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How To Run A Dungeon - Fixing The Lost Mine of Phandelver
Here’s the problem, if you grew up in the 90’s or later, and have only ever played 5e - it’s likely that your only detailed point of reference for what a dungeon experience is like comes from video games - maybe something like Zelda (Ocarina of Time - best game ever made. Fight me!) The issue here is that they teach the player that a dungeon is this linear place, to be solved in a set way, with battles in predefined places.
By JimmiWazEre
Opinionated tabletop gaming chap, who’s having to write this on his wife’s laptop because his broke :(
TL;DR:
Lost Mine of Phandelver gives you dungeons but no guidance on how to run them well. Good dungeon play needs urgency, resource pressure, meaningful time tracking, and dynamic encounters. This post breaks down classic and modern dungeon crawl procedures; from Justin Alexander’s traditional dungeon turns, to The Angry GM’s Tension Pool, Goblin Punch’s Underclock, and Dungeon Masterpiece’s encounter tables — and then shows how to use them to make Phandelver’s dungeons tense, reactive, and actually fun to run.
Introduction
Are you trying to run Lost Mine of Phandelver? I ran it recently. Have you noticed how (despite being a ‘starter set’) it does absolutely nothing to teach you how to run a dungeon? Bummer right?! Literally - there’s arguably five dungeons in this module, and it doesn’t show you how to run them at all. In fact, the closest it comes is the final dungeon where it even acknowledges how boring it’s going to be, and weakly suggests rolling for random encounters on a d20 table as and when you feel it’s appropriate.
Do better, Lizards-Ate-My-Toast.
You see, if you don’t know what you’re doing with dungeons, they can very easily turn into this very boring, very samey experience, with your players meticulously checking every tile for traps as they move from room to room, occasionally interrupting monsters that have apparently been sat there for an eternity - waiting to meet the PCs! Meanwhile the PCs have been long resting every couple of encounters to make sure they’re at maximum power all the time. And my God, I’m bored just thinking about it!
The chief cause of this dry experience is that there's no urgency or risk management. So how do you get that, I hear you ask? Damned fine question if I may say so myself, pat yourself on the back. You my friend, should read on, because unless you’re particularly looking for a simple linear gauntlet of pre-defined encounters, you probably need a “Dungeon Crawl Procedure”.
What In The Name Of Sweet baby Jeebus Is A Dungeon Crawl?
Here’s the problem, if you grew up in the 90’s or later, and have only ever played 5e - it’s likely that your only detailed point of reference for what a dungeon experience is like comes from video games - maybe something like Zelda (Ocarina of Time - best game ever made. Fight me!) The issue here is that they teach the player that a dungeon is this linear place, to be solved in a set way, with battles in predefined places. It works in a videogame because of the spectacle and hand eye skill involved.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t translate well to TTRPGs I’m afraid and these games bear little resemblance to what a D&D dungeon is supposed to be.
The fact that people try to emulate these video game experiences is why they fall flat at the table. It’s why your players probably don’t like dungeons, and it’s why you probably don’t like running them.
So, What’s missing?
To run a better dungeon, I advocate for the following components:
There should be no predefined method or route for ‘completing’ the dungeon. The player’s motivations and methods should be their own, and you should expect them to shift as they learn new things and as the situation inside the dungeon develops.
The dungeon should be punishing, and it should be a place that drains resources which cannot be easily replenished whilst the characters remain inside. This could be HP, or light, or spell slots, or rations, or more likely - some combination thereof.
The dungeon should be dynamic. It should move and breathe, and be both proactive and reactive in response the player character’s trespass. There should be opportunities within for all the major pillars of play - combat, social, and exploration.
Time should matter, it should be tracked carefully. Time affects your resources, and the position of dungeon inhabitants, and wasteful players should feel all these factors as keenly as a pin in their arm.
Which brings us nicely onto the “how” part of this post. Well my dudes, you have options. You see, it’s been a hot minute since the 1970’s and quite a few people have stepped up to the mark and developed processes for running dungeons. Here’s a handful of them:
Dungeon Crawl Processes
Justin Alexander - So You Want To Be A Game Master
In his book, Alexander explains a very traditional style. It’s a method that’s as old as the hobby itself, and it sets the fundamentals of most of the methods to follow - tracking time, resources, generating improvised encounters, and the concept of a Dungeon Crawl as a minigame within D&D as legitimate as combat.
Marching Order
Getting players to declare a set marching order for the party up front solves a lot of hassles later on. As GM, now you know which characters are likely to trigger/spot traps, and which are likely to be picked off from the rear.
Dungeon Actions
After Marching Order, the next thing to define are the Dungeon Actions, these are not dissimilar in concept to the actions you can take in combat. Don’t read these as an absolute list, but rather as some common actions, which you can improvise upon as required.
This list includes, but is not limited to the following:
Move carefully (a snail’s pace. default movement speed to reflect the extreme caution of PCs moving through this pitch black, dangerous, scary environment).
Move fast (for when the PCs throw caution to the wind out of absolute necessity, or if they’re backtracking over a recently explored space).
Unlock a door.
Disarm a trap.
Investigate an area (getting more detail about some room feature than has been vaguely called out in the room overview).
Look for secret architecture (hidden doors, traps, pits).
Keeping watch (reducing/removing chance of being taken by surprise).
Casting a ritual spell.
Something else (talking to an NPC, loading your pockets with treasure, helping another PC, lighting a torch etc).
The idea here is that each player does one of these things per Dungeon Turn. Sometimes your players might want to do something so insignificant that you rule that they can have another action. This is fine. Trust your gut.
Dungeon Turn
This is an intentionally loosely defined amount of time - usually ten minutes (this is because ten plays nicely with many timed effects in D&D which are usually roundly divisible by this figure). Don’t sweat the precise granularity of it vs the actions taken in the Dungeon Turn, it requires not overthinking it in order to be effective.
Once the Dungeon Turn ends, the GM performs a bit of bookkeeping on their Dungeon Running Sheet. Justin Alexander features one on his website for you to print out and use:
The idea is that you record each ongoing item or spell effects duration per row, and then for each Dungeon Turn mark a tick in each row (all rows should read the same number of ticks in Alexander’s version, other designs may vary). When a given duration is met, that effect ends.
Whilst Alexander advocates doing this behind the scenes and making it feel less clunky and mechanically like a boardgame, other D&D scholars disagree. Dadi on Mystic Arts describes this process, but instead leans into the idea that the players should be aware of what’s going on behind the scenes to better inform their decisions, and thus debates.
You do you.
Regardless - there is one final step the GM takes as part of their bookkeeping.
Random Encounters
These are so important, and so many GMs are terrified of them in case they “ruin their story”. I say; it’s time to cowboy the chuff up, get comfortable with improv, and embrace the dice my friend! Seriously, stop worrying so much about game balance, and just trust your players to make the right choices to get out of whatever peril the dice serve up for them :)
Random encounters are valuable because they make your dungeon feel alive and dynamic. Rather than the players feeling safe that they can only encounter creatures as they travel to a new area, now, the creatures can come to them. Alexander recommends the following method:
Once you’ve done all your Dungeon Turn bookkeeping, roll a d8. A result of one means that an encounter will occur.
Roll on your pre-prepared Dungeon Encounter table to decide which encounter it will be.
Determine how far away the encounter is by rolling 2d6 x 10 feet.
Unless it’s obvious, make a 2d6 reaction check to determine the attitude of the creatures you’ve encountered. Not all encounters have to be fights.
Determine if one group is surprised by the other, usually Stealth vs Perception checks. Any players taking the ‘keep watch’ Dungeon Action infer a better probability of success here.
The Angry GM - The Tension Pool
One problem with the traditional method described by Alexander is that the only sense of increasing dread comes from resource drain. The odds of an actual encounter remain static, and this effects the psychology of the group if you’re trying to foster a sense of ever creeping doom!
Responding to this shortfall, the Angry GM has a nifty little replacement for traditional random encounter checks called the Tension Pool and it all starts with a glass bowl.
Each Dungeon turn, toss a d6 into the glass bowl (AKA the Tension Pool). This should be visible to all the players. Then:
Each time during a dungeon turn that a PC does something risky or noisy, you roll any dice in the Tension Pool. Results of six prompt a roll on your pre-prepared encounter table.
Each time the Tension Pool fills up with 6d6, roll all the dice in the Pool as above to check for encounters, and then reset the pool to zero.
This is pretty cool, two things are happening:
We’re tracking the passage of time, with a dice in the pool representing a dungeon turn.
The likelihood of a random encounter is visibly impacted by the passage of time and the actions of your players.
That said, not everyone agrees that this is enough, I reckon that with a small modification, you could also use this to abstractly track effects using different colour dice of different denominations. For example, if someone lights a torch, toss in a d8 (or whatever seems right - I’ve not play tested this). The d8 will never trigger an encounter check like a d6 does, but each time the pool is rolled, that d8 might come up with an eight, and if it does - the torch is snuffed out (and the d8 is removed).
This way that’s less stuff to track on a piece of paper, and we’ve also now baked in variance on item and spell effect durations - if that torch goes out, maybe it was a gust of wind? If a spell effect ends, maybe the caster tripped on a flagstone and lost concentration?
Goblin Punch - The Underclock
Arnold K over at Goblin Punch has an entirely different method for using random encounters to build tension. He calls it the Underclock and it works like this:
Grab a d20, a nice big one. Or use a piece of paper, or a paper dial, or whatever you have that can track to 20. This is the Underclock, keep it out in the open so the players can see it.
Starting from 20, each Dungeon Turn the GM rolls a d6 and subtracts the result from the Underclock value.
Results of six on the d6 explode (this means you roll an additional d6).
When the Underclock hits less than zero it triggers an encounter on your random encounter table. At zero exactly, the clock resets to three instead.
If the Underclock ever reads three, a foreshadowing event occurs and the PCs learn a clue about the nature of the impending encounter (naturally, you’ll have to roll the random encounter at that point for your own reference).
The nice thing here is the players are more informed (but not perfectly so) about when an encounter is due. You can represent this as them hearing noises, or ‘spidey sense’, or whatever works for you.
This forewarning means that the players have another interesting decision to make - do they press on, do they try to hide, or do they prepare an ambush instead?
Dungeon Masterpiece - Random Encounter Tables
Baron de Ropp at Dungeon Masterpiece makes an excellent point regarding Random Encounter Tables.
Traditionally, they’re either single die table of possible encounters, or they’re a multi-dice table, which introduces a bell curve only the range of outcomes. Then on top of that you layer distance and reaction.
De Ropp highlights that this structure alone does not do anything to weave a larger narrative together, nor is it scalable, nor does it do much to help the GM to come up with a unique yarn to spin about the specific encounter.
To resolve this, he has a number of tricks:
If you have quests and rumours planned out - seed these into your random encounters. That pack of wolves you just defeated, maybe one of them had a golden arrow buried in its flank. Who made the arrow? Perhaps there’s someone in the woods that specialises in such trinkets?
If your table contains six entries, corresponding to a d6, why not add two more entries to it. Order the tables by difficulty, and then as your players advance in skill, add +1 or +2 to their dice result to weigh the results in the favour of more difficult encounters.
This one’s the real juice. De Ropp suggests adding two more columns to your random encounter table. Behaviour and Complication. You fill these in on a per row basis in a way that makes total sense for that given row. For example - Wolves. The behaviour might be “Hunting Prey” and their complication might be “Their pups are sick”. Here’s the clever bit - you roll three times on the random encounter table, generating a potentially different row per column. You might come up with “Goblins”, “Grifting for Cash”, “Their pups are sick”. This is your improv prompt for the scene, and by combining the elements from different rows, you’ll come up with some really unique encounters.
I’m a big fan of building Encounter Tables this way, and aside from the small amount of extra prep work they take - there’s not really much in the way of downside that I recognise.
Conclusion
So there you go. Whether it’s the Goblin Caves, Redbrand Hideout, or Wave Echo Cave - you’ve now got a detailed set of options for running these dungeons in a way that’s time tested and true. Let me know below the line if you have any other tips for people looking to improve the way that they run dungeons.
Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running! If you’ve still got some time to kill, Perhaps I can persuade you to click through below to another one of my other posts?
Catch you laters, alligators.
Very Belatedly, The Monster Overhaul Is The Best Damned ‘Monster Manual’ I’ve Read
Geared towards value as an in-game tabletop resource, The Monster Overhaul is a TTRPG bestiary that contains 200+ creatures, 20+ maps, traditional D&D style line art, and about a bazillion random tables of improv friendly prompts.
By JimmiWazEre
Really quite hungry, but otherwise opinionated tabletop gaming chap
TL;DR: Looking for the best monster manual for TTRPGs? The Monster Overhaul delivers 200+ creatures, logical organisation, and improv-focused tools that make running games faster (betterer, strongerer) and more dynamic.
This post contains affiliate links
What is The Monster Overhaul?
Well obviously, it’s “a practical bestiary by Skerples” of course, it says so on the front cover, see the image below if you don’t believe me :)
In case you don’t know, Skerples (a pseudonym, their real name unknown - Although, I’d like to think it’s something like ‘Max Danger’) is a bit of a rockstar in so much as we have them in the OSR blogging community. Kind of like a Banksy, for nerds.
Coming on the scene in the back end of the tweenies with the successful Coins and Scrolls blog, Skerples is responsible for community favourites such as the introductory OSR dungeon; the Tomb of the Serpent Kings and the somewhat gloriously whimsical Monster Menu-All: Eating the AD&D Monster Manual.
“Skerples wanted this book to exist, and it didn’t exist, and therefore had to create it” - Kickstarter
Geared towards value as an in-game tabletop resource, The Monster Overhaul (TMO) is a TTRPG bestiary that contains 200+ creatures, 20+ maps, traditional D&D style line art, and about a bazillion random tables of improv friendly prompts.
It was launched as a Kickstarter in 2022 with the help of Editor; Dai Shugars and a small team of artists including Dyson Logos & Lucas Roussel (and many more), and then delivered in 2023.
Naturally, I’m late to the party with my review coming in a solid 2 years after the fact. That means this blog post is neither evergreen, timely, nor an attempt to make an emotional connection with the audience. Good work there Jimbo - blogging 101 master… Don’t worry folks - I’m gambling on a late surge of interest which will rocket this post to the top of every single Google search. Wish me luck.
OK, this review isn’t sponsored in any way either, I bought the book myself. Twice technically, because I’m an idiot. Sigh, let’s get on with it shall we?
What’s It Trying To Do Differently
I see TMO as a clear reaction to the popular mid/late-tweenies 5e school of thought, whereupon a surge in new people into the hobby lead to the inability to correct en masse an oft held assumption among GMs to view creatures as little more than bags of hit points to simply be balanced against player characters for them to fight. “Fairly”.
Instead, this book wants to flip the script and give creatures breadth and depth to their behaviour and motivation, to help train GMs to replace the idea of a “combat encounter” with the more liberating idea of a “generic encounter” - in other words, not all encounters with creatures need to be conflicts, or if they do, then they certainly don’t all need to be combats, or if they do, they certainly don’t need to be balanced!
Additionally, it’s clear that TMO wants to address the issue of TTRPG books being mostly full walls of top to bottom long form text, and nigh on impossible to use effectively whilst under pressure at the game table. If you’ve read my guide on how I prep notes for an adventure, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
So, What Works Well
All the information in TMO is presented concisely, which is great when you’re at the table trying to find something out on the fly. If you’re anything like me - then you cease to be able to function efficiently when presented with lengthy prose to parse under pressure. Skerples (AKA Max Danger, by me exclusively) obviously recognises this and has made sure that each monster write up is lean and to the point, functional, and respects the urgency of the moment. That’s… liberating.
Additionally, each creature gets a set of bespoke prompts delivered in a tabular format which allows the GM to quickly add some extra flavour to a vanilla monster (terrible metaphor - I bloody love vanilla), in turn presenting the players with an array of hooks and roleplay opportunities to explore as solutions… you know, as opposed to simply presenting the same bland goblin we’ve seen a hundred times before, thus setting the expectation of another combat.
Such flavour might include names, attitudes, motivations, where their home is, modus operandis, catchphrases, favourite riddles - the list goes on and is bespoke for each creature, with more options provided for more worthy creatures.
Without saying the same thing over and over again in a slightly different way, this; 🡱 is the money, right here. If you only wanted the main reasons to pick this book up, they’re in the former three paragraphs. Reread them if you have to - I’ll wait. If they don’t sell you on it, then nothing else will.
You want to know more? OK, well the book is organised by the logical category (habitats, seasons, game genre) that you would find the monsters in - so what, right? This is another clever way of saving your time at the table. Imagine, your players are in a dungeon and you need to make up an encounter on the fly - Now the most relevant ingredients of that encounter are all next to each other in the book and you don’t have to go page flipping.
Not that the book makes page flipping hard though - with a handy ribbon bookmark to keep your page, and sturdy stitch binding, I’m confident that my copy of TMO is going to last for years despite the regular use.
Why It Might Not Be For Everyone
This book is great, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favours if I didn’t highlight some of the reasons that it might not be right for you. So here we go:
It ain’t cheap by a long shot. I mean, sure, you pay for quality - and I’m certain that Skerples can’t afford a loss leader business strategy, but we’re talking £50 for the hardback book. Even the corporate overlords at WOTC are only charging about £35 for their latest monster manual wheeze. The PDF isn’t much cheaper either: £22 squidlyroos! That said though, would I rather have something cheap, or good? For me - it’s totally worth it. Twice in fact.
If you’re running something with heroic style characters like Pathfinder or D&D 5e, then this book is still great for you for all the improv prompts and stuff, but you are gonna need a separate resource for your monster stats - well, either that or the ability to convert them satisfactorily on the fly.
The book is the same sort of size as a WOTC book. It’s mahoosive. Sure that means it’s packed full of value and creamy marrowbone jelly, but it also means it’s quite unwieldy to have this beast hidden behind your GM screen among your dice, notes, and stash of Universal Monster Tokens.
The artwork inside is all very old school, black and white lines - I think this is very, very cool in general, but some of the art isn’t for me, maybe not for you either. Additionally, if you’re wanting full colour spreads, this isn’t that.
Reeeeally nitpicking now, but I wasn’t kidding when I said those pages were chock-a-block full of stuff. I’m… not normal (ha!), when I see that much stuff on a page it can be quite disorienting. That’s not to say that I didn’t get used to it though, but it’s something to be aware of which could be an issue for some folk, let’s call it a lack of whitespace!
What Other Reviewers say
My own conclusion is coming below, but in the meantime, whilst you might think that it’s a novel approach to include content from other creators in my review, my stance is that if information is power, then my dudes, I want you to be powerful. Let me know in the comments at the end of the review if you appreciated the links to these videos, or if you think I should leave them out next time.
Conclusion
I really like this book! It’s an evocative, actionable toolbox for GMs, and so much more than a mere monster manual.
If you want to pick it up, I have an affiliate PDF link for Drive Thru RPG (The Monster Overhaul) and physical copies affiliate links for Compose Dream Games (UK) and (North America). These should give you plenty of options, and if you use them then it means I’ll get a small kickback on the sale at no extra cost to you. Go on, treat us both ;)
Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials - it really helps me out and costs you nothing! If you’re super into it and want to make sure you catch more of my content, subscribe to my free monthly Mailer of Many Things newsletter - it really makes a huge difference, and helps me keep this thing running!
Catch you laters, alligators.
