RPGMemes

In a lot of modern guides on dungeon design, they stress thinking this stuff out. Yeah you should definitely have some idea why the inhabitants are here and not elsewhere, where their supplies come from, and how they interact with whatever else calls this place home.

They should have a place to sleep, eat, maybe recreation even. While the PCs poke around, the dungeon denizens shouldn't just be waiting around in preset rooms, fully ready to fight like MMO mobs. They could be on patrol, raiding their neighbors, sleeping, arguing, partying, whatever.

There's even fun things you can do with this like inter-faction conflicts between floors or other regions. Do the Orcs fear the dragon at the bottom of the dungeon?

Do the bandits have an uneasy non-aggression pact with a lich? Or are they constantly embattled with seemingly limitless undead because they're struggling for a legendary artifact?

Somebody's gotta reset all those traps, too.

Players should definitely feel like trespassers in a living place. Few people enjoy that ancient style of dungeon delving anymore, where you slay a band of kobolds, answer a sphinx's riddle, then bust in on a vampire who's as confused about why they're there as you are!

Where are the toilets?

Maybe the hallway but the local gelatinous cube roombas it up. (Eeeeeww) ... Or a room has holes dug dropping into an underground river. Or just a really deep pit, or a convenient portal to the Abyss LOL.

You can have fun with this stuff.

I ran a bitd game with a civil engineer playing a leech. 'Where does the poop go' got a lot of people killed.

My DM would burst out laughing at those questions and respond with:

YOU'RE the adventurers, aren't ya? So:

• explore and find out
• explore and find out
• explore and find out

Make the enemies coprophages and all the problems sort themselves out.

DM sweats profusely, starts searching for books on underground ecosystems.