How do you design a dungeon with a lot of backtracking for the purposes of puzzle solving?
Hi DnD friends,
I'm tackling a new DM challenge and could use some guidance. I'm designing a dungeon where humanoid beavers are attempting to awaken a sleeping god. Their efforts get derailed when they offer the god a magical plant that overgrows their entire base, warping the rooms and fusing many surviving beavers into half-plant, half-beaver creatures.
Since our group is relatively new, I've found that combat can be a bit slow. To speed things up and make combat more dynamic, I want to include environmental elements and traps—things like shelves that can be pushed over or a chandelier that can be dropped on enemies. I hope this will make the players feel more impactful when they pull off creative moves.
I plan to design a large building that encourages investigation, puzzle solving, and backtracking. My goal is for the players to get familiar with the map before combat, allowing them to discover useful items or environmental features they can take advantage of when enemies appear.
Since I've never done anything like this, I'm seeking advice on how to approach the design. Are there common pitfalls I should avoid to keep the building fun? How large should the maps be if I want to run this over 3 sessions, each about 3 hours long? And what types of puzzles would fit well in this environment?
Thanks a ton for your ideas! I’m already feeling like I may be reaching too high, but I’m excited to give it a shot!
As usual, DM Lair has an ace vid about this.
Going beyond those basics I have a couple other tricks to stack on top.
I often find it useful to think about the passage of time in the location. What is the history of this place? How long has this building or cave system or whatever it is been here before the current occupants lived there? Who were all of the prior occupants and what were they doing there? Why aren't they there now? What have the current occupants done to the place, and what older bits have they destroyed or upgraded? Perhaps this cave system was once some kind of temple, and there are still vestiges of that around that the players can discover and use - that sort of thing. I like to start with the natural location itself at least as an idea, and then add the layers of history on top. This isn't meant to get you to write a dissertation - just think about it, and it'll help make it more interesting. Gives it a sense of history, and who knows, maybe there's something in there that the current occupants know nothing about but the players can discover, if they pay attention to the clues.
Another idea that's good to consider is what the day to day in the place looks like. Are there patrols? Where do they walk? Where do the occupants sleep, hang out, build things, store things, eat, keep prisoners, etc. The place should feel like it exists before the players get there. It's also wise to consider what happens if the players disrupt a portion of that routine or make loud noises - how will they attract the attention of the occupants in various areas when they flip a switch, open a door, kill a patrol, or make too much noise in certain areas?
Dungeons are an awful lot more fun if the combat/traps/whatever are in dynamic areas rather than just everyone standing around in a big boring room. Perhaps there's an area where the floor is prone to a cave-in to an area below, for example - what happens when the weight is too much or someone casts a spell that shakes the place? Now those unlucky souls have crashed one level down into an umber hulk den, or something. There should be safe spots and dangerous spots. Get players making those skill checks instead of just attacking and sneaking all the time.
I think you'll find that donjon tools save you a lot of time. I rarely use them as generated, rather start with something from there and build on it, or use it for inspiration. It can generate any size or style dungeon and populate it with relevant creatures, extremely detailed treasure lists, traps, and encounters.
You can also totally crib from hundreds of amazing maps.
I'm going to add on and say that you need to provide enough clues and hints to demonstrate that certain spells and effects may have disastrous consequences.
In a dungeon I recently ran, I gave my players a diary they had to decode (substitution cipher, which one player absolutely loved figuring out and deciphering) which gave some oblique clues to guide them as described by a previous explorer. This proved helpful for them!
Another dungeon saw my players navigating to a room filled with water and stepping stones. I described in great detail the sinuous roots descending from the ceiling, the main tap root descending almost to the surface, and the one single stone with a beautiful icy sword set in it at the center. They clued in that the roots were part of a trap, with the likely trigger of retrieving the sword. They were able to take the sword and escape the entangling roots in the nick of time.
A neat thought by a player in that last scenario was to see if the sword would create icy patches to step on in the water. Rule of cool and all so I let him create a (difficult terrain) surface to traverse to escape the roots more quickly.
You know that’s a ride of a first paragraph, love it.
As far as that kind of design goes, I would look at things like the actual map for dark souls and some of the Zelda worlds.
Point being that “oh wait this connects to there!” Is both a great eureka moment, and can also work really well in puzzles.
Obviously this doesn’t answer the whole traps sort of things, but I’d also recommend far cry and dishonored for that kind of thing.
Of course you can’t 1 to 1 these easily, but using verticality is probably the main takeaway. Not sure what your beaver human hybrids can do but but if construction is a big point that’s another way to affect setups and the world
My temptation here is to try and put on my Darth Vader helmet and try to sway you to the dark side of narrative TTRPGs but that's not what you asked!
I can't offer you a huge amount of advice, I think trying to setup a dungeon like that which is makes sense mechanically and feels good is very difficult and time consuming, but totally possible.
For your puzzles always remember to give the players insight and intelligence checks to try and solve them. Yes it's great if a smart player works out the solution at the table, but remember that its the characters who are solving the puzzle if they get stuck.
Plus I personally think for something like what you are doing it is best to be clear.
Going off script for a moment, I've found that personally (in my 10 plus years running TTRPG for various groups) you're not going to be able to "force" the players to be more creative or speed up combat with envriomental items unless the system itself changes.
And what I mean is you can just homebrew some stuff of you can actually change system.
If you want them to use the environmental stuff them make it a new rule and make it attractive, they'll use it all the time.
If combat is too slow homebrew that once one side has lost 50 percent of their side, then the rest of the fight is down to a dice roll no matter what.
Or make combat more deadly. Or switch system.
Are the player characters the humanoid beavers or are those NPCs? Either way, you can’t skip past that element so blithely. Beavers, above any and all creatures of the animal kingdom, make changes to their environments. Have beaver-type traps and puzzles, with trees that must be felled and areas that get flooded. Alarms of beaver tails smacking the water.
To speak to the recursive puzzle idea, if this is less a linear dungeon and more an ecological setting modified by the beavers then you can address the puzzle as an ecosystem out of balance, an area of wilderness that needs to be reconstituted or rehabilitated. Beavers are nature’s own forest managers and a puzzle to them would be a setting that needs to be put back in balance.