Mythic Underground
A few thoughts about dungeons, role-playing games, and reading old school adventure modules for fun
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Dungeons (mega and otherwise)
I started 2023 with the goal to complete the #Dungeon23 challenge, a brilliant idea courtesy of Substack writer Sean McCoy, whereby participants spend each day of 2023 creating one room for a multi-level megadungeon, and each new month means starting a new level of the dungeon, so by the end of December, participants will have completed a twelve-level megadungeon.
January was GREAT for my Dungeon23 challenge. I was in the midst of reading John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to make a megadungeon that was a huge, sprawling wizard’s castle that went underground and had all kinds of anachronistic elements in it due to the wizard’s ability to travel between space and time?” The background info very much borrowed from the lore Bellairs established in the novel, and my idea was for the PCs to be residents of a village in a small duchy known as the Grand Union of the Five Counties (I stole this from The Face in the Frost) who travel to Prospero’s castle looking for treasures and spells and whatnot to help them stave off the machinations of a petty tyrant, Duke Lemantegris, who rules the duchy and wants to capture everyone in the village and make them his slaves.
Anyway, the idea for my megadungeon was to make what’s sometimes called a “fun house dungeon” where things can be quite random and even nonsensical at times. Everything would revolve around the conceit that this was a wizard’s castle/lair, and thus, things could/would get weird because of Magic.
January, as I intimated above, was fantastic. I completed all the rooms for Level 1 (“The Dusty Vestibule of Castle Prospero”), and was ready to embark upon Level 2 (“The Observatory of Castle Prospero”) in February when suddenly I realized I had to take care of my family and my health and my job and other such adult responsibilities.
My #D23 efforts were thus waylaid.
As of right now, the end of March, I haven’t given up on the megadungeon, but I have had to scale back my expectations. Instead of a twelve-level megadungeon, perhaps it’ll be more like a five or six level affair. Or even just three levels. The point, after all, wasn’t really to make a twelve-level dungeon, but to make a dungeon in the first place, something I’ve only ever attempted once before (and that time, I mostly cribbed things from TSR’s B3 “In the Palace of the Silver Princess” and added in some Prydain Chronicles flavor to fit my campaign). Dungeon23 was going to be my second attempt at dungeon creation: a creative endeavor first and foremost that was meant to spur my game mastery imagination and perhaps my author imagination as well. So with that as my goal, there’s no reason I can’t continue the project even if February and March turned into mulligans.
(This essay is going to focus heavily on role-playing games and concepts, so my apologies if this isn’t strictly related to fantasy literature as such.)
(Or is it??? As you’ll read below, I think “fantasy literature” can be a very broad term and might even include things like role-playing adventure modules.)
What exactly is a megadungeon anyway? And why am I calling this month’s newsletter “Mythic Underground”? Well, it essentially comes from the culture and play-style of the original iteration of Dungeons and Dragons as created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and in discussing the mythic underground, I’m borrowing heavily from Jason Cone’s ideas in his treatise Philotomy’s Musings, which explain megadungeons and their ecology.
A megadungeon is usually defined as a multi-level “underground” environment where players adventure with their characters in a role-playing game. The reason “underground” is in quotation marks is because strictly speaking, a megadungeon doesn’t have to be underground. “Dungeons” can be castles, abbeys, ships, towers, warehouses, etc. When we use the term “dungeon” or “underground,” we mean it metaphorically, in the sense that these are spaces that are separate from the “civilized” or ordinary world in which the player-characters come from.
This isn’t to say that the literal qualities of an underground space don’t matter; in fact, I’m quite interested in the symbolic qualities behind the literal “underground dungeon,” i.e.: darkness, death, etc.
But in role-playing terms, the “dungeon” doesn’t have to be an actual dungeon.
I’ll be honest, when I first started getting into role-playing games, the megadungeon stuff didn’t appeal to me. I was more of a “fairy forest” kinda gal, and I thought I would much prefer wilderness adventures. I do still enjoy wilderness adventures, but over time—and with more experience playing RPGs—I’ve come to appreciate the megadungeon as both a concept and a style of play.
What is that style of play?
It’s a style that privileges exploration and the inherent dangers of the dungeon to create a sense of dread and mystery. It’s a style that taps into a fascination with ruins and history, with the primeval, with things lost to the mists of time. Going down into the dungeon is about exploring and confronting the mysterious secrets of ancient civilizations and the mythic spaces inhabited by monstrous creatures imbued with strange magics.
The “mythic underworld” is not a new concept in human storytelling. It’s been around since, well, the myths of ancient civilizations! Going down below the earth to the land of the dead, or into the Labyrinth where the Minotaur dwells, or into the underwater cave of Grendel’s mother, or into the realm of the Nieflheim, are powerful symbols for confronting death and evil and mystery and the Id and whatever else you want to call it. Classically, the role-playing game dungeon was a series of caves inhabited by strange creatures and weird phenomena, or it was a crypt of some long-dead lich king, or the ruins of a lost city. These were places of death, darkness, magic, and mystery. Places that didn’t play by the normal rules of reality as we know it above the ground.
That’s why, as Cone points out in his “Musings,” the underworld is “a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken.” In the classic Old D&D dungeon, monsters can see in the dark, but adventurers can’t (without a light source), and monsters can open any door at-will, but adventurers can’t (without forcing it open and thus making noise). Doors close automatically unless the adventurers can rig them to stay open with spikes or other tools. Doorways or pools or tunnels or rooms may effect the adventurers in strange ways, changing their appearances or their stats or their abilities. The underwold is dangerous but also actively hostile. As Cone writes: “It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it.”
When playing this sort of game in the mythic underground, it’s the space itself that provides the seeds for adventure. The game master doesn’t start with a narrative in mind; instead, she starts with a place—the megadungeon—and designs that place with monsters, treasures, traps, factions, and weird wonders for the players to explore. The dungeon is characterized by being non-linear, not static, and not having an over-arching story. The players and their interaction with this space is what creates the narrative. (Another word for this is emergent storytelling or emergent play.) In fact, a coehesive narrative with rising and falling action, climax, resolution, and thematic resonance are not really the aim of this exploratory type of play. Exploration, and discovery, and creating the sense that the dungeon is really dangerous and scary and challenging are the aims.
When fiction writers craft stories, they ignore setting at their peril, but setting (at least in popular fiction) is still subservient to the narrative. We need setting to help us visualize the story, and setting can impact theme, characterization, plot, and so much else (in fact, I would argue it should, or else the story won’t have much resonance). But still, setting is not narrative. Narrative is the progression of events, and for most of us, when we read a story, we want that progression of events to mean something. We want the story to have significance. We want the characters to grow or at least experience some kind of event that impacts them and to which they must react.
This is different from the RPG gameplay that emphasizes exploration and emergent story over traditional narrative. What can be frustrating for many players who are used to more modern iterations of D&D is that their player-characters can die in a random encounter with a goblin. There might be no narrative significance to this event; it can be utterly random and anti-climactic. This can be frustrating, especially if the player expects the role-playing experience to provide a satisfying “narrative” for their character.
In a novel or story, the main character being killed by a random encounter would seem pointless. We would question the author’s skill and feel cheated.
But in an old-school D&D game, this random death is simply one of the effects of the dungeon, of that hostile, inimical space that defies our normal reality. And let’s face it, if a bunch of explorers REALLY went down into a dangerous, mythical underworld, they might indeed die from falling into a pit or being stabbed by a random monster.
Perhaps this illustrates that playing a game and writing/reading a story are two very different pasttimes, and that while randomness might be fun in a game, it’s less fun in a story. I’ll accept that, for sure, but I do still wonder if it isn’t possible to borrow some of the qualities of the megadungeon—the randomness, the non-linear, non-static elements, the focus on exploration and the space itself—and apply them to a work of fiction. This type of fiction would definitely be avant garde/experimental and not something that would find mainstream success, but I still wonder if we might not find a kind of satisfaction and fun in a story that put setting and exploration at the center instead of a traditional narrative structure or character arc.
What if a novel or story focused on the exploration of a place, not on the arc of a specific set of characters? Adventurers may live or die, and new ones may come into the dungeon to take their place, but the narrative is exploration-based and from the point of view of either an objective outside observer or from the dungeon itself, with the “explorer” really being the reader and not necessarily any particular character. The non-linear, non-static setting and the wandering monsters and factions within the dunegon would provide structure to the “narrative,” but there would be no attempt to wrangle a cohesive meaning into the story. Meaning and “theme,” so to speak, would emerge through the randomness and changing nature of the dungeon itself. Sort of like Sword and Sorcery meets Luis Bunuel…
I suppose what I’m describing is perhaps just a “play report”, or a Choose Your Own Adventure book, like the old TSR Endless Quest series. Or maybe what I’m describing is simply the megadungeon adventure module itself. I admit, I enjoy reading OSR/old-school adventure modules for fun. Yes, I often have some vague hope of running these modules with a group of players, but even if I never do, I enjoy reading them as texts, as a kind of fantasy literature. Sort of like how we read the text of a stageplay as a kind of literature. As we read a script, we imagine the play unfolding onstage. We get to people it with actors and be set designer, lighting designer, and director. Similarly, when reading an adventure module, we imagine the game unfolding: what we’d do if we were the player, or what our players might do if we were running the game for them. The old-school dungeon adventure isn’t “telling a story” in the traditional sense, but it is creating an atmosphere and an ecology that we can imagine and interact with, and that can be a satisfactory experience even if we never end up playing the module at the table.
Setting often has a curious place in fantasy literature. Too much “world-building,” as we call it, and not enough character and plot means the reader might get “bored.” But not enough world-building and uniqueness to our setting, and some fanasty fans who prefer detailed settings might lose interest.
But the mythic underworld, the megadungeon, is not a “world” in the sense that we need to know all of its history and how it functions in some sort of plausibly realistic way. Creating the mythic underworld means following dream-logic and focusing on the strange and numinous. In some ways, this is what writers like Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft were doing in many of their more dream-like fantasies, but I wonder if we could be even more radical and remove the focus on the characters entirely, turning our narrative attention to the underworld itself and the ways it bends and shifts and changes as factions and adventurers interact with it.
Maybe this would be a hot mess, I don’t know. Maybe we just need to expand our idea of literature to include gaming materials like megadungeon modules. (Maybe we already have and I’m just behind the curve…) (And I don’t mean LitRPGs or GameLit either; both of those sub-genres, as far as I can tell, still adhere to a normal-ish narrative structure with a focus on character arcs. I’m talking about something more experimental without the usual narrative structure.)
Anyway, whether we go avant-garde or traditional in our storytelling, the mythic underground is still a fertile plane on which to explore the horizons of what fantasy literature can be. Just because it’s an old concept doesn’t mean there isn’t more it can offer. If nothing else, let this be an encouragement to pick up a copy of Operation Unfathomable or The Keep on the Borderlands or Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a novel with a delightful spin on the mythic underworld and the shifting, inimical nature of the “dungeon.”
Blog Posts of Interest
Here’s an older post about my discovery of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, which really reignited my interest in tabletop role-playing games and has been both a gaming and fiction-writing inspiration for several years now.
And here’s another older post about how I sometimes use RPG random tables as a way to generate fiction ideas or as playful prompts for my writer’s notebook.
Finally, here are some of my thoughts about old-school RPGs vs. 5th edition D&D, character-builds vs. exploration as a style of play, and how I’ve taken to solo role-playing to fill my need for old-school gaming.
That’s it for now! Thank you for reading! And please consider buying or pre-ordering my books HERE, or my short stories HERE.
If you’ve already gotten copies of my fiction, please know how appreciative I am. I’m grateful for you support!
This is a fantastic post. I hadn't considered mystical spaces as "dungeons" before, nor had I considered D&D play reports as inspiration for fantasy literature before. But I certainly am now. You also prompted me to go look up "Neverwhere", which led me down a long rabbit hole...so it's taken me an hour to read your post. Then I had to go back and read it again without getting distracted by your resources and links...LOL.
Altogether, you've written a thoughtful and inspiring piece here.
Fabulous work, keep it up!
Thank you for this fascinating post! I have often thought about the intersection of gaming and role playing, but usually with the intention of bringing more narrative into the game, not the other way around. I wonder if Dante’s Inferno qualifies as a “mega dungeon” narrative like what you are describing here? It certainly fits in terms of the Mythic Underground!