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The original was posted on /r/osr by /u/great_triangle on 2025-09-01 16:23:09+00:00.

When it comes to old school dungeon crawling, one thing I like a lot is making dungeon levels very different from one another. In your games, what kind of dungeon levels do you like challenging your players with?

Here are some of my favorites:

The Tutorial Level: This is the most common first level of a dungeon for first level characters. The level is populated with passive and/or stupid creatures, such as animals and skeletons. The traps are often more inconvenient and embarrassing than lethal, such as ten foot pits, lodestones, and alarms. When something is a lethal hazard, the dungeon level has clear warnings and clues.

The War Level: This dungeon level has several factions (I prefer 2-3) who are actively fighting with each other. Typically, one faction will be invading the dungeon level, and struggling with logistics and limited resources, while another faction will be defending, and find themselves under siege. Advancing through this level provides the PCs a lot of opportunities to play both sides against each other, and creating an alliance with a faction will often enable the PCs to get through that factions traps and checkpoints.

The Dungeonforest: These dungeon levels contain a wilderness area which is magically lit, sometimes because of a hollow earth situation, sometimes due to teleportation to a whole hexcrawl. Dungeon forests provide a way to break up the gameplay, and highlight the abilities of character types such as Halflings, Rangers, and Druids. If having the PCs rest and end sessions inside the dungeon is desirable, the forest often provides a place where the PCs can establish a base within the dungeon.