Summary

• Dungeons in unexpected places like fight pits can surprise veteran players and add depth to the campaign's storyline and gameplay.
• A dungeon beneath a player's keep or castle can add mystery and thrill to the game, ensuring no location is truly safe.
• Consider placing dungeons in unique locations like city sewers or hedge mazes to challenge players with diverse obstacles and scenarios.

There are two constants in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons, and it's not death and taxes. While you can run a D&D campaign without a single dungeon, they are a fun and powerful tool at any Dungeon Master's (or DM's) disposal. These structures house many horrors and treasures.

However, knowing where to place a dungeon can be half of the battle, especially if you're looking to break away from some of the more common areas for them. For many DMs, the other factor to consider is catching veteran players by surprise, which requires some thinking outside the box. So let this list serve as a source of inspiration next time you're planning.

8 ♌ In Or Under A Fight Pit 𝓀

Death By A Thousand Steps

Players typically love a good fight pit. A place for gambling and showing off your physical power. Or, in your campaign, maybe your players have to battle for their freedom in gladiator fashion. But what if defeat in the pits didn't mean death, or even more simply, that the party leaves empty-handed?

Instead, you can have the floor of the fight pit open up, bringing your players crashing down into the middle of a dungeon. This could be that only those who can make their way through are set free or that, instead, it is assumed no one will survive. You could have a whole city's worth of fighters down there, ready to help or hinder the party at the drop of a hat.

7 Under The Players' Keep Or Castle

No Dungeon Like Home

As your adventure party travels together and lines their pockets with gold, chances are they will decide to purchase a keep of some sort. They may even be gifted a castle, mansion, or the like from someone wealthy they've aided along the way. What if this house turned home held a terrifying secret underneath it?

Whether you make it importaꦉnt to the plot or something that your players can just come across, hiding a dungeon literally under their noses is bound to lead to some mischief. It could also leave them second-guessing any purchase or gift they receive for the rest of the campaign.

6 In A Temple Or C🍸hurch

Worship And War, All In One Place

Even if you don't have a party member who has devoted themselves to religion, like a cleric or paladin, many campaigns feature these religious buildings for one reason or another. Your players may seek them out for resurrections. There may be a wicked cult spreading chaos. Why not have it be the backdrop for a dungeon?

And, unlike other dungeons filled with beasts and mimics, it could house fiends and devils, or celestial creatures if you're looking for a real surprise for your players. Having a dungeon hidden in a place like this can deal a one-two punch to your players if they have traveled to it looking for aid.

The monsters and traps you have featured in any dungeon don't have to match the theme of the location. But it's worth noting that what dwells inside, as well as what riches and items are found, can widely vary, making dungeons so highly customizable.

5 🦹 City ๊Sewers

That's A Lot Of Sewage

While this is a more gross alternative to the dungeons in ruins and caves, if you're playing in an urban setting, sewers can make for a believable option. Not to mention, this could serve as a side quest that something has been backing up the sewers, and anyone they send down there doesn't come back.

Instead of having one big monster blocking everyone's pipes, you could have it be this dungeon that has become overrun with different hazards and monsters. You can even have the end of the dungeon bring them up into the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:home of a villain, causing the placement to make a lot of sense—bonus points for filling 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it with oozes.

4 💜 A Hedge Maze

And That's A Lot Of Hedges

Now, you might need to have some anti-magic in place to make this a challenge for resourceful players, but if everyday people can get lost in a hedge maze, couldn't one be filled with monsters and traps in the fantasy world? Especially if your party stumbled into it after exploring an old wizard's home who cursed the land, making it hard for trespassers to escape.

As the players pass through the hedge maze, they can come across bonuses and buffs to help them, chests filled with prizes, and then, of course, monsters and debuffs that will set them back. This would be excellent to use in a Halloween-themed or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Haunted House one-shot.

3 A Miliaꦦry 🍌Base Or Guard Station

So, Your Party Members Keep Breaking The Law?

Like with any of the options, there are a few ways to approach this. Maybe your players have be🏅en captured by the military of an enemy nation, and they have to battle their way through a dungeon-like array of rooms. They could have been arrested by the guards and tried to escape through their maze of a station.

Or it could be the shell of a building once used for these purposes, but is now the dwelling of an evil force that is arming themselves for battle. It could house not just multiple battles, bu♊t rooms filled with weapons, armor, and riches for the party to snag up before leaving the dungeon in their wake.

2 I🌺n A Pocket Dimension 🍌

A Dungeon Out Of This World

Picture this. Your party is about to close in on one of your campaign's bad guys and trigger a trap that teleports them into a pocket dimension. The only way out is to make it to the bottom (or top) of this dungeon-like plane, battling through each of the threats inside.

If that sounds like a scenario you'd like to run, just be sure it's not easy for your group to simply teleport back out. But even just making it so that plane-shifting spells don't work in this space can be enough to force your players to make it through the old-fashioned way: by walking and battling their way to the other side.

1 Under Where The Players Met 🍨

Ending How You Started

A lot of campaigns find themselves starting approximately the same. With the "so you meet in a bar" scenario makes it easy to bring characters from all walks of life together. Well, even if your campaign starts this way, it doesn't mean you can't throw them for a loop by either ending it or ending a story arc this way.

After years of adventuring, they go back to the bar (or location) tha🌠t started it all. A mundane place where no one would have any way of knowing the importance of this first meeting. Unless either a wicked foe or force knew that these exact adventurers would be therܫe exactly when they needed to be to start off the story.