Blackmoor dungeon history

[Big Mac]

Yep, that's what I figure and what the history pretty much says, but its pretty clear that the history section must have been flehsed out by the zgg team without paying much attention to the description of the levels, especially the first ones. They should be the oldest and most Sar aigu in architecture but they are clearly typical castle dungeons in design and function. So 2+2 don't equal 4. That's basically why I was reimagining the history a bit.

Yeah it doesnt make all that much sense does it? Unless the upper levels tended to be destroyed/collapse each time a new race is driven deeper under ground, so that it needs to be excavated by a new ruler?

I know nothing about Blackmoor's dungeon (apart from a few stories of The Great Svenny, that I saw after surfing over to various things from The Piazza), but I have seen a couple of things that might help sell dungeons being build in a seemingly "wrong" way.

Firstly, I've seen stuff about Roman London. And it seems that most Roman London is fairly far below present day London. So you could either:

• Have a dungeon that gets burried and then rediscovered via new tunnels or
  
• Have entire (surface) buildings that vanish below the ground over time

Either of these options could give you an excuse to put newer things below ground.

The burried tunnels are good, because you can have a deep dungeon that comes up a shaft to the surface...and then bury that to make the top a dead end. Something like this would allow you to build a structured dungeon that is several floors high, but does not go to the bottom or the surface. Something like this could be "sold" as the activity of an empire that existed 500 or 1,000 years ago. It could be their attempt to "civilise" the tunnels below the city. And the "capped off top" could be the result of a big battle between the underground forces and the surface forces (either with the people on top blocking the tunnels as part of a fighting retreat or with the underground people raiding the surface and setting fire to a tower or fortress that guarded the surface from the people below).

The buried buildings are also good, because they allow you to take things not normally found in a dungeon and hide them underground. Imagine, for example, a church, inn or a house that gets trapped in a landslide and forgotten. It could be left there, prettymuch intact, with rubble blocking many of the windows and maybe one of the doors. People could enter an underground inn via a window on the second floor, go down two flights of badly maintined stairs and then leave via a tunnel that comes up in the basement.

Another issue, is that people talk about "a dungeon" and there is always the possiblility that there are multiple dungeons that gradually merge together.

So you could have an old dungeon under a small town and then, as the town expands to create a city, have a number of newer dungeons get built in the districts surrounding the original dungeon. At some point another group could build random tunnels trying to join one dungeon to the next.

Civil engineering would also be a good excuse to join up a number of different dungeons. If someone built sewers it would create links to the sea (which I would expect to have a structure like tree roots (or artificial rivers). People also build escape tunnels from castles* and I wonder if various eras of a city might have a lord, king or government that felt they needed a secret tunnel. And one thing about secret tunnels - they don't work when they mob you kicked out built them. So you could have some tunnels being blocked off, while others were built.

* = In London, the British Government spent a lot of tax payers money, building secret underground railways during and after the Second World War. Some of these (like the partially complete Express Northern Line) have become public knowledge, but others (like the line that links up to the station below 10 Downing Street) are complete and still in use.

Another good excuse to build new tunnels (at the wrong height) could be your giants and other creatures. If an early tunnelling race was something like dwarves, they might not make full height tunnels. Then if humans made more tunnels, they might try to dig out the ceilings of dwarven tunnels, succeed in some cases and cause the roof to collapse in other cases. (The same could happen if they dig down into the floor - it could work, but occasionally someone could dig through the roof of a lower tunnel and the lot could collapse down.)

If giants came along, they could find two nearby tunnels and dig them into one big tunnel. They could study the area carefully (or use man or dwarf size minions or employees) to help them work out what tunnels would work and what would cause a cave in. They could then make a number of routes that would allow them to get where they want to go and abandon the areas in the middle (as no-go zones).

Do all of these sort of things together and you change a dungeon from a "depth = age" thing into something that could be a lot more complex.

And this doesn't even include natural tunnels from things like underround rivers, volcanic erruptions or rock eating monsters.

I would agree that the monsters would likely have been driven down by the successive conquests and the upper levels would have been molded to conform to the desires of the most recent conquerers.

That makes a lot of sense. Although I wonder if a few groups could find a way to hide** an underground building before the enemy take over the city.

** = This sort of thing was done in the Second World War (to hide defensive positions that would have slowed down a Nazi invasion of England. But as well as that sort of thing (which is mostly gone now) we also have a few weird and wonderful things like 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens. These look like two ordinary houses, but are in fact a giant wall (the height of a five floor building) that hides an airshaft that drops down into the London Underground.

It must be possible to tear down a large entrance, box i in and then build a small "unimportant building" that has a "small cellar" that sits on the boxed in entrance and makes a would be invader uninclined to dig up the cellar. If you build wine shops and cheese storage caves into a section of a town they could have hidden walls. Or if you were really clever, you could go down two floors with the fake building and hide the secret entrance in the ceiling of the second basement.