There is nothing natural about a dungeon, especially a Gygaxian dungeon. The never made a damn bit of sense to have various monsters living in a monster condo. Or various 80 yard corridors through solid stone with a fooking pickaxe.
I think you make very sound points in this video; however, you did not explore that the absurd possibilities that may be produced by random/procedural dungeon crafting methods are deliberate elements of the mythic underworld. Why is a dragon imprisoned in a cave with no passages large enough for it to leave, or for it to have arrived? Because the dragon may be experiencing its own mythic trial, or the dragon's impossible presence is meant to vex the characters and/or players and challenge them to seek understanding. The random dungeon could be meant to be a Tarot deck from which the Dungeon Master was to weave a *possible* catharsis or enlightenment for the denizens, characters, and/or players to glean. I always inferred this to be the case for random dungeons in a campaign context, but maybe I'm just weird. The much later Saga card-based RPG leveraged randomisation/proceduralisation for storytelling as its central conceit. To me, for reasons I cannot clearly distinguish, the title Dungeon Master conferred the responsibility to share wisdom, even though I was barely 9 when I tried to run my first game of BECMI D&D from Mentzer's Red Box and had precious little to share.
You keep giving... that group... too much credit. They're trolls with one bad joke - AD&D is the best RPG in the entire universe. But you're right about random dungeon tables do not equate to the mythic underworld. The deeper implications are religious in nature, and I'll be exploring them in my upcoming guide to gonzo gaming.
Actually in Tonisborg we've since discovered the monsters were probably placed. No one knew how big things were, but the pre publication draft describes wyverns as "small dragons." Until 1977 how big things were was pretty much up for grabs as there was no definitive source.
Why is it so hard for ya'll to grasp the concept of a mythic underworld without straw-manning it into "random lazy DM rolling on a table for everything"?
Because they want to reduce it down to "BroSR 1e Onlyists who only use Gygax's tables" because it's a easily burned strawman. They'd rather attack who/what they THINK it is.
Occult activity perfecrly suffices to explain any manner of zany dungeon design because those invested in the occult are obsessed with knowledge, secrecy, obfuscation, manipulation, and often evil. Yes, there's a spike trap before the room with two giants in it. No, the room doesn't have giant sized entries. If you can't be trusted by the high wizard with the dungeon layout (nobody is) and can't divine the purpose of these strange things (gauntlet for initiates / game fodder) then your death by them is natural.
dungeons with ecology, dungeons that make absolutely no sense, underworlds, etc. Why not have both? They can certainly be fun in their own ways. Call me an evil Dungeon Master, but having both in the same world of fantasy to confuse your players makes a very interesting game indeed.
You can have all three (mythic, naturalist, or 'no sense' dungeons), just generally not in the same setting. A lot of settings can handle two out of three, though.
Random dungeons layered according to level was fine when we were teenagers learning to play, but we outgrew those once we learned to tie in story with the campaigns and worlds grew outside of a layered catacomb. If someone still enjoys playing that way, it's fine, but it's not "the way".
I'm not sure about that. A lot of the tabletop gamers I know started in the 90s, a few of them in the 2000s, and most of them played video games, but handled tabletop like tabletop.
Well explained differences of dungeons and how they developped in TTRPG. I started with this insane but most interesting hobby back in 1987 and already then the contest dungeons didn't make sense to me. Congratulations to your outstanding work too. My collection is nearly complete... 😄
That's not really true. That's a bit like saying that using tools when trying to built something means you lack imagination. Random generators can work as incredible tools to direct the GM's imagination, and of course there are better and worse versions of those tools depending on what type of dungeon you are trying to create.
Random dungeons aren't divinely inspired unless you generate them using TempleOS. Seriously though, was there ever a time in D&D history where DMs were expected to be beholden to the roll on a table?
No, but I'm pretty sure no one suggested that there ever was. What is happening is that a group of reactionaries are trying to claim that the random dungeons in early D&D were actually intentional and ideal renditions of the "mythic underworld". Which they are not. They're just a silly irrational dungeon-crawling arena.
The mythic underworld has always proven that dragons, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt, just wait in little rooms with tiny doors, led to by squared 10’ x 10’ corridors that are only the right size to completely draw on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of graph paper. You dolt, how dare you question the science, man!
There's nothing wrong with AD&D1e in general, it's a classic. Nor is there necessarily anything wrong with generating a "contest dungeon" like the AD&D DMG creates. They can be fine for certain campaigns, as I said in the video. On the other hand, if you want to generate a naturalist dungeon, or a Mythic Underworld, you need different tables than the ones in the DMG.
I didn't say that. On the contrary, I said that the BroSR crowd, as usual, are making things up: they're calling a random gonzo dungeon a "mythic underworld", when what those tables generate do not show a mythic underworld at all.
@@RPGPunditEven back in the late 70s or early 80s we rarely played dungeon crawls. I mean they happened, but as part of a wider campaign that was, for the most part, set above ground :) The 1e DM Guide dungeon generator was something I have never used or seen used. Maybe I should get my dice and a piece of grid paper out.
Look it's not that deep... It's a game and the idea is that the DM shouldn't be burdened by the presumptions of rigging the dungeon. And so in service of that, the random tables were needed.
Random tables are fantastic, but you have to craft them to do what you want them to do. Not unlike a computer code: garbage in, garbage out. You can make any kind of dungeon with the right random generator for the type of dungeon you want to create. But this doesn't mean that the AD&D random dungeon generator was a pre-planned genius-level homage to the "mythic underworld", because the results make it pretty clear that it isn't that at all.
The BrosSR is off playing their Muppet games. They aren't even talking about Mythic Underworld. Pundit is doing a, "Everyone I disagree with is BroSR" right now.
Yes, there were blogs and articles written about the idea of myth and the dungeon for decades. What's new is the attempt to argue that dungeons that make no sense are that way because there was some great Master Plan of that being "mythic" somehow, rather than just an example of imperfect early generator designs.
Well that's funny, because several BroSR guys wrote in support of the idea of the random AD&D dungeon being "mythic", Jeffro chimed in (though I couldn't read it because he's gone subscribers-only), and TBE did an entire substack about it complaining about people who questioned his claim (must hurt "his brand").
Philotomy's Musings, written by Jason Cone in 2007, has a section on this that has been referred to since the origins of the OSR. "As for ecology, a megadungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken. Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer. It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it. " The PDF is easy to find. And beyond that, you can go all the way back to Greek mythology, especially Odysseus. (Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey; also search for 'katabasis').
This is essentially a solved problem, at a table that drops acid right before they throw dice; randomly generated one PC into an orange once. Guy didn't come out of it for another two sessions. Wild times.
One thing I think worth mentioning is if you’re really into geeking, is that crunching numbers for sake of testing a system against itself can be quite immersive Not to mention challenging when a party can not really prepare ahead of time due to all the randomness D&D Euchre anyone?
My impression is that the underworld thing was coming from the other direction, people just looking for reasons to be pretentious and crap on "simulationism"
There might be some people doing that, but the people I've seen that are currently defending the irrational dungeons and pretending that they are somehow part of the Campbellian monomyth, have mostly been the Brosr crowd
@@RPGPundit I'm not in the BroSR crowd, bud. And I haven't seen anyone in the Brosr talking about Mythic Underworld. There's not enough Muppets for those knuckle draggers in the BroSR to care about Mythic Underworlds. No one is arguing for irrational dungeons. I'm arguing to write them yourself and not use other people's books.
@@spiritualgodwarrior i think there is value on using other people's works as a basis and making changes over it. Whoever is starting need to have experience on how dungeons are formatted and run from many different sources to develop their own way of doing it
You can choose to make a dungeon or a whole setting that has zero verisimilitude, if you really don't care about playing in a complete nonsense world. Or you can make a world, and dungeons, where the squid man and the floating eyeballs have a reason for existing.
@@RPGPundit Then you've missed the point of Mythic Underworld. Putting aside the amount of strawman arguments that could provide enough fuel to get us through winter.... If Hell is a real place inside the earth, then floating eyeballs form Hell have every reason for existing. The verisimilitude is that Hell is a real place. The end. Also don't know where you guys come off saying Mythic Underworld is some Gygaxian thing. I don't play 1e, never will... I don't care to read Gary's coke babble nonsense. I couldn't be further from the "1e onlyist" people you're referencing. But darned if you're not sweeping us all into one big pile like dogpoop with people that I don't associate with and that probably think Mythic Underworld is an infringement on their rapping Muppet campaign.
In a mythic underworld, you wouldn't just have a random selection of creatures. You would have, as I said in my video, monsters that are representative of some form of symbolic allegory.
That's beside the point. Yes. You can play without the vtt, but that doesn't stop Wizards from moving away from having a physical product and charging microtransactions.
You have sold me on Arrows of Indra. You have also touched on something very very important here. Several things. I think this is my favorite video of yours so far. The dungeon crawl has been following a shallow design pattern since the the earliest days of D&D. I have put a lot of thought into this subject and have written extensively on it. The dungeon design of old was terrible, and since most people have stuck to that pattern since, it is still fucking terrible. Gygax and Arneson invented a game that i dont think even they understood the potential breadth of. It was an experiment that was never brought to completion before it was corporatized. Now its the same game that it was fifty years ago but has somehow continued to degrade rather than evolving. I am currently writing an extensive piece about you since you are one of the singular people on this platform who have anything of value to say about D&D. Id like to know what the best way to contact you directly is because Id like to field a couple of questions with you.
These people sound like they read Dark Dungeons, watched Mazes and Monsters and decided that this is what D&D is supposed to be. In other words some creepy cultish activity for weirdos, as opposed to a fairly normal game played by normal people. I was there in the 70s and 80s, kids and teenagers playing D&D were just trying to have fun. If you want a "mythic dungeon" in AD&D, buy the Manual of the Planes or Mayfair's Demons supplements. That's where the "mythic" dungeons show up. However, those are still not to be some creepy cult for weirdos.
A great example of a "mythic underworld" module is Pharaoh, by Tracey and Laura Hickman. Gygax dungeons were ridiculous, with save or die traps, the worst example of which is Tomb of Horrors. Sorry, just my opinion.
Tomb of horrors is an interesting selection because it was basically created for the entirely meta purpose of being as deadly as possible for adventurers
Well it has to do with creating tables that generate with a certain structure, with tables of potential items and encounters that are not just randomly distributed, but our first of all selected to fit the type of dungeon you want, and have a table distribution that determines the probability of results.
@@RPGPundit So again, you're conflating this concept with the 1e onlyists who will ONLY use a Gygax approved dungeon generator. Like nobody who runs a mythic underworld game can possibly conceive of such a big brained idea as writing their own random encounter tables and dungeon generators that fit the dungeon they're making! Nooooooo! We can't write 12 encounters that make sense because we're just not smart enough as you are! I have 100 pages of random generation tables I made, and they all make sense for the environments we're playing in. It's not that hard. And the ones I write are probably going to make more sense for our gaming environment than anything you or Gygax ever snorted out. You act like we're not smart enough to ditch the books and write better material ourselves when any one of us could write a better DMG than Gary did.
Once again, if you aren't arguing that Gary Gygax's random dungeon tables are in fact representative of "the mythic underworld" that means THIS VIDEO IS NOT ABOUT YOU. You sure seem to be protesting about it a lot though.
With all this talk of dungeons what is your opinion on traps? I personally do not like them for an immersion, gameplay and meta reason. Immersion. If you are setting traps you don't want to set them in areas you will have to move through because you are at risk of falling into your own trap. This leaves very few places where it makes logical sense to set traps. Gameplay. The players only know what the gm tells them which can make traps feel cheap especially if their is a difference in interpretation. I also find it very hard to make traps interractive and interesting to find. Meta. In my experience it slows the game down as in my experience traps makes players very paranoid so they constantly want to check for traps. Now you can do passive checks but this makes it so the players have no input in whether they trigger the trap or not which feels bad. I am very interested to hear your opinion/ how i am completely wrong/ how to run traps better.
You may want to check out my pundit files issue 13: historically authentic traps. It deals with what you're talking about, how traps would be made in a way that would make more sense depending on the type of historical place the traps guarded.
As a DM, my policy with traps is 1) they’re used in tombs that nobody is supposed to enter, 2) they’re placed in dead-ends that the inhabitants know are dead-ends and never use, but intruders don’t (the Viet Cong did this in their tunnels), and 3) if a trap guards an area that the inhabitants actually use, then there’s either an easy way to deactivate and reset the trap, or an easy way to bypass it.
Randomly generated dungeon crawling can be a lot of fun. That is a 100% sufficient explanation for its existence. But if you want an in-game reason for dungeons to seem random, try playing Nightmares Underneath. The setting itself explains dungeons as nightmare incursions taking physical form. In some settings, with extremely deep history of unimaginably advanced beings, you can invoke the Roadside Picnic analogy, although that works better for games like Numenera than classic D&D.
D&D Dungeons are more fantastical than D&D Dragons. My group & I came to this realization during Junior High in the mid80's @12 or 13 years old. The mega dungeon just stretched our imaginations too far. Grew up in the Mid-Hudson valley where abandoned cement mines are common, & as kids we'd explore them. These mines made in the 19th & 20th century are smaller than D&D dungeons, so it didn't make sense. Eventually we got some books on real castles & saw just how small dungeons really were. Dungeons were small because they had huge stone structures resting above them. Since then dungeons have been a series of cells used to store prisoners. Maybe a score of prisoners or so at max . Now caverns are a different story, they can stretch on for miles & miles. Exactly took the words right out of my mouth, caverns are made by the divine & dungeons are made by men. The size of caverns vs dungeons should reflect the mastery of their creators. Mythic underworld adventuring happens in caverns.
@@Fernoll I agree large man made subterranean structures are feasible. We never made it to the bottom of some of those mines for example. It's the massive subterranean prison/dungeon part that breaks immersion.
The idea of fantastical/dark races like Goblins to represent a human aspect is interesting, almost like a Sin, "the Goblins did this" is almost a medieval way of pushing an act away from a human. It's harder to handle something if "Old Man Hendersen attacked and burned down the church", whereas it is much easier to accept, and to punish Mr. Hendersen, if you say he is a Goblin, a non-human entity. It reminds me of another Pundit video discussing the Dark Albion setting, I am para-phrasing from memory, "Because of all these sinful acts, evil is returning to the land." so the Kings brother killing the king, Murder, is connected to one type of creature as a sin. Maybe Murder would be connected to Goblins/Orks? So, the Kings brother plunged the kingdom into Ork-hands by killing the rightful king and bringing these marauding mercenaries everywhere? Do Dark Albion or Baptism of Fire have a short-list for creatures and what sins they represent in the human condition? Now THERE is a great shorthand how to write stories for a beginner!
This idea reminds me of mimetic theory by Renee Girard. He says that interpersonal conflict builds up in a society until it becomes unsustainable, and there's an outbreak of violence by the majority against a scapegoat, usually someone on the margins of society. The ritual murder resolves the conflict, but the people then create a myth to cover up the murder by claiming the victim was a monster or god, and this is the origin of myths.
Not directly no, but a good GM should be able to figure those out pretty easily. For example the Zar-ptak, or firebird in BoF and my recent pundit files adventure is a "questing beast", which represents obsession. The search for it drives men to madness.
"Ah but our dungeosn are mythic! . . . Why is there Boss Music playing?" "YOU CAME INTO MY UNDERWORLD MOFO!" (And I do believe MoFo to be a decent replacement word!)
The problem is their idea of D&D is guided by a kind of ideological fanaticism, not a political one in this case as such, though in the case of the BroSR they have also intermingled with reactionary politics, but rather this ideology that says that the old school was a mythical golden age and therefore everything that was produced in their one true addition has to be explainable as an act of perfection, rather than some kind of work in progress
I don't know why you insist on conflating Mythic Underworld with this straw man of the people talking about it that's not accurate whatsoever. I'm certainly not BroSR, don't play 1e and never will, don't believe in a golden age rpgs (Ad&d is pure word salad coke babble), and I'm not a 1e onlyist. I actually hate on Ad&d for it's word salad writing and clunky mechanics. I don't even play d&d anymore! So I don't know where you're getting this from. You're creating 1e onlyists that only exist except in your head, Pundit.
I was reading this Youth 2030 Global Youth Work agenda (stuff the National Youth Council of Ireland stuff their youth workers with in their online training programmes). A programme for the youth workers filled with propaganda anout the goals to achieve a sustainable and equal "One World" (not "One D&D" mind you, rings a bell?) by 2030, bla bla bla, you know the drill... And guess what is the subtitle of that document? "Globalisation: the Youth and the Truth"... The second I saw this I rolled on the floor laughing. Also this: the next day, one of the (14-year old) girls at my RPG club texts to everyone: "Hey guys, I JUST REALISED I am non-binary"... Then I didn't laugh very much at all... She had "JUST REALISED"? ffs...
It almost sounds like people have confused Philotemy Jurament's misnomer of an idea of a mythic underworld with what used to be called a "funhouse dungeon."
That's exactly it. They're not arguing against Mythic Underworld games, they're arguing against Gygaxian Funhouse dungeons. They're not the same thing. The latter is something I would avoid like a plague in my games.
If I make a game-like dungeon, I'd make every floor have a theme and a boss. There's still room for randomness, but it's random within limited parameters. That's just for artificial dungeons. Otherwise, I try to emulate nature.
Randomness isn't the problem. The problem is how that randomness is directed. If you make bad tables, you get bad results. If you make good tables with good probabilities you end up generating good results that enhance the sense of credibility.
The foyer? 😊 When I read that my mind immediately went to the old monster manual picture of the Rackshasa, a tiger sitting in a comfortable chair dressed in a Victorian dressing gown smoking a pipe while reading a book looking very sophisticated. When I read foyer in your comment, I figured you have to have a Rackshasa in there, otherwise it's not a foyer. Probably should have a Persian rug in a fireplace too. Thank you for that wonderful mental image and reminder of my early osr days back in the seventies.
Well the issue is what the dungeon is meant to be. So you should have a rational dungeon if it was created by men. On the other hand if it is created by nature or magic, it should be a mythic dungeon. "Contest dungeons" are suitable for pure dungeon crawling campaigns, for intentional old school homages that are not meant to make sense, or potentially for Gonzo.
Yeah, I was one of those who got into that argument about "the mythic underworld" with someone (I'm sure you know who) You don't need to think up all ecological things in a dungeon, but the randomness is just silly. At that point, Diablo does a better job of it than D&D. Sure you can have like a mad wizard's labyrinth, but if you're doing that ALL the time, you're just lazy or taking the piss. Besides, the OD&D rules for dungeons were stupid shit anyway. Doors have to be forced open by PCs but open automatically for monsters, all monsters can see in the dark but PCs can't, etc, etc. again, videogames handle that way better than D&D so if you want that style today, just play a videogame.
Interesting that you've mentioned Diablo. Now that I think of it, Diablo is a great example of the man-made dungeon slowly shifting into an Underworld one.
I'm pretty sure they've sold packs of character record sheets for every edition. I don't think this is anything new, and these most likely will also be available in stores on release day. We also usually have the fan products, which may or may not serve you better. I've also seen a lot of discussion from players who feel moving the skills to blocks with their abilities was a bad choice, so you may be better off served with the current character record sheet!
