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Your options are sort of limited here. You're asking: "In an age where people have not built any large above-ground structures, what sort of large above-ground structures are there?" You need to either reach out to fantasy or think outside the box. Natural, mazelike terrain Open-air passageways through an icy tundra, or cracks in its ice. Effectively a ...

The traditional dungeon is really a literal 'node-path'. There are encounter locations represented by rooms connected by linear hallways. Really, the rooms are just physical places where combat, plot-points, or background color / descriptive bits can be handed out. The hallways are just the way you get the players from one node to the next. With this ...

The way I understand your question: you want the atmosphere to be different when exploring a dark place. I do not think it's something you can solve by tweaking the rules (especially with D&D, which is not exactly an ambiance game - personal opinion). Here are some tricks I would try: Switch off the light; it seems stupid, but fear of the dark is ...

Some ideas: I built a city in a ravine. The ravine was about 300m across and twice as deep. A town had been cobbled together inside the ravine. It was a maze of stairways, catwalks, multi-level plazas, rooftops, and arcades. A river flowed through the bottom of the ravine providing food, water and sewerage disposal. Two cranes at the top of the ravine ...

Here are some suggestions that would be different enough that they might make things interesting: Swamps. This works best if they are bog-like and have islands of solid ground linked by pathways that are surrounded by quicksand/mud/water. This also allows for unexpected surprises if they get too close to the edges. Rooftops of a city. Say, for whatever ...

The biggest difference between fantasy and sci-fi notions of value is that: ideas have value Therefore, besides the standard stuff players receive, they can also discover what amounts to IP. One of the oddest forms of IP is actually Real Estate, as it's a purely symbolic agreement that X owns area Y, even though X may not sit on Y with guns. (Note how this ...

They are defined on p97 of the Dungeon Master's Guide Concealed doors are doors hidden in some way: Behind a curtain Covered with plaster Trap door under a rug A PC can normally find a concealed door just by checking his surroundings well. Secret doors are portals that look like a normal wall to the naked eye. Typically it takes more effort to ...

Several come to mind without violating the Fantasy level of tech. Forest platforms (ala the Ewok City on Endor in Return of the Jedi, or the Wookie cities in Christmas in the Stars). Maze-like canyons and cave systems with open ceilings in parts. island-cities like Venice or pre-conquistador Tenochtitlan. Hanging cities like some of the abandoned Anasazi ...

Dungeons are often man-made, so why not try something with a more natural feel, like an overgrown forest, jungle or swamp? If it's sufficiently wild and untamed there'll be more than enough vast thickets and fallen trees that effectively block off routes and reduce the connectivity. Mist or fog can be used to reduce visibility and it can be very easy to ...

An important difference between a torch and a flashlight, which you noted, is a torch is omnidirectional. What other omnidirectional sources of light are people familiar with? Campfires. Ever sit at a campfire on a dark night and look into the woods? What can you see? That's right... squat. A torch, unlike a flashlight, is always in your eyes. It's ...

How about a high-altitude mountaineering adventure? Maybe the heroes need to find a lost city, or rescue someone from mountain bandits, or simply find a route from point A to point B (for trade, or scouting for a military maneuver). Once they're on their way, they'll be naturally constrained in which directions they can go because of the nature of the ...

Perhaps the monsters/guards/whatever are WAY too powerful for them to handle, so its them trying to remain undetected, so darkness represents safety instead of danger. [granted, this only works for a certain type of quest] The light will attract something that will otherwise be a non-issue (another torch-prevention method). Exploding moths, a powerful ...

So here's some things to think about with a torchlit party. There is a limited distance to the light. So you can have creatures outside it with, say, missile weapons shooting in with impunity (this requires large spaces of course). Though not necessarily that large; in Pathfinder for example a torch lights a 20 ft radius and dimly illuminates out to 40'; ...

What about the "boat towns" like those on the Yangtze or in the port of Hong Kong? Here is a little write up for my long-defunct Pulp campaign. See also this pic for inspiration. To get back to the "dungeon" feel the actual place should have been deserted, or the inhabitants have been dead for a long time, or whatever... you still get a set of ...

Some possible ideas: Dimensional wormholes; connections between planes need not be just a simple "pop in pop out" affair; you can wander twisting space/time tunnels and fight star vampires and the like as you wander. Similarly - a cross planar dimension. The "ether" is often used as a parallel dimension where creatures such as undead and the like reside in ...

One of the enemies of fire is water. Sure, your party may have stacked up on torches, but do they have waterproof bags? Put in an underground river or lake they have to swim through, or a waterfall they have to go through. The torches may be soaked afterwards, and take a few hours of drying before they can be relit. Distance may also work in your favour. ...

Might I recommend nests or a hive? If you really want to bend their brains, how about something Escheresque? You've likely seen the optical illusion of stairs that converge (drawn by MC Escher). Think crazy things like that. Then go back to using a castle.

As part of a short conversation in chat on how to physically implement low-light conditions on a battlemat, I made a couple of suggestions: Only draw parts of the map that they have seen. Use a template to indicate "lit" area (something like transparencies with circles of light range and a dot for centering on the light source). Remove (non-player) ...

A cliff city. Inhabitable areas are carved out and connected by a FEW paths, not heavily interconnected like a normal city is. Of course magical flight could bypass these limits and let you go anywhere. Alternately, a very jagged version of the Himalayas. There are small valleys that are flat enough for people or monsters to live in. However, mostly ...

It might be a few thousand years later, but something like Chichen Itza or Machu Picchu. But the complexity of structures in Egypt (e.g. the Pyramids) lend itself to the idea that with enough slave labor anything is possible.

You can deal with this by dousing the lights forcibly: A monster that eats light sources can be a huge annoyance. Give it a lot of speed and an ability to avoid attacks, and use it as a harbinger of a larger encounter, and your party will start cursing when they show up. Torches and sunrods go out eventually. Extended stays in dark areas will become ...

Check out the stuff available for other mapping programs. DTiles looks like it will work with most of them. RPTools has a fair number of free images available. Campaign Cartographers guild has a large number of user provided images

The Mistborn books deal a lot with nighttime skulking in fog by folks capable of superhuman vision that cuts through it & frequently comments about how normal humans not only show everyone where they are long before it's too late to get out of the way with their torches, but the light reflecting off the flog pretty much blinds them to anything more than ...

You haven't mentioned the magic level in your setting, but if high magic; the inside of a monster. I'm thinking the party gets swallowed by a giant sea monster, Jonah and the Whale style. You explore the belly, and intestines and such, and have to fight monsters that aid its digestion. There could be a large shipwrecks in a stomach (or multiple stomachs) to ...

Its hard to argue "forever" but the company have cut its cord with the printing company that made the tiles for them. They still own the rights, so unless they sell those rights off, we can only hope for someone making a DTiles-like product. My guess would be to look into some of Paizo publishings latest project. They seem stable in their economy and have ...

One thing to consider is the effect of carrying a torch during combat. If you want to hold on to the torch, require a "two weapons" mechanic. You cannot use both a weapon, a shield and hold a torch. A dropped torch is likely to go out (by having combat taking place on top of it, if nothing else). Even if it doesn't go out, a dropped torch is static and as ...

Goto RPGNow and look at the first three Traveller Adventures, Adventure 1 The Kinunir Adventure 2 Research Station Gamma Adventure 3 Twilight Peaks If you get one Twilight Peaks is the one to get. They are pretty stat light and while the Imperium is not a Eclipse Phase style background they do overlap in addressing various science fiction issues. For ...

I know this is most probably not the answer you're looking for, but I've just seen this and remembered your question, so here's a link to an image depicting Giant Vampire Frogs: http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/12/09/demotivational-posters-suddenly-5/ This specific creature seems to have been made up by a certain Alan Fomorin and it appeared ...

What you need to do is: Floor Tiles Create four jpeg images at 400 by 400 pixels (say water1.jpg to water4.jpg) Copy them into the DTiles directory Edit the library.ini file and add in a line like below after the [Floors] tag: water1.jpg|0|X:\DTiles\water1.jpg|X:\DTiles\water2.jpg|X:\DTiles\water3.jpg|X:\DTiles\water4.jpg here is an example unpack in ...