Believe it or not, among the dozens of adventures I’ve written for this site, there is not a single “dungeon adventure.” Sure, there’s many that feature small underground areas, a mini-dungeon or two, or even a trip to the Underworld, but none that are really a pure dungeon adventure.

Which is odd, because I love dungeon adventures, and have reviewed many on my YouTube channel. I have my favorites too, from old-school classics like Keep on the Borderlands and White Plume Mountain, to newer ones like Sailors of the Starless Sea or Trial of the Slime Lord.

But there are a lot of dungeon adventures out there for GMs to grab and play. It’s hard to separate great ones from ones that are mundane or unsurprising. For me, a great dungeon adventure has four qualities:

Great Dungeons Tell a Story

I don’t mean great dungeon adventures have a plot. I mean the dungeon itself tells a story as players adventure into it. It feels alive, has personality, and as the PCs go room from room, they’ll piece together what has happened here. Who built the place? Who was here before them? What was the place actually used for? The more vibrant the story behind the dungeon, the more it will feel alive and unique to your players.

Great Dungeons Have a Perfect Fuel Mix

Dungeons shouldn’t just be places where heroes crawl room to room, killing monsters in each one and grabbing their loot. The battles need to vary – the same tactics should never work twice. Fighting a band of kobolds will not feel the same as fighting a mummy juice elemental!

But more importantly, he best dungeons have a variety of encounters — battles, traps, puzzles, and even opportunities to roleplay. If a dungeon tilts too much in one direction, players learn what to expect, and the dungeon becomes boring. Try to include a variety in your dungeon, and your dungeon becomes better.

Great Dungeons Give GMs Tools

By nature, dungeons are constrained. It’s harder for players to break out from the walls and wreck the GMs adventure! This is probably why a lot of us RPG fans started playing in dungeons before we moved on to wilderness hex crawls or city-based locales. But the reverse is true. The walls of a dungeon constrain GMs, making it harder for them to hurry players along, apply pressure, give hints, or adapt to their group’s playstyle. An A+ dungeon gives the GM those tools, whether it’s a roving band of enemy adventurers, survivors from the last delve, enemies organized into factions, willing to hire the PCs for assassinations, or ghosts that haunt the player. All of these are examples of ways a dungeon adventure gives the GM tools to make the adventure more fun, not just relying on players to control the pacing.

Great Dungeons Have a Big Twist

The best dungeons have a twist, a turn, something that surprises players and makes them remember the dungeon. This is the hardest thing to include! It’s tough to know for sure whether your dungeon has one of these until a few groups have played it. But think about the classics — Tomb of Horrors’ green devil face, White Plume Mountain’s strange menagerie of creatures behind glass, or the room in Tower of the Black Pearl that literally puts the lives of every hero in the realm into the players’ hands. These are encounters that burn into your brain, and cause players to ask each other “what did YOU do when you saw the green devil face?” and compare stories.

If you have all four in your dungeon, congratulations! I want to play in it.

The 99 Devils

This month, I return to one of the first genres I visited on this site, “Arabian Nights Fantasy”. In The 99 Devils of Uzrah’s Palace, the PCs learn that a great pirate is planning to distribute his vast wealth among the survivors of his crew over the years. He picked a hard-to-find spot — old ruins on a faraway island. Hoping to trick him into thinking they once sailed with him, they visit the rendezvous point and enter the ruins… not knowing that the location the old pirate picked was once a palace haunted by a capricious djinn.

Along the way, the players will learn the history of these ruins and the sorcerer who once built it. They’ll face battles, ambushes, traps, weird magic, pirate survivors, and more. And I included several ways GMs can push and pull the players around — crocodile men cultists who have their own motivation for being inside the ruins, a sneaky wizard who has been teleporting in and out of the ruins for his own purposes, and a lesser djinn who just wants to keep the place clean and free of dust.

And the twist? The PCs can discover a monkey surrounded in a time bubble from when the palace was still new. If they’re clever, they can use the monkey to “unwind” time in some places, reverting ceiling collapses or opening now-locked doors. RPG rule #19 – nobody doesn’t have fun with a monkey!

As always, the adventure is free, includes pregenerated characters, fun handouts, and more. Enjoy!

Get The 99 Devils of Uzrah’s Palace for FREE here!

• The 99 Devils of Uzrah’s Palace (GURPS)
• The 99 Devils of Uzrah’s Palace (GURPS) – Printer Friendly
• The 99 Devils of Uzrah’s Palace (Shadowdark)
• The 99 Devils of Uzrah’s Palace (Shadowdark) – Printer Friendly
• The 99 Devils of Uzrah’s Palace – VTT Assets

Related: The Third Hall of Uzrah