish rationalization)
All the monsters spawned down in the deeps. As they were looking for territory, the stronger ones stayed closer to the place of origin (they had no reason to move further).
They're not stronger, just strange (more like idea for specific dungeon than rationalization for any of them)
The challenge of fighting monsters living in the deep is that they are unusual. No one on the surface knows how to fight with mind flyer's psionic. Human's immune system can't really fight with those strange poisons from underdark. No fighter was taught to fight xenomorphs. There IS a problem with fresh air deep in the caves. The creatures are stronger only subjectively for humans, objectively not so much. Like water Pokemon is stronger than a fire one.
There is a higher concentration of chaos/evil radiating rock lower down in the ground that attracts monsters in proportion to their strength. It may even be what spawns some of the nastier ones. Finding pure veins of the rock could have some nasty effects -- or be the source of ULTIMATE POWER to some crazed wizard...
ReplyDeleteElderThings set up shop in the deepest parts of the Earth to avoid God or the gods the same as the Infernal does. They may not care about morality but they do wish to enter into this dimension in order to destroy it thus the gods are not too thrilled with them. Cities of Deep Ones strive to call forth Cthulhu from an underworld sea. Or the most Powertel cultists try to find an extradimensional portal to summon Nyarlathotep , these portals are at the lowest depths of the dungeon.
ReplyDeleteThose are a lot of cool ideas, guys, thanks!
ReplyDeleteThe world used to be a lot more dangerous and magical than it is now. As ages passed and the magic drained away, the more powerful creatures died out or evolved into less powerful forms, leaving only a few throwbacks lurking in caves and their descendents. When you travel into the dungeon, you're effectively travelling down through the geological strata of the world, encountering creatures from progressively older time periods, like living fossils.
ReplyDeleteI like that, although it really needs to be something you decide very early in the design of the campaign. It implies a dying-magic world.
Delete"Finish off the last of those elder monsters" is a different game than "Orcs breed in the darkness and will spill out and cover this land."
I do wonder, though, why those powerful monsters don't come up. There must be some reason they stay down there. It's not like the surface is poor - if you can wreck cities and like to eat people, the surface world is not such a bad place!
Like IT professionals, they fear the dayball.
DeleteCurse it! It burns! It asks for technical support!
DeleteYou can use the "magic is dying" spin, in which case they can't survive well in the new ecosystem or there's not enough magic on the surface to sustain them or they're sleepy and want to be left alone, but you also could make it a "that which sleeps does not eternal lie" kind of thing in which case they basically just haven't noticed us yet and adventurers are courting doom every time they venture into the depths.
DeleteThe implied default setting of D&D always seemed to me to be a world in which magic has grown less powerful. Otherwise, why all these Vancian-style spells hoarded by jealous wizards, and powerful magical items lying around in dungeons?
I just assumed most of that magic was underground because Zagyg put it there, not because it was dying off. And that mages hoarded spells so carefully because Gary wanted to stop people from just going out and buying more spells cheaply, or hiring henchmen, copying their spells, and then firing them.
DeleteThe "magic is dying" thing is very Vancian in the literal sense, but I have to wonder if a game where you can buy spells from other wizards really assumes that.
Well, yes, but more to the point it's a common motif in the literature. The ancients' command of magic always seems to be much greater than that of the present day. Fantasy settings aren't very progressive.
DeleteThat's certainly true. Hmm . . . that gives me an idea. I'll post something about that tomorrow.
DeleteAnd here it is: Fictional Reasons for Magic Items in Dungeons
DeleteSurvival of the fittest. The lower down you get the bigger the things are because to get big and powerful you need to survive for a long time.
ReplyDeleteEver wonder why there are so many 'one-of-a-kind' creatures down there? Its because all the others have died off, either due to in-fighting with other dungeon creatures or because of adventurers.
Ever wonder why all those big 'boss' creatures have large lairs which are defended by traps and 'minions'? Its because they set up base there! They need to defend themselves and have a safe place to work and grow more power, else they'll get killed and their 'lands' taken over.
Ever wonder why those powerful entities are rarely seen surface side? It's because everything is so *dynamic* up there, it's always changing and always warring and it's so hard to keep an army going. Plus, all these yahoos team up and drive you back down or kill you - it's like all of a sudden they have bigger fish to fry and they're happy to work together or something...
Ever wonder why there's so much loot and really potent items down in the depths with all these powerful monster? A lot of the time even containing the very items needed to slay them? Well its because a bunch of 'not-quite-up-for-the-job' adventurers bought them down there and died, leaving their loot to the monsters... who prompted wanted it hidden away so no one else would use them. Few destroy them because in such a cut-throat world you never know when those items will be useful to equip yourself/your minions with when the monster next door wants to expand their domain directly into your domain (or visa-versa).
So why are they more powerful the lower you get? Because they're subjected to fewer adventure raids, and don't have to deal with as many invasions of other invasive species looking for a home. It's more *stable* the lower you are, lairs are clearly defined, allies/truces are more permanent. Fighting down here is more subtle and insidious, no one want's to risk all-out warfare because that just causes too much chaos and power vacuums, which in turn only undermines your power in the long run.
When you're that low down, you want to conserve your strength, bide you time, grow you power, and make decisive moves against your foes - so everything is played out over a much *slower* time frame. Something those short lived surface dwelling hordes just can't fathom, which is why they're kept out of the way 'up stairs'.
'Least, that's my take on it.
(I know this is an old post, but you linked it, so you get comments.)
Reversal: The dungeon really IS arranged to protect the weaklings against danger, while the heavy hitters guard the front door.
ReplyDeleteHow this works: everybody assumes raids from the surface are the major danger from inhabitants' point of view, but... statistically, in a megadungeon, they aren't really. Loads of low-level PCs end up dying at the hands of goblins, kobolds, or whatever rabble they meet in the most shallow vaults and tunnels. Most NPCs are even weaker than that, and wouldn't even dare venture below the surface.
On the other hand, wherever the dungeon goes down to, there's some really scary stuff down there. Hell and its demons, purple worms, gugs, aboleths, dragons, the halls of Death, whatever. The chthonic world is so much more deadly than the surface that any stable arrangement within the dungeon must involve its biggest, baddest inhabitants guarding against that at the very bottom, while the fodder get as close to the sun as they can bear and pick the bones of foolish surface-dwellers who wander into their domain.
Except the PCs, maybe. But that's a statistical aberration that the dungeon-dwellers can be forgiven for not seeing in advance.
We're all assuming that the surface is the source of danger, and weak creatures being closer to it presents a soft underbelly of sorts. What if that's just backwards?
ReplyDeleteWhat if there's an extensive chthonic underworld, and within a stable megadungeon ecology, the biggest, baddest inhabitants have to be guarding the lowest levels against the shoggoths, gugs, Old Gods, demons, purple worms, aboleths, and whatever else is down there? Small scrawny inhabitants hide from those horrors, as close to the sun as they can stand... and are generally sufficient to pick the bones off of any foolish surface-dweller that wanders into their realm.
The PCs may be a statistical anomaly there, but 1. the dungeon denizens can be forgiven for not predicting such an outlier, and 2. they tend to die a lot as well.
(Sorry if this is a double-post; signing in to Google seems to have deleted my first attempt.)
That's a great way to look at it. Don't worry about the double-post - I put a need to approve comments on my old posts to stop spam.
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