When the average person thinks of a “dungeon” they would typically think of a damp, dark, underground prison made of cold stone lined with cells caging criminals and unfortunate souls alike. Prisoners are clamped to the walls by iron manacles behind a thick wooden door or rusty iron bars. The average person wouldn’t be entirely correct.

The Origin of The Dungeon
In the early medieval period, most castles didn’t have dungeons since confining a person as punishment wasn’t common practice yet. As a matter of fact, the word “dungeon” itself comes from the French word “dunjon” (also spelled dongeon) meaning “keep”, which in turn referred to the Great Keep of the Main Tower, the most secure part of the main castle where the lord and nobility would live. However, as time progressed, the nobles moved into more luxurious bedrooms outside the dunjon and it became used to store valuable items and eventually important political prisoners as the practice of taking prisoners became more common.
After the 12th century, purpose-built prison chambers were built in the least desirable areas of newly built castles called “castle dungeons”. These dungeons are the ones that people nowadays are familiar with and that the fantasy genre takes inspiration from. In reality though, most dungeons were not always below ground; dungeons could be within a tower, within the gatehouse (where the guards lived), or behind heavy doors within the keep. What mattered the most was security rather than location.

The dungeons we will discuss ahead are nothing like the dungeons built during the medieval era; these dungeons are bizarre and abstract mazes where the brave risk their lives to find their fortune or their doom. These “fantasy dungeons” base their origins in real dungeons yet exist only within imagination and entertainment.

The Fantasy Dungeon
The Fantasy Dungeon originated from the first tabletop fantasy role playing game ever created, Dave Arenson’s Blackmoor. In this game, players would create fantastical characters on paper and let loose in a fantasy realm of Dave Areneson’s imagination, their actions and consequences of them dictated and described to players by Dave himself as they would all go on epic adventures centered around the titular Castle Blackmoor.
In the early 1970s, Dave Arneson’s players had become increasingly curious about Castle Blackmoor’s dungeon which Dave hadn’t originally created much for; it was just a typical medieval dungeon with very little to interact with. However, that didn’t stop the curiosity of Arneson’s players. In response, Dave, taking inspiration from a weekend of reading Conan the Barbarian novels and watching old monster movies, expanded upon the dungeon adding more tunnels and rooms filled with traps, treasures, and monsters until the dungeon became multiple floors deep and an essential component of the game itself.
Dave Arneson would then later go on to demonstrate his game to Gary Gygax in the fall of 1972. Arneson had partnered with Gygax previously as wargame designers, so it was only natural that the two then agreed to collaborate on developing “The Fantasy Game” which would later develop into the cultural phenomenon Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). As D&D spread like wildfire, it would also spread the concept of the fantasy dungeon as it massively shifted the fantasy genre, becoming a staple archetype within it.
As an archetype, the term “dungeon” is used to describe a space or a place that contains traps, treasures, and monsters that are typically labyrinthian in design. Fantasy Dungeons, like real ones, don’t even need to be underground yet, unlike real ones, also don’t need to be in castles or even appear castle-like. The scenario I described to you in the introduction was the beginnings of a fantasy dungeon.

As you will see moving forward, fantasy dungeons are bizarre, fantastical playgrounds that capture the curiosity and imagination of delvers and designers alike, providing them the opportunity for exploration and adventure.

And I can’t wait to explore them with you.