THIS is how I build STORY-FIRST dungeons

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]The moment a dungeon starts to feel like just an obstacle course, players who come to your table to tell stories start to check out. It pulls them out of the fiction and the player GM relationship shifts from collaborative to adversarial. Their thought process morphs from what should we do next to what does the DM want us to do next?

[00:00:17]Don't worry though, the good news is it's an easy fix. We just have to change the way we approach our dungeon design.

[00:00:23]My name is Sam. I'm a dungeon master and former teacher and I spent the last decade teaching over 100 new players how to play Dungeons and Dragons. So yeah, I have built a lot of dungeons. This is Tabletop University. Let's build one more.

[00:00:38]There's this idea that a narrative game and a dungeon crawling game have to be two separate entities. Either you are delving through a dungeon and you're looking for traps and solving puzzles, or you're focused on the story and rarely enter dungeons of any kind. But the best dungeons, in my experience, are the ones that do both of these things equally well. The story first dungeon.

[00:00:58]Designing your own dungeon can be a perfect playground for coming up with puzzles, traps, and combat encounters, but the insert encounter here format can also be a pitfall. Your players fight the monsters because they happen to be in the way. They solve a puzzle because it happens to be how you get to the next room. If you want to build a dungeon maxer story, you have to come to terms with the fact that every dungeon is itself a story. And a story is nothing without its main character. Don't start with a location or a cool trap you thought of. Start with the way you tell any story. Identify a main character, then build out from there. By the end of this video, you'll have a dungeon you can drop right into your game, complete with puzzles, traps, and challenges for different sets of skills, but all of which serve the central story of the dungeon. I'm actually going to walk you through a five room dungeon I have ran quite a few times over the years. It's gone through a few different iterations, but it's probably my favorite dungeon to run because I've never seen it completed the same way twice. All the names and lore have changed depending on the campaign or oneshot that it shows up in, but here's the gist. It's built around a central room with a great puzzle your players will love. Three smaller rooms with different challenges that give multiple characters and players their moments and then a boss fight at the end. Oh yeah, and the whole thing is haunted. Originally named Death of a Duelist, the latest version, which was reskinned for my fantasy western setting, is called the gunslinger's ghost. No matter the setting or style of your campaign, dueling is a universally recognized art form, and you can easily reskin every element of this dungeon to fit your campaign.

[00:02:32]First, we have to get the party to the dungeon. Literally anything can be the hook, though. A significant treasure, a family heirloom. Tailor your hook to your campaign. So, who is our main character? One of my current players is doing a treasure hunt in the style of national treasure. So, the ghost is his great great-grandfather named Silus Kain, and one of the three keys to the secret family vault is around his neck.

[00:02:55]If you want a more classic ghost story, you can always just have the ghost be terrorizing the local town at night. Now that we have our main character and a reason for the party to enter the dungeon, we build a story around that.

[00:03:08]A long time ago, Silus made a deal with an otherworldly entity. For me, it's usually a hag to never lose a duel in his own home. In classic Hag fashion, that's why he's here. It's forever. He has to now guard this place until he loses that duel. Just like that, we have the setup for our boss fight. Silus's four closest followers chose to stay with him here. Silas started looking for loopholes in this curse and challenged his own men to a duel. They knew they couldn't beat him. They'd seen what he' done to other people, so they broke the rules and ganged up on him, killing him.

[00:03:40]But because they cheated the duel, they were now cursed as well. And now the spirits of all five haunt the dungeon.

[00:03:46]The goal of your players, if one of them can beat Silus in a duel, they will free him and his men from their curse.

[00:03:52]Alternatively, they can just kill him in a straight fight as long as they don't agree to a duel first. But he will continue to haunt the dungeon afterwards.

[00:04:03]The players hear organ music coming from the keep until the moment they open the doors. As they enter the main burial chambers, the first thing your players will notice is the massive pipe organ in the center of the main room with strange symbols carved into the keys. Silus was a renowned duelist, but also a musician.

[00:04:22]The organ is surrounded by four skeletal guardians on horseback. Mine look like cowboys this time, but you can make them knights if you want to. If you press a wrong key on the organ, it plays a horrible noise and wakes one guardian and their horse. They attack instantly.

[00:04:38]If you press more than one, that number wakes up and attacks as well. If you kill the skeletal guardians, but touch the wrong keys again, it revives them with half health. This can and occasionally does happen more than once.

[00:04:49]There are three side rooms, each with various challenges representing memories of big moments from Silus's life. The guardians have satchels on their side, each of them containing journals that catalog moments they remember from Silus's life as well. Make the journals obvious to anyone who examines the skeletons. A lot of the adventure rides on these, so you don't want to hide them behind a skill check. The year on each of these is marked, and that will come up later. Like I said, it's all fairly simple, but there is one wrinkle.

[00:05:17]They're not alone.

[00:05:20]Let's think back about our main character again, the ghost of Silus Kain. His primary goal is to be free of his curse. So all his actions should reflect that, even if they're wildly inefficient and get the party hurt. His primary ability is something called possession. Silus will attempt to possess a PC at random times throughout the dungeon. And it's really up to you how frequent this is, but I typically do it first at the very beginning and then right after they complete any of the challenges and have Silus comment something about what's going on in the room. Uh his only goal though is to play the organ. If they play the correct three keys in order, a trap door will open from the ceiling with a rope ladder that leads to the final boss room. At his core, Silas really wants them to succeed. He wants the curse to be broken. So, his demented ghost just knows the organ is the key. So, when he possesses people, he will make a beline for it. Even if that includes walking off elevated platforms and taking damage. If the party has blocked the way somehow, he will run into it head first, dealing damage to the host and the structure barring the way. He does not attack other players though until they attempt to physically stop him from progressing. Silus uses the ghost stat block, but with a couple notable changes. If the party is lower than level five, I completely remove the withering touch attacks. They're just a little too strong. And add in that he can only use horrific visage while possessing a character. Also, when the host takes damage, they get to retry that charisma saving throw. When he is dispossessed from a host, he immediately retreats to the ethereal plane for a while to wait for his possession attack to recharge or whenever there's a good narrative moment for him to come back.

[00:06:59]There's a dance hall in a spectral saloon where Silus originally won the heart of his wife. Everyone else dances in pairs, but a woman dances alone.

[00:07:07]Players must succeed on a performance or athletics or acrobatics check to capture the attention of the spectral woman on the dance floor. There is no set DC for this. Just allow the players to explain what they attempt on the dance floor and adjust the DC and check type depending on their choices. If a player fails their check, the other spectral dancers howl at them and they take 1d8 psychic damage. Hey, Froto. For the player who completes the challenge, ask them what their dance looks like. If they succeed, the woman gives the PC a handkerchief with this symbol on it. If a PC has a handkerchief or one of the other three items that show up later, they get advantage on the charisma save to resist Salice's possession. When that does happen, they can feel that item emits some warmth, and this is a clue that they should spread them out among the group. Froto's decided that this is a good time to clean himself. So, this is what's happening now. Uh, the next room is a room with No, don't do this. Okay, it's just his feet. Uh, the next room is a room with a giant mirror, and the PCs can see the reflections in it, but the reflections hold guns or hand crossbows standing in the street on a sunny day.

[00:08:08]There's a table with special guns and ammo if they want to pick them up. Then, if a PC points their pistol at their reflections, there's immediately a duel with their reflection. They make an attack roll with the pistol or a slide of hand check. If they succeed, their reflection will fall over dead with X's in their eyes. They have to figure out a way to eliminate all the reflections in the room. If they do, the mirror wall will open a tiny compartment where they can find a cowboy hat with one of the carvings on it. Silus won this hat in a duel with a law man a long time ago. And the hat has a carving of the symbol and a hole where Silus's bullet went through back in the day. It's a simple scenario that gives your characters the opportunity to get creative. The rule is that every reflection in the room must be defeated. That presents a few loopholes. If one character wins and the others just leave, the mirror compartment will open since the mirror has no way of knowing how many entities there actually are. One character in my most recent game used a reflection from a bottle to see behind him. And since the reflection was holding a gun instead of a bottle, it couldn't see him. And he was able to just shoot him. No roll necessary. In the final room, there's a spectral barkeep behind the bar. You can see five bottles on the shelf behind him, and they each have a symbol that matches the keys from the organ. The barkeep insists that all drinks are on the house. You have to figure out which of these bottles was Silus's signature whiskey. Now is when I need to bring up the journals from earlier. One of them details the moment that Silas found his signature drink and describes the two flavors within it. They each require a constitution check, finally giving a high constitution a function other than just having more HP. Each consecutive tasting for a PC requires a higher check as their tolerance starts to come into play.

[00:09:54]With any good puzzle, there comes a time to put it all together. The journals.

[00:09:58]The first one tells of the curse and the day they tried to kill him. It also says that the only way the curse can be broken is by defeating him in a duel, although no one ever has. This tells you the stakes. Journal number two tells of the day Silas met his wife on the dance floor. Journal number three tells of Silas's favorite whiskey. Journal number four tells of the deal with the hag that made him win the shootout in the street with the law man. They have to hit the three keys and symbols in order of the years the three events happened in Salace's life. If they do this correctly, a ladder will drop from the ceiling through a trap door and it leads to Salus's burial chamber where the ghost embodies the skeleton of Salis Kane.

[00:10:40]Every story has a climax, and this one is no different. The upper room is smaller and has no exits. This is your opportunity to make a setpiece that intimidates or delights your players.

[00:10:50]Ideally, both. The last time I did this, I had Silus's skeleton hanging from a noose. His ghost flies over the skeleton. It ignites into flames. He takes a knife out of his boot and cuts himself down, landing right in front of them. Silus becomes much more lucid and coherent once he's back in his original body. Spectral skin reforms over the bone so they can actually see his face again. He wants them to succeed. So, he comes down and eagerly asks for a challenger to duel him. He'll even ask if they need to prepare first. He's actually very encouraging. He even has an extra gun. If someone agrees to a duel, he'll just give it to them. Again, hand crossbow if you're doing fantasy.

[00:11:28]If a player agrees to the duel with Silus, here's how I handled those mechanics. First, every roll is going to be a subtle roll for both the DM and the player. They'll roll it in front of one other player and then write down their answers before revealing at the exact same time. Revealing the results this way really captures the feeling of that quick draw duel that you need to make this land. It's handled in two phases.

[00:11:50]First, there's the quick draw phase.

[00:11:52]Players can roll initiative or slide of hand to see who gets to shoot first. Any player can choose to take disadvantage on this role to gain advantage on the attack roll that comes next. After the quick draw phase is the attack phase.

[00:12:05]Both participants will make an attack roll with the pistol or hand crossbow.

[00:12:10]Any hit will take either opponent down to zero HP. Be very clear about this before they agree to the duel. They can add proficiency if proficient with firearms or hand crossbows. And others can even help, but they can't attack.

[00:12:23]They can use the help action, but they have to give a legitimate way that they're helping without actually participating in the fight. Because again, if they break the rules, that's how you get cursed. Once they make it to the upper room, Silus will be encouraging if they choose to duel him.

[00:12:38]He'll be pretty annoyed if they don't and will get angry because he knows no matter what happens, his curse won't be broken. If no one is proficient with pistols or hand crossbows, he will literally teach anyone who wants to learn, and they will immediately gain proficiency in this weapon forever. You can add an extra layer to this by having him give him a little pep talk just before the duel starts. Come on, kid.

[00:13:00]You got this. He will, however, shoot to kill. He knows firsthand that if he doesn't try, it doesn't count. You've probably noticed this trend throughout the entire dungeon, but you should say yes to creative thinking. This is usually where the journals or other artifacts can come into play. If they offer him a drink of his favorite whiskey, maybe he gives disadvantage on his shot. One group of mine read the journals out loud to him. So I gave him a Bane or minus 1d4 for each story that they told him. For one party, the duelist held out a handkerchief instead of the gun. And Silas couldn't shoot. He dropped his gun, fell to his knees, and said, "End it."

[00:13:38]All in all, there's a lot going on in these five rooms. There are four journals with individual stories about a man's life. There are five whiskey bottles. There are eight piano keys.

[00:13:48]There are five rooms and one ghost which you can adjust however you want that is haunting them the entire time with a mad dash to play an organ. Because of these variables, I have never seen it completed the same way twice. And I've ran this a lot. When you build a dungeon around a story and its main character, it sets up your players with the opportunity to make big choices in that story. And at the end of the day, that story is all that matters. You can find a PDF of this dungeon for free on my Patreon. There's a link down below. This dungeon is part of a creator community event on YouTube called Dungeon Jam. If you want a full library with a bunch of dungeons to drop right into your games, you can find the Dungeon Jam playlist right here. It's all free and there are some fantastic dungeons in here that start with the main character and then build out from there. If you want some alternatives and recommendations for reskinning this dungeon for your campaign, I made a separate short video about that because I was trying to keep this one at a manageable length. You can find that video among other bonus videos and PDFs if you choose to support the channel on Patreon, which I would greatly appreciate. As always, this has been Top University. I've been Sam.

[00:14:54]Thanks for watching.