I build a lot of dungeons for the tabletop games I play. They're not always literal dungeons, but conceptually almost every map layout with enclosed spaces is a game dungeon. The game dungeon is a way to enforce passage through specific points on the map (usually a door), to conceal surprises hidden away in a room behind a closed door, and to enforce a somewhat linear progression through a story plot. I've got games that create dungeons with cards, or tiles, or a board with little door tokens, or just by drawing lines on graph paper. When the Boarding Actions expansion for Warhammer 40,000 was released, it changed the way I build dungeons for roleplaying games and wargames on the tabletop.
I've written about my love for Boarding Actions before, but even in that post I admit early on that Boarding Actions is almost too simple to be considered a game expansion. All it does is take a game and put it into a maze (or dungeon, if you prefer). But make no mistake, that simple idea changes everything. For a wargame, it has all the benefits a dungeon has for roleplaying games. It opens up new story possibilities, it restricts how you strategise during the game, it adds atmosphere, it forces difficult choices, it conceals surprises, and it can enforce linear storytelling (depending on how you create the map). Those are all known factors for an experience Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant player. It may have been a planar shift for wargamers, but it's not news to DnD players that dungeons make for good playgrounds. But what's exciting about Boarding Actions for me lately is what it does, better than anything else, for dungeon building.
Boarding Action uses walls (some with doors and some without), which you connect to pillars. Because walls are always anchored by pillars, they're easy to connect, they're sturdy even when you throw a wall on the table as a partition, connected to nothing else. You can build dungeons wall by wall, if you want, as player characters progress. And players can knock a wall with a hand accidentally without bringing the entire dungeon down.
It seems like a small detail, but having doors that open and close is an amazing feature for dungeon terrain.
I've played tabletop games, like HeroQuest and Doom, with doors that are just cardboard stands. It works, but I have to admit that swapping a closed door for an open frame in HeroQuest can feel like a real chore (probably because I'm also frantically setting up the enemies in the room the players have just revealed). To be fair, in HeroQuest an open door can never be closed, so it's a one time swap. The "sliding" doors of Doom do open and close, and the way the game board is configured the doors are pretty convenient, but doors without walls never feel right to me.
With dungeon walls that have opening and closing doors, there's never any question about what state a room is in, or what state a door is in. The door is open or it's closed, because you can see it. And it's easy to change it, because it's on hinges.
And I love that the doors are physical objects in the dungeon. For whatever reason, players don't tend to argue when yet another monster throws open a closed door. Was the monster there moments ago? Was it written into the adventure or is it just a wandering monster the Games Master popped into the dungeon to spice things up? They'll never ask, because the monster came through a door. You can't fake a monster behind a door. A door conceals all.
Like the 5-foot square of a grid map, wall sizes offer stability and predictability for the Games Master. While setting up rooms for a dungeon, calculating room and hallway dimensions are easy because you know exactly how many walls and pillars you have. It doesn't take long before you start thinking of maps in terms of room sizes visualised as walls and pillars. For instance, with my terrain set, I know I can have a "big" room (3 long by 3 long) plus 2 "small" rooms (2 short by 2 short) and a few hallways in between. But I also know I could lots of small rooms if I place the big room behind a secret door (the discovery and opening of which would trigger a map change).
It might sound like a drawback, but my available terrain also limits the scope of a dungeon. As a compulsive dungeon mapper with grid paper notebooks full of whacky dungeon ideas I'll likely never actually run, I know the value of planning for actual physical space. I'm not going to stop running silly dungeons that allow my imagination to run wild, but it's also refreshing to have the tools to just give players a classic dungeon crawl experience. Sometimes it's nice to keep it simple. Not every dungeon has to have collided with an elemental plane, or feature magically shifting realities that change the shape of the room. Sometimes you just want to set up some rooms, take note of traps and treasure, and let the players loose.
I'm excited about Boarding Actions terrain as if it's a new thing, and of course it isn't. Dwarven Forge has existed for a long time, and places like Dirt Cheap Dungeons offer walls of varying textures and designs so you can construct mazes and dungeons on your RPG table. The Boarding Action terrain I own isn't what's sold by Games Workshop, but MDF cut-outs by Battle Kiwi.
I'm also acting like I've switched to 3d maps for my roleplaying game sessions, but I haven't entirely, for lots of reasons. Carrying all that gear to the game is basically impossible, and very often it's just not necessary. Very frequently, hastily drawn lines on a dry-erase mat is all we need or want.
However, Boarding Action terrain is an amazing asset when you want it. It can be the driving force of a gaming session when you have nothing better planned, or it can be the inspiration or guiding light for a dungeon you're designing, or the thing that makes an important boss battle especially memorable. If you've never tried introducing 3D terrain elements into your RPG battles, consider trying it out to see how it changes play.
Header image by Seth Kenlon and used according to the Creative Commons cc0 license.