It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Feeling’s mutual! Thank you so much for inviting me for this chat today.
You’re a busy institution; I wasn’t sure you’d have time for this.
Nonsense! I haven’t been asked to chat in ages and ages and AGES. Everyone just wants to kick in the door and get it done, you know? Happy to have a conversation for once. Love it.
Then let’s get started, shall we? Introduce yourself, please.
Hello! I’m the Plundered Tower on the Edge of Darkness, and I’m a dungeon!
Now when you say ‘dungeon,’ this brings to mind a wide array of possible meanings. Please describe which of them you feel identify with personally, if that’s no trouble.
Certainly! I’m not a dungeon in the traditional sense of being a jail you throw prisoners into – although I certainly contain a few of those, let me tell you! Rather, I am a dungeon as the place of excitement and intrigue and reward and mystery, existing just one possibly-perilous journey away from a conveniently homely settlement. More specifically, I’m an overgrown and ruined watchtower some six stories high (and my lesser outbuildings clustered around my base, which are in greater disrepair than myself) left to moulder for centuries, signifying that this place was once considered ‘civilized’ and other such concepts and has now been overcome by the forces of entropy and barbarism. I’m an ironic mirror held up to the follies of empire – and as such, a subtle advocate for its benefits and a warning against its enemies! Devious, aren’t I?
Indeed. What are those enemies? Are they represented within you?
Oh, of course – I have a wide variety of inhabitants, all of them symbolically rich. For example, my gatehouse is full of gigantic rats and there’s a huge centipede in my belfry.
Ick.
Oh yes, that revulsion is the entire point! See, these are household vermin… but on a scale fit for a nation! My infestation with outsized pests represents the disrepair that the household of humanity has fallen into in my immediate vicinity, and thus expunging them through violence is transformed from the simple killing of animals into a heroic deed akin to cleansing a poorly-maintained house for the benefits of its hapless inhabitants. A blade-as-a-broom, you could say.
That doesn’t sound like quite the kind of heroism most would sign up for.
Well of course – that’s why it’s all symbolic, to suck people in. It’s like my biological metaphors for societal outgroups.
Pardon?
I call them BMSOs! It sounds cute, and it’s a lot simpler than remembering what the hell they’re called. Kobolds, goblins, trolls, apemen, lizard people, troglodytes, cannibals, gnolls, orcs, hobgoblins, goatmen…nobody can keep all that straight! And most of them are basically the same anyways. They’re really just dehumanized embodiments of those that fall outside the boundaries of the society represented by both my original state and the humble little hamlets that adventuring groups come from. Their bizarre but ultimately superficial quirks hide this ugly symbolic reality behind a façade of manly slaughter and pulp.
What kind of superficial quirks?
Well, there’s a few kinds. There’s the trivially obvious stuff, like the visually bizarre, biologically gross, and standard slurs – stuff like making them ugly and bestial and caricaturized and making it clear they’re all stupid and filthy and live only to destroy. That’s easy, and the physical aspects can be used as little motifs to make killing them interesting – orcs having light-sensitive eyes, for instance, not only marks them as disturbing and antithetical to diurnal hominids but also rewards clever adventurers for using terrain, time of day, and careful use of supplies against them! That’s the sort of shtick that gets people invested – and that kind of thing can be useful in ANY monster, not just the BMSOs. It can get really complicated with the big ones.
Give me some examples of those – do you have any inside you?
Oh yes; every dungeon needs a big showy finish, or at the very least a motherlode where the danger and potential for reward meets a fever pitch. That’s where you put your showstoppers. I’ve got two, an evil wizard and a juvenile dragon.
Which is your favourite?
Oh gosh that’s always such an unfair question – I love them both, of course! But in different ways, you know? An evil wizard is like French fries: they’re welcome EVERYWHERE, no matter what. Cave in a hillside? Evil wizard, mixing foul potions. Tower on a cloud? Evil wizard, besetting the countryside with magical storms. Magical castle inside a glass orb in a dungeon embedded beneath the continental crust? Evil wizard trying to erase the concept of free will and become a god and also maybe cross-breeding an owl and a bear. So versatile, so simple – the concept of an old guy who can command and the universe obeys him, wrapping up the concepts of knowledge and social hierarchy in a single robed crazy bearded scrawny man. Mine’s a necromancer, I think. He’s raised the captain from his crypt underneath the tower as a wight-lord, and most of the dead guards from the bonfire-grave as horrible cinderwraiths. Bless his crooked nose and cracked heart.
And the dragon?
Well, they’re classic. Can’t have a dungeon without a dragon – some big ugly monster that loves treasure is a MUST, and if it’s a literal dragon that’s just all the better, the bester! Also they’re sort of fun because they embody a societal vice but externalize it as originating from OUTSIDE the society. See, a dragon’s about lustful greed, wrath, pride, and usually a good pinch or three of sloth – but it lives by itself in a cave and indulges all of those just by existing,, which it then inflicts upon the countryside. All at once it warns you that These Things Are Bad but tells you that their REAL cause is people like you becoming akin to stuff from Far Away, rather than any inherent flaws within your home or town or kingdom or whatever. And of course they breathe weird nonsense. Mine’s a juvenile mauve drake, so it spits flans.
That sounds delicious.
Oh no, they’re molten flans. Six hundred degrees inside, animate, try to ooze inside your orifices. There’s a surprising amount of monsters named after foods.
Is there any particular reason for that?
Oh, some. But not all.
You’ve lost me.
There’s lots and lots of detail within me, but it’s sort of selective and fixated on particular KINDS of information. Like, I can tell you that molten flans were created by an anonymous mad wizard, and I can tell you that you can find one to six of them 20% of the time if you linger in my ruined kitchen. But I can’t tell why the hell they’re called flans. Similarly, I can tell you there’s a tribe of 32 BMSOs lurking in my old stables, where they build crude altars of horse bones to worship my mauve drake whenever they see it fly out to prey upon the cattle of the villagers, and I can tell you they have 2 shamans and 1 chieftain with a magical axe and fourteen women which are noncombatants for some reason and eight young which frankly are just bait to rationalize child-killing as morally and biologically logical, and that their altars contain a single rough-cut agate apiece worth a specific monetary value (more if it’s cut properly; gets people invested in their treasure beyond just looting it). But I can’t tell you why they’re worshipping the dragon, or what’s led them to take up residence here specifically, or why they’re so fixated on kidnapping and sacrificing villagers every full moon. The traps are where it REALLY sinks in: I’ve got a secret door behind a bookcase in the captain’s quarters that leads to a secret passage that has another secret door in it (press the discoloured flagstone three times) that leads to a spiked pit and if you pull the eighth spike in it a secret door opens in the pit’s wall to a treasure chest. The treasure is a cursed necklace. I have no idea why any of that makes sense.
I see. Speaking of treasure, you seem to have an awful lot of it for a long-ruined tower.
Oh, absolutely. Treasure goes where danger goes, so that sort of thing just happens – basically every inhabitant I’ve got is a magpie, inadvertently or deliberately. The drake is greedy and hoards anything shiny; the wizard uses obscure and obscenely lavish implements in his blasphemous rites; the BMSOs are festooned with crude trinkets from their victims despite having no concept of money; my graves are filled with valuable pieces of armour and coin just ripe for robbing. Hell, even my weathervane has an emerald stuffed in the eye of the manticore that decorates it. Sometimes there’s an explanation, sometimes it’s just…there. The explanation for each given item of value is nice if it’s there, but it’s not as important as the underlying assumption at work: that places outside your home are dangerous but full of value and that those that dwell there either don’t recognize it or are morally unfit to be its custodians or have stolen it from the deserving folk who are just like you. Or all three. Usually it’s all three. Anyways the important part is that people come to me seeking violence and financial gain.
And what do they do when they’re done?
Wander off, usually. That’s the thing about adventuring: nobody really PLANS to retire; they just keep going until they just lose interest. I’ve seen a lot of folks loot me top to bottom before going home, swearing they’ve got to do this again next week, then never ever coming back. But there’s always some oddballs that get addicted. They don’t come back again, though. They usually just move on to other dungeons. Fine by me; that’s when I get refilled.
Are you acquainted with these ‘other dungeons’? How do you get along with them?
Oh yes and it depends, respectively. I’m what you call a ‘starter dungeon.’ Just a little bit of danger from a little bit of nasty a little ways away from a little town that’s facing a little bit of a problem from it, filled with a little bit of treasure.
That’s a lot of diminutives.
It is, but I am! And I like that, and I take pride in it. No matter who you are, everyone’s been in a starter dungeon. Nobody moves on to the Doom-Mines of Far Low Deep Kruuk without passing through me first and finding the ancient rubric in the wizard’s chambers that leads you to its hidden back entrance. And they know it, and they appreciate it! Me and Doom-Mines, we’re like THAT, you know? Just like THAT. Tight as thieves. Specifically, thieves stuck inside a magical chest of devouring teeth.
Are there any other starter dungeons near you?
No. Not really. I mean, not that it’s worth knowing. The Forest of Fruundy doesn’t count. Is it a dungeon if it isn’t a series of discrete rooms, I ask you? You know what that place is? A bunch of random nonsense stapled together with no organization. Anyone could go anywhere in there and just do ANYTHING. No rhyme no reason no sense no ORDER. Stay the hell away from that place. UGH.
Well, thank you for-
I think it has elves. ELVES. In a FOREST. There’s traditional and there’s unimaginative and tell you what I don’t NEED to tell you what THAT is.
-spending some time so generously with us today-
And a UNICORN. What good is a unicorn? They won’t fight you unless you’re a jackass. The kind of jackass we don’t encourage, at least.
…Is there anything you’d like to say to all the prospective adventurers out there?
Not even any good treasure on ‘em. Huh? Oh. Yes. Live nobly, fight constantly, loot everything, and bring your friends. And tell them to bring theirs too. Always room for more.
Thank you.
Thank YOU. Mind the trapdoors on the way out. They’re under the flesh-eating fungus.