I’ve spent a good chunk of the last two days down in a crawlspace underneath a house we’re working on, installing seismic upgrades. Which are steel plates attached to important joints in a house’s construction to stop it from shifting/shearing/falling during an earthquake. (Incidentally, the standards/county building code for how many you need is ridiculous, according to learned sources.)
I’m not a spelunker by nature, so I don’t spend a lot of time underground. I think the last time I spent a long time in a subterranean place was when I walked through a half mile or so of storm drain with a buddy of mine during college. There were bats. And cockroaches. And trash. It was an adventure.
The crawlspace reminds me of what I think a D&D dungeon would feel like, with the possible exception of the dirt floor (as I tend to think of most D&D dungeons as being carved out of the rock itself). There are spiderwebs everywhere, mostly with eerie spider skeleton-corpses hanging in them. The few living spiders are harmless but large for their species, and there were a number of suspicious-looking web bundles that I think may have been egg sacs at some point. There was evidence of rats (droppings, especially inside the insulation wrapped around the pipes), but no sightings of rats themselves.
I got to spend the entire time on my hands and knees, crawling to get from place to place, or sometimes even needing to squeeze through narrow spots by sliding on my stomach or back, sometimes even twisting around to get a good angle. Light was sparse, with a few floodlights and the use of my phone flashlight when those weren’t working well. Shadows sstretched long, and every time you needed to be careful about placing something odds were you’d end up with the shadow from your own hand obscuring your view of the site.
The air was dusty and made me cough, and nails came through the ceiling where the floor had been put down in the house above. It was like a constant low-level trap to navigate through.
I think I’d like to include some of these details in the next dungeon I run. Our dungeons in fantasy tabletop games are often spacious, relatively speaking. But, so often, places belowground are anything but. Our heroes should have to crawl, shimmmy, and squeeze. There should be wildlife that isn’t enough of a threat to warrant an entry in the monster manual, and evidence of an ecosystem beyond what shows up in random rolled encounters. Light should be a constant issue, once the sun is gone, and the air should be stale. It should be a place that never quite feels completely safe. Because that’s what a dungeon is meant to be, right? A low-level menace, even when you’re not fighting anything.
Or at least, that’s what I’d like to try next time I run a game.
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