Dungeon Room Index: Animal Rooms

Today we're looking at animal rooms: stables, zoos, aviaries, apiaries, hatcheries, and so on.

Here are the rooms:

Life finds a way

Animals are one of those touches that breathe life into a fantasy world. After all, if the only things alive in this world you've imagined are the people, how "living" and "breathing" is this world really? We'll address that a little more at the end, but for now it's enough to say put some animal rooms in your dungeon.

Animals are all around us, and we thinking-beings do a lot to keep and cultivate them. Just think of all the different reasons to keep animals:

• For labor. Whether to ride them, or to pull a cart or plow.
• For study. To learn their behaviors, to glean some insight into or from their survival mechanisms or biology.
• For testing. To test human remedies without risking human lives.
• For harvesting. Whether it be gathering their fur or milk, or their silk or honey.
• For companionship. Some people gotta have their fur-babies...
• For entertainment. Animals, especially exotic ones, are a spectacle.
• For preservation. Animals, especially exotic ones, strike some as something that it would be a shame to lose from the world.
• For eating. Yes... by the numbers probably the most popular reason.

With that as a primer, to inspire this batch of rooms I did something a little bit formulaic, and I want to explain to you how this sausage was made (too soon?).

I started by coming up with some broad groups of "animals":

• Mammals
• Birds
• Bugs
• Fish
• Reptiles

Good enough. I will be very loose with these groupings anyways (snails are "bugs" in my head, and a crustacean or giant clam is a "fish" for my needs); they're just to get my creative juices flowing.

Then I brainstormed a variety of kinds of "rooms" associated with animals:

• Stables
• Zoos
• Nurseries
• Hatcheries
• Apiaries
• Aviaries
• Holding Pens
• Pastures
• Paddocks

I noticed as I was doing this that these don't really represent distinct "categories", so I needed to think about it a bit longer. I noticed that a "Hatchery" and a "Nursery" are very similar--both have to do with raising infant creatures. Other rooms are specific to one kind of animal, yet refer to animal related activities that are easily generalized--"apiary" is a place where beehives are kept for their honey, yet we could collect products from a variety of kinds of animals, whether we have a word for where we do that or not.

To cut this anecdote short: I compressed my categories as much as possible, formed a table with my animal groupings on one axis, and some room categories on the other, then I tried to brainstorm at least one room for each intersection on the table.(This is a useful piece of advice when trying to come up with any kind of creative idea for "content". Do just a bit of broad research, group things into rough categories, and spark table the crap out of that stuff.)

Let's go over them!

Room Notes

Stables

A "stable" is a place where animals are kept to rest, usually for animals that are meant to be ridden.

A simple configuration, with stalls on the south wall, and a more constrained space between pillars on the north side. I imagine barrels of feed or grooming tools gathered between the pillars and against the wall.
Horses are an odd thing to imagine within a typical dungeon. But they could just as easily be skeletal horses, or some other kind of large, unusual mammal. (For some reason giant boars seem right at home to me inside of a dungeon. Weird, eh?)

Another configuration (I have embarrassingly forgotten to color the wall in the middle...). Perhaps this stable houses fat giant rabbits. Or big, hairy goats.

These stalls are so big there must be something truly fantastic in them. Like giant armadillos or siege-pangolins.
The southern half of the room is actually two levels: the lower level is depicted, a stair leads to an upper loft, held up by the pictured pillars.

Elliptical "cells" covered in sand served as resting places for giant riding lizards. Stairs descend on either side to a cramped hall with small "ovens" beneath each cell (to keep the sand warm). The hall is poorly ventilated, and so fills with smoke easily.

Multiple levels of open terrace housed flying mounts (gryphons, or birds of some kind.). Of course this means the terraces need exposure to some very open area to be useful. Perhaps this section of the dungeon is open to an outside cliff face, or simply a very large cavern with a wide exit to the outside.

Some kind of large fighting fish bedded here. Each stall has an accompanying winch for raising a gate, exposing the stall to the outer channel.

Large, round chambers are filled with deep mulch. Giant war beetles were stabled here, burrowing themselves almost entirely into the mulch for the night.

"Apiaries"

An "apiary" typically refers to bees. But the basic idea is that the animal produces something that someone else wants to gather.

Individual stalls are lined up, with a short wall between each, for milking some large mammal. (I have since learned that such a place is called a "milking parlor", but really, I think "apiary" is good enough, don't you? Plus, it's funny.)

This cavern houses actual bees. Giant bees. Enormous honey combs tower from floor to ceiling, tended by the clamorous buzzing of worker bees.

A more industrialized bee-keeping room: the bees occupy a lower chamber, and the combs are fixed to large panels that can be raised into this chamber (by the winches on the north wall) for easy collection.

Enormous clams grow in these large pools. They are kept for their giant pearls. Nobody likes to volunteer to collect them, however; the clams are a little aggressive.

Stalls like shallow baths line this room. Large, specialized reptiles were scrubbed for their loose scales, collected to be fashioned into armor and spear-heads.

Large fish were gathered at these docks to collect their magical tears. In a single session, one fish produced a small vial's worth of viscous liquid.

Ever seen a honey-pot ant? That's the idea here. On the second level, giant honey-pot ants enter from the north side, and attach themselves to the ceiling of the chamber. Walkways have been built up for workers to siphon off some extra nectar.

Cages line the walls, housing birds prized for their feathers. A central, cramped, spiral stair leads to upper walkways to yet more cages. (Insert as many levels as you please.) This layout could just as easily be for some kind of messenger birds.

These walkways are at least 50 feet above the halls below. Giant moths hang their cocoons from these walkways, and upon emerging, the remains are collected for their silk.

Nurseries

Rooms for rearing infant creatures.

Large deep pools hatch large spawns of fish, or eels. When hatched, the young are gathered with nets and barrels and carried elsewhere. They have to work quickly though: the young are quite aggressive, eating many of their siblings--or anyone unlucky enough to fall in.

Eggs are buried in the deep sand filling this chamber; the young reptiles that hatch must first dig their way to the surface, or they won't be strong enough to survive beyond infancy.

A single, large nest, carries a single, large egg. Double-doors are opened during the day to let the mother return to warm her nest and tend the egg, and closed at night for protection.

Natural pillars connect ceiling and floor. Walkways surround these pillars at their narrowes points, and sticky eggs cling to the pillars in large clusters all the way up to the ceiling. The eggs are harvested as a rare delicacy.

What nests on these cliff terraces? Giant hairy cave monkeys, obviously. In large nests of gathered debris and plant matter, or in shallow caves in the cliff faces.

Zoos

Large enclosure for keeping, observing, or studying animals (or just letting them roam or graze with a modicum of freedom. "Pasture" was a tough prompt in a dungeon.)

This semicircular enclosure housed enormous snakes, with a high, open ceiling, and warm rocks to bask on. Enormous barred windows allowed for safe viewing, but the acid-melted bars indicate it was never that safe to begin with.

A large pit forms a rocky enclosure, with many boulders, buttes, and shallow caverns. Great white-haired apes were displayed here, and viewed from elevated terraces around the enclosure.

A small, indoor lake houses large crabs, covered in algea--nearly indistinguishable from submerged boulders--and other fresh-water creatures. Submerged viewing areas on either side allow for underwater viewing through large glass windows (or magical force-fields. I like the idea that an invisible wall holds the water back. Perhaps even one that functions like a one-way door: you can enter the water from the outside, but you can't get out the way you came.)

Strange, exotic birds pirch in the thick branches of this ...tree? On closer examination, an expert would conclude that this entity is actually an unusual form of fungii, but the effect is that of a giant, fibrous, white tree, with bioluminescant pink leaves.

A large vertical cavernous chamber choked with enormous fungii. Most of the chamber is situated below the two main entrances. But the barred doors made of thick, black iron should be the first warning that whatever lives in here is quite a good climber. They ought to be with that many legs...

Similar take on the same idea, but this time all the entrances are well above the mushroom canopy, and the walls are smooth and wet. The occasional jostling of tall mushroom stalks indicates that there are indeed creatures stalking below, out of sight. The room might be crossed safely by jumping from cap to cap, but skittering things may just take the opportunity to burst from the jungle below to grab you.

Miscellany

It seems at first just to be a large cavern. But the ground is coverend in an enormous mound of poop. Giant bats hang from the cavern ceiling above, and the hot, steaming mountain is swarming with vermin.

An enormous cage hangs above an open chasm, connected to a cave opening by a rickety wooden bridge. The bars on the back side are slashed and mangled. Whatever used to be trapped here is clearly long gone, but by the size of the feathers you have to assume it was very large.

I'mma be real. I don't know what lives here. But I liked this image of a tall wall, pocked with balconied alcoves. It's like the many-doors Entrance from my first post, just less accessible. There's probably something worth finding up there for anyone willing to risk the climb.

A discussion on ecology

I love a good dungeon full of hungry monsters. I do! There is much fun to be had in just fighting or running from wild and wondrous beasts that want nothing more than to eat you, or torture you, or torture you then eat you. 

But, we can do more.

Don't get me wrong, if your dungeon is on the small end, or represents some high-concept, you may be best just sticking with the scary monsters. But, if your dungeon is meant to be big, or naturalistic, or part of a long-term campaign, or all of the above (where my megadungeons at?) I think we can benefit from thinking of them through the lens of ecosystem.

The circle of life

That could mean different things to different people, but basically I'm talking about including living things in your dungeon besides the overtly predatory kind.

Why? Well, because you might want to make your fantasy world feel like a world and not just half-price medieval Europe (or whatever time and place inspires you) with a few gryphons and hydras stapled on. What I mean is, if the only things of note in this world are the unbelievable things that want to eat you, then I think you run the risk of making your fantasy world feel a little bit thin (even more so if the only things that don't want to eat you are cows and sheep and other normal stuff.)

Of course, I don't want to create a bunch of extra work for you by giving you a big worldbuilding or speculative-evolution project. Instead, I just want to invite you to run through these questions when building your awesome dungeon or adventure site:

• What is the food chain like around here? I've got my scary predators, sure, but what do they feed on when they can't get adventurers? What are my prey creatures? What do they feed on? If nothing else, there should at least be some rats skittering around in these rooms.
• What sort of fantastic attributes would make even mundane, herbivorous creatures more interesting? Or elevate them to the level of non-trivial obstacles? Those giant slugs might not want to eat you, but they could still emit a drowsy mist when startled. Those sheep are wrapped in steel wool, etc.
• What kind of weird creatures can I come up with when my first concern isn't simple lethality? Constraints are great tools for creativity at times, but at others they're arbitrary limits on the imagination. Let yourself come up with interesting creatures that are benign.

Doing this isn't necessary for a good time, but I do think it can yield certain benefits:

• Fuller ecosystems are more lively. The mushroom forest is more immersive when it's teeming with colorful, pointless fungii, and ambivalent grazing creatures than when it's just a few purple mushrooms and a stalking-centipede.
• Fuller ecosystems can fill gaps in your encounter table. Empty spaces are important. But when we say "empty spaces are important" we don't usually mean "every other room should be a gray cube with nothing to look at". It's not always easy to come up with an interesting, lore-infused art piece to put in a room, or a really compelling hazard; innocuous, non-threatening creatures are just another tool in the toolkit to fill the gaps with something to look at and interact with.
• Ecological principles are gameable levers. If you know what a predator eats, you know what can be used to lure or bribe them. If you know where it's nest is, you know what to steer clear of, or how to effectively threaten something precious to it, or where to find some loot.
  A prey animal might be a source of a valuable potion component. A herd of docile creatures might be whipped up into a frenzy to cause a distraction. A fresh carcasse might alert you to a nearby threat. These don't have to be mechanically pointless inclusions; they can be just as functional and interesting as any other kind of set-dressings turned solutions-looking-for-problems.

Not just animals

For what it's worth, all of those ideas above can be applied to things that aren't just animals. While a very naturalistic dungeon might benefit from the addition of some grazers and whatnot, even a very fantastic and niche dungeon benefits from things that are not immediately threatening. For example, a crypt might have many animated corpses in various states of decay that are not actively hostile; just imagine how atmospheric it would be for your players to wade through legions of legless skeletons that can only grasp at their ankles without effect, or whispy ghosts that wail and moan but do no harm, de-materializing on contact. These things are fun and interesting and "alive" even if they're not a combat encounter waiting to happen! Food for thought.

Anyways, I hope that's helpful. It's perhaps a bit obliquely relevant at best to today's room type, but I didn't anticipate a better opportunity to plant these seeds.