Play Environments, Power, Complexity, and Agency in D&D

Location types exist in close proximity to one another but serve very different gameplay functions.

There are basically four main location types in D&D (and D&D-like games): settlements, strongholds, dungeons, and lairs.

You might disagree with this taxonomy. The Welsh Piper's Hex-Based Campaign Design identifies two other types of "major encounters" (or locations): religious orders and natural phenomena, as well as many more "minor encounters" (or locations): camps, beacons, construction sites, battlefields, crossings, gathering places, and more. Sachagoat's Re-Inventing the Wilderness identifies not just towns, lairs, and dungeons but also "scenes" and "utilities". Hexographer has icons for oases, geysers, windmills, wineries, and graveyards. 

You can't really boil all the locations player characters might encounter in their adventures down to just these four broad categories. But these are, I believe, the "core four" locations around which a D&D-like game tends to be structured. They are the major locations characters will be interacting with again and again. 

There might be one settlement or stronghold which serves as a home base, a single megadungeon that props up the whole campaign, and one big bad monster lair such as a dragon's den or an orc camp which threatens the entire region until it is dealt with, or there may be many settlements to familiarize oneself with, many strongholds whose rulers must be obeyed or subverted, many dungeons to haul treasure out of, and many monster lairs to clear out or otherwise deal with.

Three of the four location types are those on the AD&D DMG's Inhabitation table:

Lairs are not included because it is assumed that these will be discovered when monsters are randomly encountered in their lair based on the % in lair statistic. I prefer to stock my sandboxes with these lairs ahead of time, which makes them set locations. Thus, when I create a sandbox, I'm populating it with these four location types. First I'm checking each hex for human inhabitation (including ruins). Once all areas of inhabitation are determined, I check the remaining hexes for monster lairs.

While I'm not going to argue that Gygax was right about everything or that his approach to designing D&D should color our perception of all such games in the present and into perpetuity, I do find this distillation of location types into a manageable few to be appealing. There are certainly others, but to me these feel very much like the most important, central locations in a campaign. (I replace religious orders, as defined by the Welsh Piper, with strongholds ruled by religious character-types like clerics, druids, paladins, and monks. And how many groves, stables, windmills, and wineries are keystone locations in the average campaign? I think it's not many.)

For further reading, I recommend my post on creating minimalist sketches of these four location types for the initial stages of sandbox prep. I think that's a good primer for better understanding the four location types and what I consider to be the most important information to know about each before diving into more detail-oriented prep.

What interests me about these four location types is what gameplay utility and experience each provides - that is, what is each location type for and how does it feel to interact with each?

Since my primary focus at this time is AD&D, I will be analyzing this topic through that lens. Not every D&D-like game will have settlements filled with unhelpful NPCs and burdensome taxes, strongholds ruled by character-types of a specific level with a specific number of men-at-arms, dungeons which conform to that particular early D&D logic, or lairs containing hundreds of orcs, but AD&D has come to color my perception of D&D and its derivatives as a whole, and many of the ideas here are still broadly applicable to similar games.

Settlements

I've already written a great deal about settlements in AD&D, the purpose they serve, and the vibe they give off. In short, they are incredibly useful places where player characters can accomplish mundane tasks such as reprovisioning, recruiting henchmen, and gathering information, as well as more fantastic efforts such as acquiring spellcasting services from high-level NPCs or even auctioning off captive dragons and selling monster organs.

While being useful, settlements are also often unfriendly, oppressive, and incredibly dangerous places where player characters are strangers and viewed as threats to the powers-that-be, where relentless taxes check their rampant accumulation of wealth, NPCs are sensitive jerks, diseases flourish, powerful factions war with one another in the streets, and almost everyone you encounter is trying to trick you, call the guards on you, rob you, fight you, or even kill you for looking at them funny.

Due to their nature as densely packed social environments with labyrinthine rules, odd taboos, and resourceful individuals and groups with independent interests in the player characters and what they do, settlements are immensely complex environments where the players must carefully consider and prepare for each move they make. 

It is this element of settlements which enables them to provide their other gameplay function (aside from sheer utility): political intrigue and high-level faction play. Above all, settlements are a test of the player's mastery of the complex social fabric.

Settlements are the lifeblood of an adventurer, allowing them to turn treasure into gold, gold into experience points, experience points into levels, NPCs into contacts, contacts into information, and information into further adventure. They also don't exist solely for the player characters' pleasure and utility. While they might serve as a home base to the characters, they are also highly dangerous. A wise player of a low level character will spend as little time as possible within a large settlement like a town or city before turning their attention back to those environs in which the adventurer truly belongs.

Dungeons

Dungeons are the low level adventurer's true home. Considering that low level player characters in a town or city might stumble into a high-level NPC who has a problem with them, a demon that's escaped a cleric's or wizard's control, or a vampire that wants to suck their blood, they really shouldn't be there if they can avoid it - or at the very least, they should avoid going out for a walk at night as much as they can. 

Similarly, they have no armies with which to contend with stronghold rulers or enough renown to be welcomed into the Keep on the Borderlands's inner bailey, and they are not strong enough to venture into the unpredictable wilderness and start clearing out dragon dens and orc camps. Dungeons, on the other hand, are much more suitable environments for early career adventurers.

Dungeons are "balanced". The 1st level of the dungeon is fit for exploration by 1st level characters. The monsters therein are drawn from a handful of tables including creatures that such characters could reasonably fight or otherwise overcome or engage with. It gets more dangerous the further down they go. Unlike the town or city, the dungeon is a simple environment with rules which are fairly easy to grasp. 

Obviously, that doesn't mean the dungeon is safe - there are monsters, tricks, traps, and other nasty things. Higher level monsters can wander up from deeper levels of the dungeon. A trick stairway might turn into a slide that sends the party down more levels than they wished to descend. A falling ceiling trap may instantly kill an adventurer of any level. They might get lost within, never to escape.

The value of a dungeon to an adventure is that it is a relatively simple environment with easily understood rules and structure. It is a place to collect treasure and experience points early in the game when the player characters are most vulnerable. Dungeons do not usually contain groups of monsters which require a small army to uproot, and there is not usually a powerful ruler sticking their nose in the party's business and exerting their will upon them.

That's not to say that dungeons are without intrigue. Just as settlements offer complex political faction play, dungeons have factions too - they're just (usually) smaller. The factions in dungeons aren't guilds of thieves and assassins with high-level cutthroats at their disposal or merchant consortiums that control the levers of power - they're groups of 2d4 hobgoblins, 4d4+2 kobolds, and d6+6 orcs (at least initially).

While factions and social play are important in dungeons, this is not the primary challenge of these locations. Rather, dungeons are a test of the player's mastery of a space. The primary mode of play in these environments is exploration. 

Play in dungeons is concerned with figuring out and dealing with whatever's in the next room. If there are monsters, how do the player characters overcome them, circumvent them, or collaborate with them? If there's a trick, what does it do? If there's a trap, how does the party disarm it or get around it? If there's treasure, how do they identify it and get it out? 

More advanced is not just confronting the dungeon room by room, but understanding the broader picture and how the room fits into the greater space. How does the room connect to others? Can the party use that information to plan an ambush or a tactical retreat? Where is it safe to rest? Where are the secret doors? The stairways? The hidden dungeon entrances and exits? What is the fastest route to the party's goal which allows them to minimize encounters with wandering monsters?

Exploration is key to settlement play as well, but like much of settlement play, the medium through which information is acquired is social. Players learn where to find an inn, where to buy equipment, and where to go to recruit henchmen by asking around. They learn how to buy and sell smuggled goods, where the assassins' guildhall is, and how to infiltrate the palace by leveraging their connections. They don't (usually) do it by mapping all the buildings on graph paper, looking for spatial discrepancies, and knocking on the right 10' section of wall (although they could, I suppose). Navigating the physical space of the settlement is less important than navigating its social dynamics.

Strongholds and Lairs

I feel compelled to address both strongholds and lairs together, since the two are difficult to parse. Is not a stronghold the lair of its ruler? Is not a monster's lair a place where it fortifies itself against intrusion by adventurers? A group of bandits, berserkers, brigands, or dervishes might rule a stronghold as their lair. A group of demihumans or humanoids or even a dragon might lair in a deserted stronghold.

It is worth pointing out that there are different kinds of monster lairs. What exactly a lair looks like is determined by the type of monster that lives there. It could be a cave, a camp, a village, a castle, or something else entirely. The most important distinction is not so much the type of place but the quality of creature therein - namely, is the monster intelligent or not, and does it appear in numbers or with minions?

The lair of an owlbear is a relatively simple - though still dangerous - environment, while a lair of orcs is more complex because of their greater numbers, ability to organize to repel invaders, and respond intelligently to repeated attempts to infiltrate their home. Whether they live in a cave, fortified village, or ruin will make a difference, but not a huge one. A dragon's lair might be comparable to an owlbear's if it's a dimwitted variety of dragon. It will be more complex if the dragon is intelligent or cunning, and even more so if the dragon has enlisted a small humanoid army as worshipers or mercenaries.

The idea for this post initially came to me after reading dungeon modules B1: In Search of the Unknown and B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. I felt that B1 is a good example of a prototypical dungeon (itself a deserted stronghold) and that B2's titular Keep and Caves of Chaos are good examples of a stronghold and a lair (or series of lairs), respectively. 

But reading through the Caves of Chaos, with their large homogenous populations of allied monsters who can all be mobilized to ward off intrusion together, along with their tightly-packed corridors where control of strategic chokepoints would prove essential, I wondered, "Is this really that different from a stronghold?" Whether the players choose to clear out the Caves or ally with their inhabitants to instead lay siege to the Keep, does the actual gameplay experience of doing either of those two things differ all that much?

Gus L. writes about this element of Gygaxian design better than I ever could in his post on All Dead Generations, Gygax's Fortress. In it, he writes about how many of Gygax's iconic adventurers like The Keep on the Borderlands, the Against the Giants series, and the Vault of the Drow (all of which detail what I would classify as "lairs") put siege-style gameplay front and center. Siege, you say...like the thing you do to a stronghold?

This is not to say that there is otherwise no overlap between all of these location types. The ruler of a settlement might dwell in a fortified tower. The Keep on the Borderlands is a place to provision and gather information as much as the Village of Hommlet. A settlement might contain a ruined manor which is essentially a dungeon, and a dungeon might house a large group of squatters or other inhabitants which form a de facto settlement within. Monsters might lair in settlements just as they do in the wilderness, and a wilderness elf enclave is a settlement of a kind. A ruin could have once been a stronghold. Monsters lair in ruins.

But the relationship between strongholds and lairs strikes me as different because they feel so similar when you consider how the players interact with them. If the players wish to roust an evil ruler from their castle, it's going to look very similar to clearing out the Caves of Chaos - a protracted series of forays into a defensible position held by an organized, (mostly) united enemy.

Much of this can be chalked up to aesthetics. A stronghold is a stronghold because it is a tower, keep, or castle. It has a gatehouse, battlements, oil cauldrons, ballistae, catapults, or whatever. A lair is a lair because it's a cave, an informal camp, or a hut in the woods. But it isn't always that - hobgoblins and orcs sometimes lair in above ground villages with ditches, ramparts, palisades, gates, and guard towers. Many giants and aquatic creatures like locathah and tritons live in castles.

You could also attribute the difference to ideology. A stronghold is a stronghold because the creature who rules it is viewed as a person or as part of the established order, regardless of their alignment or relationship to their neighbors. A lair is a lair because it is inhabited by crude monsters who are outsiders, without rights or the privilege of simply living. It's essentially Law versus Chaos.

That's all well and good (or bad, I guess), but it's unsatisfying to me because I'm primarily concerned with the gameplay function of these locations - what use do they present to the players, and how do the players engage with them? From that perspective, how are strongholds and lairs different?

One way to think of it is how the locations project power. Strongholds control a certain area around them and collect revenue from the settlements within their domain. They send out patrols of men-at-arms led by high level fighters. The stronghold's ruler might emerge to challenge the party to a joust, demand a tithe of treasure or magic items, or ensorcel the party to send them on some quest. Monsters in their lairs, on the other hand, just wait around for the party to come kill them and take their stuff.

But this is a disservice to monsters, and not entirely true. Monsters with a lair in the area should be included on wilderness encounter tables. Orcs can go out on patrol too, mounted bandits will surely raid any inhabited areas within their sphere of influence, and flying monsters like dragons can control and have influence over the entirety of a small region, even demanding tithes of treasure from settlements within their domain much the same way a stronghold's ruler might.

You could also make a distinction between the two on the basis of their relative locations. Strongholds are generally found in inhabited areas, whereas monster lairs are found in the wilderness. Strongholds are known locations and readily accessible to the players should they have the means to take them, whereas monster lairs are hidden and remote, requiring scouting to find and wilderness travel to reach.

This too does not hold up to scrutiny. More dangerous monsters are generally found in the wilderness, yes, but monsters lair in inhabited areas as well. Humans, demihumans, humanoids, giants, and even vampires can establish their lairs in close proximity to settlements, strongholds, roads, and cultivated farmland. If one of these creatures lairs in a fortified camp or stronghold, its location is likely known, and it is probably well within reach of player characters launching forays from inhabited lands.

You could attribute the difference to logistics. Taking a stronghold requires a small army and siege weapons - but clearing some monster lairs will require these as well. According to the AD&D DMG's Appendix C, a stronghold will have its ruler, up to five henchmen, and as many as 64 men-at-arms led by four low-to-medium level fighters. On the other hand, a gnoll lair can have up to 200 gnolls, 10 leaders, a chieftain, 20 guards, and either three trolls, 16 hyenas, or 12 hyaenodons. Humans, demihumans, and other humanoids also appear in numbers up to the hundreds with leader-types and (often) other monsters in their service. 

These will need to be faced with armies as well - and in many cases, armies which are larger than those needed to deal with strongholds. Facing a monster lair in the form of the aforementioned hobgoblins' fortified village or giants' castle will likewise require the use of siege weapons, just as strongholds do.

The distinction might also be a matter of politics. Strongholds are part of the established order - they are fortified positions in which armies can be mustered, which control a surrounding area and collect revenue from its inhabitants. Powerful people within the social fabric of the campaign will generally care one way or another about what happens to a stronghold, and they will be sticking their noses in the player characters' business if they get wind of a plot to usurp a local ruler.

But that's not to say that people won't care what happens to a monster lair. Goodly folk will likely be appalled if they hear that the party led an army to massacre a village of elves, and a powerful Evil magic-user who rules the local town will be none too pleased to find that the party has slain a manticore with which the magic-user was secretly aligned. Similarly, people's feelings about the fate of a stronghold can go both ways - fury if the party burns down a monastery inhabited by peaceable monks, or jubilation if they overthrow a tyrannical warlord.

The difference is utility. A stronghold is real estate which the player characters may now control. They are probably not going to take up residence in a cave cleared of goblins (and would not be able to raise an army there or collect revenue from it in any case), and might not be able to make much use of a castle proportioned for inhabitation by giants, but a conquered stronghold is a readymade base of operations for the player characters going forward, which will come with both perks as well as obligations.

All of these locations exist on a gradient which is perhaps best viewed through the lens of power, complexity, and player agency. Dungeons are relatively simple environments where players have a high level of agency despite their characters not having much power. There are factions within, but they are small. A local ruler might have opinions about what goes on in the dungeon and may lay claim to what is hauled out of it, but their ability to exert control over it is limited. Players of low level characters by comparison have much less agency in highly complex settlements, where powerful factions and high level NPCs rule, influence, and exert themselves upon those weaker than them.

Strongholds are somewhere in the middle. They are fortified, ruled by high level NPCs, and involved in regional politics, but they are not so formidable that they cannot be overcome by medium level characters, and their position (often) on the borderlands of civilization means that the more powerful rulers of settlements' influence over them will be somewhere between that of nearby dungeons and that of the settlements themselves. However the players address them will require some consideration and planning because they are of medium complexity.

So what then is the role of monster lairs? Because they can vary so much, they fluctuate along the gradient. They are stepping stones from one level of power, complexity, and agency to the next - the owlbear den is probably more dangerous than the dungeon levels the player characters have explored up to that point, but it is not any more complex (it might even be simpler), and the players have considerable agency in addressing it because it is unlikely that anyone will retaliate against them for clearing it out. These lairs give the players the experience (both in terms of experience points as well as accumulated knowledge) to later tackle more challenging locations like strongholds.

The lair of hundreds of organized men, demihumans, or humanoids may in some cases be an even tougher nut to crack than a stronghold ruled by a character-type, but past experience with such a stronghold (and the accumulation of revenue and mustering of an army in such a place, should the characters be able to hold it) will prepare them for the challenge. It is a more complex environment than the owlbear den because the monsters there will be true factions of their own - meaning powerful individuals will have opinions about them, which in turn will limit the players' agency. Like the owlbear den before it which provided the bridge to engaging with stronghold play, this type of lair will be the launchpad into high level play in towns and cities, with the player characters now powerful enough to assert their agency there.

We can summarize the complexity/agency gradient as a semi-linear progression as follows, from low complexity/high agency environments which require only a low level of player character power to engage with to high complexity/low agency ones which require greater player character power: dungeons > simple monster lairs > strongholds > complex monster lairs > settlements. 

There are of course more complex and challenging dungeons (or simply deeper, more dangerous levels of the same dungeons in which play begins), as well as simpler settlements (a thorp and a city are very different environments). We could complicate the progression like so: dungeons/simple settlements (thorps, hamlets, and villages) > simple monster lairs > moderate complexity settlements (towns)/moderate complexity monster lairs (where monsters are intelligent/faction-like but not huge in number (a clan of ogres, for example)/strongholds > complex monster lairs (a clan of 100 orcs, for example) > complex settlements (cities).

This is reflected nicely in my sandbox for B1: In Search of the Unknown. In that post, I anticipate that the players will begin by tackling Quasqueton, then venture into the wilderness to deal with the less complex monster lairs (the leprechaun, the giant eagles, and the owlbears), then graduate to the brigand stronghold and the slightly more complex/challenging ogre lair and adventurer camp, before finally being able to confront the evil illusionist who rules the local town.

None of this is prescriptive - the illusionists' stronghold is right in the middle of town, and the adventurer camp, brigands' castle, and ogre den are nearby. There's nothing stopping the player characters from checking those places out in the very first session, but they will face considerable challenge should they choose to try confronting them. This challenge might be readily apparent to the players, but if I'm conscious of it as well, I can be sure to signpost the danger in rumor tables and interactions with NPCs.

Regardless of how exactly we define it, understanding this progression is key because it informs how campaign play is structured. Player characters begin with a relatively small amount of power and a limited ability to affect the world. They begin play in less complex environments, which they can affect without entangling themselves in overwhelming complications. As they accumulate power, their ability to affect the world grows, allowing them to tackle more challenging environments while being equipped to deal with the complications which arise.

Each of these locations is essential to a standard D&D-like game not only because they provide different gameplay experiences to the players and utilities to the characters, but because each is a stepping stone to the next type of adventure environment, allowing the campaign to evolve in scale alongside the player characters' growing ability to affect the setting.