Bringing the Town to the Dungeon

In recent posts, I’ve looked at orientating an RPG setting around a dominant social process, such as imperialist expansion or economic crisis. Something I want to avoid is repeating this exercise for the dungeon portion of a setting. I.e. I don’t want there being a separate and distinct set of “material conditions” applying to the underworld, in addition to those on the surface. 

In short, I want to bring the social conditions of the town to the dungeon.

Part of this is about efficiency. But it also undermines the whole idea of there being a dominant social process, if only a portion of the setting is influenced by it. If I’m exploring economic crisis as a driver of revolutionary upheaval, I don’t want a random clan of mushroom men skipping around oblivious to this.



Weird Writer has put out a helpful blog post along these lines. In their campaign, they are looking to eliminate faction play as something “naturalistic” to the dungeon environment. I take this to mean “natural” to the underworld, as something apart from the surface setting. Part of Weird Writer’s solution is to unify the social context of surface world and underworld, importing the former into the latter:

“The megadungeon factions are merely the factions of the external world, erasing distinction between modes of play and spaces”

As this approach seems a good fit for my campaign goals, I will look at Weird Writer’s advice on achieving this.