Black Fang's Dungeon: A Masterclass of Design

I'd like to talk to you today about my favorite dungeon. It's not some sprawling multi-layered thing like Arden Vul, or the old 3.X era delves like Rappan Athuk or Slumbering Tsar, or even an old-school classic like the Tomb of Horrors. Instead, I'm gonna be extolling the virtues of Black Fang's Dungeon, which comes with the Pathfinder First Edition Beginner's Box. Now, I love this box to hell and back-I grew up on Pathfinder-but as I grow older I appreciate how it functions both as just damn good game design, but also as a really good teaching tool for making dungeons for a group of Elfkissers. Its fundamentals are strong enough that I would recommend doing the porting work to 5th Edition or Draw Steel or whatever. 

With that in mind, I'm gonna go through the entire thing, so spoilers for Black Fang's Dungeon. It's great, you should buy the Beginner's Box and bug someone else to at least run the dungeon for you. (I don't make any money from that endorsement but like...my DMs are open, Paizo)

When you fight the dragon at the end, the book says to show them the cover art of the box so they understand what they're looking at.

The Importance of Editing

For a commercial roleplaying product, clarity of information is (usually) desirable. Your text has to make sense to one group of people as filtered through the medium of another person. If this kind of structural editing is poor, you risk losing clarity or even the sauce altogether. Or you become Modiphius I guess. God I wish someone would play the John Carter RPG with me.

The editors here knocked it out of the goddamn park. Areas are clearly labeled, encounter maps clearly set up, stat blocks are easy to read, different colors of text mean different things, and (aside from the dragon at the end) they all fit within a single page for ease of reference. I don't really have any notes here for us as GMs to learn from, aside from "This editing is fantastic, omnomnomnomnom." But I just wanted to make sure it was appreciated.

Love some tasteful use of color and bold text.

Every Day's a School Day

While not as explicit in the matter as Tomb of the Serpent Kings, Black Fang's Dungeon is really good at introducing people to different facets of the game. The first area allows players to dick around against two non-threatening enemies, the second room has a locked treasure chest to introduce ideas of searching and skill checks, and so on. Both players and GMs are able to learn as they go, with important rules bits highlighted on the page for the GM to see. This helps get the GM ready as they go through the rest of the book later on. 

Don't you know, you never split the party!

Differences in Kind

For that matter, every room is different. It's a very all killer, no filler kind of dungeon. The flaming altar and the wishing well are different kinds of puzzles requiring different interactions, and there's a potential sidequest involving tracking down a toy for the local goblin boss! This is actually something I ding Menace Under Otari, the 2nd Ed. Beginner's Box Adventure for: where the first box's King Fatmouth can by default be talked to, his successor, the kobold boss Zolgran, isn't, and I think that's a shame. 

Even within combats, however, each combat encounter in Black Fang's Dungeon is a separate and memorable one that teaches a different aspect of the game:

• The drunk goblins in Area 1 give the players a safe place to figure out the system.
• The spider in Area 5 teaches players about surprise rounds, difficult terrain in the form of its webs, and how to circumvent them. 
• The reefclaw in Area 7 has the potential to attack the party while they're split by a large channel of water, forcing a change in tactics (especially if your best swimmer isn't your best fighter).
• The goblins in Area 9 are a possible social encounter, teaching the lesson that doing quests for people gets rewards. If you fight them though, you have to deal both with being outnumbered and facing an enemy spellcaster. 
• The skeletons in Area 10 are immune to cold damage and resistant to all damage except bludgeoning, making them deceptively tough despite their low hitpoints. The party will have to change their approach for this, using some combination of blunt weapons and/or a cleric. 
• The dragon in Area 11, the titular Black Fang, is something of a final exam: he's a deadly encounter with an area attack, but he can be made easier by getting advice from the goblins and getting the Dragonbane Longsword from Area 7. 

This kind of separation makes each individual encounter memorable and prevents them from becoming blurred together in the player's heads. I like to approach each encounter as though it's the title of an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: a high concept hook to get folks excited. 

Empty Rooms

In his essay "More Empty Rooms," Wolfgang Baur argues against design maximalism and in favor of leaving room for things like whimsy. He cites his work on Fortress of the Stone Giants, and how it ended up being a slog of fights against giants (he also talks about like...Fourth Edition and the Dragon Age RPG and funnily enough the Pathfinder Beginner Box). Something I think that Black Fang's Dungeon does well is occasionally just include weird shit. There's no reason for there to be a magical well, but there is, and you can interact with it. 

There was apparently a wizard who lived here a long time ago and had trouble swimming, and that might be something you follow up on. Who made the graffiti that foreshadows the dragon? I don't know! You make it up! I'm not typically a proponent of this kind of design in my trad games-if I'm buying an adventure I want an adventure, not a moodboard-but a little bit of it goes a long way. Like salt. Or anthrax. 

Unfortunately it seems Paizo itself hasn't learned this lesson.

Real Dungeons Have Curves

In terms of things I wish the book was more explicit on...

If you read this blog, you know the importance of Jenell Jaquays' work. I don't need to tell you that. The nonlinearity of her dungeons, aside from just making it more difficult to map the fucking thing, also instills a greater sense of exploration and ownership over the path the players choose.

The map, with routes drawn in piss yellow by yours truly.

Crucially, this also gives the players Room to Fuck Up. Hypothetically, a group of players could just carve their way up north and face the dragon early, completely missing the gem in Area 4 and the sword in Area 7 that make that fight a lot more doable, and while it does suggest having Black Fang run away after a few rounds or if he knocks half the PCs down (or gets hit by the longsword), ultimately it's the party's decision and the party's consequences. I wish that the book talked more about this part of dungeon design, rather than the terrain effects of uneven flagstone, since there isn't much advice on Flow within the book itself. 

No, that wasn't a joke.

In Conclusion

Black Fang's Dungeon is great. I've heard good things about MCDM's Delian Tomb, and I'm excited to look into it at some point, but for me this is the gold standard dungeon for introducing people to dungeon-delving and elfkissing. Through a combination of stellar editing, map design, and encounter design, it is a triumph, and everyone involved should be proud of their work.