If archaeology has taught us anything it’s that the deeper you go underground, the older the things you find are. If D&D has taught us anything, it’s that the deeper you go underground, the more dangerous but more rewarding (literally) it gets. Why not combine the two concepts?
Thinking downwards
Why would we want to do a thing like that? By thinking in a unity of space, we can create some general rules for aesthetics, contents, and denizens, that we can always break, when we want to, but can, otherwise, provide a useful framework.
Let’s set some epochs. For the purposes of this demonstration, I’ll use four but you can use as many or as few as you’d like. My epochs:
- Present
- Recent
- Ancient
- Primordial
We can assign each of these epochs a number of dungeon levels that correspond to an abstraction of their depth underground:
- Present: levels 1-2
- Recent: levels 3-5
- Ancient: levels 5-10
- Primordial: levels 10+
You might be thinking that, outside of megadungeons, that it’s an awful lot of levels. It is! The good news is that you don’t have to use them all. Instead, place the levels at the depths that correspond with the theme that you want and have fun connecting the levels by interesting means: pits and chasms, stairs and ramps, elevators and shafts, magical portals, cavernous sub-levels; any way that fits your fancy.
Time Bandits
Time for an example! Let’s say that we want to incorporate influences from some historical Earth cultures into our game world. This is standard worldbuilding. Instead of positioning them across our setting, horizontally, on the surface, we position them vertically. We might end up with:
- Present: medieval European;
- Recent: Hellenic/Roman;
- Ancient: Bronze Age/Near Eastern; and
- Primordial: Lost World style dinosaurs and cave-folk.
What this does is give us a quick scaffolding for both the appearance of locations at each depth and what creatures might be there. At the lowest level, we’ve got dinosaurs, natural rock or roughly hewn stone structures, and petroglyphs. Above that, we’ve got pyramids and ziggurats, sphinx and lamassu, etc.
We can always insert exceptions, if we feel like it, but, if not, we have a fallback of visual styles and cues, monsters and mythos to draw from. This also encourages us to spread our dungeons downwards. Instead of a cluster of levels near the surface, we have an excuse to engage with all the depths of the earth available to us.
