Mythic Underworlds Versus Dungeon Naturalism

 Like most things, this begins with a secondhand book.

Almost every tabletop book I own comes secondhand. This is a result of my cheapness, which is also the motivator behind many of my kitbashes, but also because I have the burrowing instinct of a researcher. Finding a crammed bookshelf in a hidden niche of a microscopic bookstore is the sort of magical experience that can motivate a hundred and more trips beyond the front stoop. What this means in practical terms is that my collection of tabletop books is eclectic to say the least. One of the outcroppings is this book, Dungeons. It dates to the very beginning of the millennium, and contains many of the classic hallmarks of a d20 third-party book. Incredibly niche monsters, questionably-balanced feats, and of course Prestige Classes galore. This is the sort of tabletop book which I would have had with me at all times in the early 2010s as a sort of security blanket, and even now I fondly reread favourite passages on occasion to fall asleep.

It is also an exemplar of Dungeon Naturalism.

Pages upon pages are spent simply describing various ecological and societal processes and listing different types of structure and purpose which could create a dungeon environment. To someone who wants to make a realistic and well-reasoned dungeon this is as good a guide as could be asked for, save for ripping actual dungeon-like environments from history directly. To someone who was largely unaware of the wider philosophies of tabletop gaming, like I was, it was also the only way to design a dungeon.

This led to some problems. Over time I noticed that I tended to write dungeons in a similar manner. Hallways with individual rooms connected to the sides, relatively few secret passages and only in sensible places, and endless similar storerooms. Dungeons were becoming linear, and monsters were being reused or ignored because I had a difficult time imagining how, for example, a ghoul could wander the same halls as 2d6 goblins without one side wiping the other out. I do not think this was so much a failure of dungeon naturalism as a design philosophy as it was one on my end of having a narrow scope. My only examples were the adventure path dungeons in some of my secondhand 4e books and Dungeons itself.

Guillaume70: Tunnel du fort d'Andoy, menant vers la tour d'aération

The dungeon as a mythic underworld presents an alternative that I had barely even considered. I had heard the concept mentioned once or twice, but I only found a complete explanation after stumbling upon a link to this post, originally by Jason Cone. Books and articles I had read until this point had sometimes derided a strange and nonsensical dungeon as a "funhouse", gesturing vaguely at mad wizards and aberrations as the naturalistic but lazy explanation. But the idea that the dungeon is practically another world operating on different rules than our own is both wonderfully fantastical and a solution to some of my problems. I had even been grasping blindly at the idea last year with this post, where I touched the edges of a mythic dungeon in my own way. Even there I was putting naturalistic ideas forward, but in a way that I think meshed with the dungeon itself being mythic.

There is still some reluctance to go fully mythic on my part. For one, I do not like the idea of rules working differently for players and monsters without any explanation at all. This is due to my Dungeon Naturalism roots, but also because I generally prefer systems where the players and NPCs are on the same footing, like Cyberpunk 2020. In Pathfinder 2E one of my mild peeves is that player followers are extremely limited in the equipment they can choose and use, and having a mythic dungeon limit the sight of one side but not the other based only on if they are tied to the players is just not to my taste. A potential solution could be to have the mythic dungeon be equally hostile to inhabitants and intruders. More encounters where both are surprised, more dead bodies found to foreshadow traps and hazards, and more isolated monsters willing to parley all seem like good results of that idea. It should still maintain the mystery and hostility of the dungeon world too, if not even enhance it.

In addition, I have been trying to read more classic dungeons to get an idea of what do to. Caverns of Thracia stands out as one of my favorites so far, and it seems to have pulled off the better parts of Dungeon Naturalism without being stuck in repetition or mundanity like I have. Dungeon Naturalism and Mythic Underworlds are hardly incompatible anyways, which means I should be able to incorporate what I like from either perspective in the future. In all then, a win-win.

So long as I can find the time to actually run a new dungeon, that is.