8 Things Worth Starting a Dungeon War Over

Just picked up Level Up by Courtney Campbell. It’s a small book of tables on random topics.

And the first table I started reading spawned an article idea. The table is titled “Top Ten Dungeon Resources” and has this description:

Well, you’ve got a dungeon. And you’ve got all these factions. Apparently they all live in total harmony because they don’t really have anything to fight over. That doesn’t sound like an environment ripe for adventure.

Cool idea for a list! Here’s mine for what factions fight over in my Lost Isle campaign:

  1. Survival. Air, water, food, blood, souls, wifi. Whatever your denizens need to survive, fulfill their drive, or carry out their duty.
  2. Routes. Control movement to control your neighbours. For example, access to key areas like the river or armoury.
  3. Territory. If you don’t own it, you’re paying rent. And in a resource-scarce environment like level 4 under Orcus’s clubhouse, you don’t have a lot of leverage with the HOA.
  4. Loot. Best case, your monsters wear it. Don’t leave a Wand of Fireballs in a chest behind the secret door unless it’s a deliberate lure. Instead, give it to the goblin chief and make players rue their choices. Loot also gives factions negotiating power.
  5. Prisoners. Hostages give factions leverage. They can also study prisoners to learn their foes’ weaknesses.
  6. Status. For many denizens, power is psychological. A higher position helps you dominate.
  7. Secrets. Knowledge becomes currency when it helps a faction dodge threats, defend itself, or gain leverage over rivals. Intel about a hidden route changes who controls the territory.
  8. Offspring. Factions fight so they still exist tomorrow. So protecting the next generation is paramount. Characters breach the inner sanctum? Defenders drop everything to protect the nursery.

I put these specific dungeon elements on my list because they all serve gameplay. Status, for example, opens up the roleplay and worldbuilding layers quite nicely in my experience.

Those with status expect respect. Lose that and characters miss out on allies, access to faction resources, and potential lore.

CampaignCraft GMs, notice items #2-#4. Those hook directly into the CombatScape GM’s Log series: Movement, Position, and Destructibles, plus The 5 Actions tutorial.

How? Well, we want to understand what the factions are fighting for. This drives roleplay, interesting choices, and the story in both non-combat and melee encounters.

Not only do factions make sense this way, they also give you great puzzles to throw at players. When players know what the other side wants, negotiating, tricking, and probing become great gameplay options that get rewarded and make sense.

It also means that what your factions do – the Moves they make – map directly to your battlefields. This makes improv and prep easier because you’re not starting with a blank page.

Thanks, Courtney, for the inspiration.

Roleplaying Tips GM, one last move before you go. Choose any item from the list above and break it. The water’s drying up, a tremor’s collapsed a passage, the chief’s heir just died.

This one change gets you an instant dungeon war. That move, and a map design that makes sense to players, is what my book Logical Dungeon Design: Tactical Cartography is for. Check it out here.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
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