The Problem with Dungeons

Volume 3 of original Dungeons & Dragons famously includes a section entitled "Maintaining Freshness."

As monsters inhabiting the rooms, spaces, and corridors of a level are killed or captured, the level will become drab and dull. Coupled with this problem, players will have made fairly accurate maps of the level, so it will be challengeless this way also.

Dungeon restocking tables  are one response to these concerns and a good one in my opinion. They're a simple way to ensure that a dungeon is not static but rather a living place. 

A problem remains, however, and it's possibly a big one. It's a problem I've been grappling with lately and I have yet to decide whether it's inherent to the very concept of dungeons or if it's only a consequence to the way most of us conceive of them. The problem is this: what prevents someone with a great deal of power and resources from clearing out a dungeon in a massive, organized way? Think about the stories of how Rob Kuntz's character Robilar successfully defeated The Tomb of Horrors but on a more massive scale. 

I ask this question not specifically from a practical perspective but more from a narrative one. Yes, yes, I know, "narrative" is a bad word in some old school circles and the mere utterance of it is blasphemy. More seriously, though, my point rests on trying to imagine how the existence of dungeons would affect the world in which they exist. Unless the player characters are the first people to discover the dungeon and keep their knowledge of it secret, wouldn't other adventurers soon flock to the site and overrun it? For that matter, if a dungeon has existed for centuries, why wasn't it cleared long before the player characters were even born?

There are ways to address these questions, of course. For example, a dungeon might have been magically barred from entry until just recently, making the player characters the first outsiders to plumb its depths in some time. That doesn't wholly resolve the matter, since the question of why a dungeon isn't rapidly swarmed with adventurers remains. That's not to say no answers are possible, only that they rarely seem to be in my experience. Instead, most dungeons operate under a kind of "script immunity" in which they simply exist solely for the benefit of the player characters to explore and no one else.

If you read Dave Arneson's The First Fantasy Campaign, you'll see, in his brief descriptions of the dungeons of Blackmoor Castle, that he did in fact address some of these questions, albeit in a slightly whimsical way.

As you can see, a group of Elves have taken it upon themselves to guard the entrance to the dungeon, both to prevent monsters from inside it escaping and to limit the number of adventurers entering it. They even charge admission and sell souvenirs, giving it the feel of an amusement park. That's not the approach I'd take myself and indeed I find it somewhat silly, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. M.A.R. Barker's Tékumel campaign had its own approach to these matters, which I plan to discuss in another post later this week, and they're instructive. I wish I knew more about the conduct of Gary Gygax's Greyhawk campaign with regard to its dungeons, since I suspect it'd offer additional insights.

Ultimately, my point is that it's not enough simply to think about what happens inside a dungeon; equally important is how a dungeon affects and is affected by the imaginary world in which it's situated. Given the centrality of dungeons to old school fantasy campaigns, this isn't an idle question but in fact a foundational one.