I want to talk about the ethics of going into a dank subterranean space to kill monsters and steal their stuff. It’s a pretty loaded subject so a quick content warning for colonialism/imperialism, antisemitism, and racism.
As an aside, I am very sorry to anyone psyched about Queensblood but I’m going to have to delay it indefinitely. I am having some pretty intrinsic problems with making the game enjoyable that I am uncertain I’ll ever be able to resolve.
The Early Days of Dungeons
Early dungeons and dragons is primarily a game about skilled and resourceful play. The dungeon emerges as a sort of contrived game space to accommodate improvisation within limits, a way to make it so the DM only needs to prepare for what players can do within the confines of a space they’ve created. This is not a space that was constructed with a great deal of care as to why it would exist or what it means to the setting that such a space does exist. Dungeons have monsters and traps to challenge the player, and treasure to reward the player.
However, just because these spaces are gameplay-first in their construction doesn’t mean they don’t have a narrative justification. Dungeons typically have a hook – usually that the inhabitants are raiders, slavers, are plotting something nefarious, have captured a princess, or (of course) possess incredible treasures. And in these justifications we can find a treasure trove of assumptions and things to unpack.
Dungeon Justification 1: Players are Burglars
If you are raiding a dungeon first and foremost because it has treasure, then the players are little more than burglars. There is actually a somewhat liberating amorality in playing a band of greedy bastards, your actions are often obviously harmful but you don’t justify them on moral terms. In this case the dungeon, where there is the most treasure and the most peril, is akin to a bank heist. Players might be moral actors who wish to obtain vast amounts of treasure for some cause (or animosity for whomever in the world has great treasure) but are just as often amoral climbers.
But who has the treasure?
From a leftist lens we can easily imagine that a dragon sitting upon a throne of gold coins while there are tons of bandits, beggars, and impoverished peasants; represents a form of wealth inequality. The Dragon is the bourgeois, the orc warlord got his treasure by plundering it from those who could not defend themselves, the lich died centuries ago and yet continues to horde wealth.
A less charitable view however might point to the fact that the orcs, goblins, and drow of fantasy are frequently racialized. And while it might be preposterous to people who aren’t raging bigots but the idea that racialized people have tremendous hidden wealth… somewhere… just out of sight, is common on the right. To cite Umberto Eco’s 8th feature of fascism:
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Which might help us make sense of how the sentient goblins capable of speech and reason are simultaneously wretched creatures who live in squalor, and yet have more treasure than the entirety of the nearest settlement.
Perhaps the Thermian Argument poisoned nerd might argue that the goblins don’t want to build things and don’t understand the value of their treasure for X, Y, or Z in-universe nerd reason of the culture, faith, or racial psychology (yikes) of goblins. But that slaps us right into another batch of pernicious beliefs…
Dungeon Justification 2: Players are Heroes Colonizers
Okay, what about dungeons where the inhabitants are murderous raiders. This makes the players initially seem far more heroic and justified in their violent raid of what very much appears to be the home of a bunch of sentient creatures. However, the framing is still potentially extremely pernicious.
Chaotic creatures in early DnD are presumed to be intrinsically opposed to the forces of law. This isn’t a nuanced battle between law and chaos where both sides are capable of being dangerously extreme, law is good, chaos is bad. The chaotic creatures are bad because they are raiders and slavers… unlike the players who are definitely not raiders or the forces of law who seem to have a system of serfdom and tremendous inequality within their societies.
If you’ve ever seen a western, the idea of a raid by an objectively weaker group being used as justification for violent and disproportionate reprisal against a racialized other is a pretty common way to claim that the imperialists are good (or neutral) actually. A common defence of the Roman Empire is that actually, their vast empire is the result of a series of defensive wars that just so happen to make the empire bigger every time. Which is an argument with a lot of parallels to the way the USA and Russia justify nakedly expansionistic wars by claiming that neighbouring polities are an intrinsic threat to their security.
And this is the justification given in a lot of DnD dungeons, there is a neighbour to the forces of order which is intrinsically hostile or destabilizing. What’s more, once you have cleansed the dungeon of its inhabitants there are sometimes procedures given for turning that dungeon into a new home base or using that wealth to build strongholds of your own. It would only make sense that this naturally leads to the now expanded borders of law creating new dangerous neighbouring polities to seize. It is not enough to merely defend yourself from the forces of chaos, but you have to actively seek out chaos and murder it in its crib, often literally. There is a long history of nerd debate about the ethics of murdering goblin children, with a perhaps unsurprisingly large number of said nerds coming firmly down on the side of “yup, genocide good”.
Combine all this with the fact that the players are still rewarded for wanton looting and these are not heroic defenders of order but bloodthirsty colonizing mercenaries who use a thin moral justification to rob and pillage from the otherized forces of chaos while getting hailed as heroes in the lands of order.
Dungeon Justification 3: Players are Heroes Cops
This is just a slight reframe of the previous point, but often the world is not so much a colonial frontier as it is a relatively stable status quo. In these worlds the dungeon is often home to an evil mastermind or a gathering army waiting to overthrow or undermine the world. The moral justification is a sort of “first strike”, making the players a sort of swat team or special forces unit. In this case, the pernicious-ness of this justification depends a lot on the coding of the baddies. Militant operations against a genocidal lich lord genuinely does come across as heroic, the same operations against a tribal group clearly on the back foot compared to the forces of order comes across as something far nastier.
In either case, this justification makes the taking of treasure come across as really dubious. It somewhat undermines the righteousness of your quest if one of your priorities is to seize as much wealth as you can.
Of these three I find the players acting as burglars to be the most honest and genuinely least pernicious so long as you are cautious about racial coding. But let’s look at some other proposals for how dungeons could work as well.
Dungeon Justification 4: Players are Prisoners
This doesn’t work well for campaigns unless you’ve prepared a mega-dungeon, but maybe we could look at the word dungeon for a justification for the dungeon. The players begin captured or otherwise plunged into the midst of a hostile place with the goal either being to leave, or make the dungeon in some way hospitable to you.
Just because you aren’t here by choice doesn’t make you immune to perpetuating colonialism mind you. The cliche of a shipwrecked or otherwise stranded group taming their surroundings is very much a thing.
Dungeon Justification 5: Players are Revolutionaries
This justification is a lot like #2, but with the roles reversed. If the forces of evil or order are genuinely ascendant, and the players and their sympathies are with those on the margins then the same actions can be reframed in a very different light. This is the difference between a conquistadore and robin hood. You can raid the castles and vaults of mighty factions and be taking the tyrants of the world down a peg rather than further cementing the world’s inequalities.
Even your wanton looting is justified, that wealth goes into the downtrodden communities you come from and those magic items help you perform further liberatory actions. There is always the threat that your newfound power and wealth turns tyrannical itself, but that is compelling drama and might even end up saying something about the nature of power.
Dungeon Justification 6: Dungeons are Metaphors
This is very different from any of the previous justifications in that it does not try to make sense of the dungeon in a literal way within the diegesis of the story. The dungeon is a willfully unrealistic space. It represents things: loneliness, adversity, fear of the unknown, even a safe haven from the world of men.
In these dungeons, the dungeon itself is understood to be a sort of entity. Usually apathetic to your existence, but sometimes deeply malevolent. The monsters of the dungeon are not so much a creature with a precise culture or physiology that can be discerned as much as they are figments of that theme. The ratmen symbolize ruin and pestilience, the undead are something forgotten and faded, the demons are raw wrath and destruction. Asking about the foreign policy of the inhabitants or how they eat or sleep is completely missing the point.
Often these dungeons are journeys into the self as well. A sort of mythic journey into the underworld where your every action is heightened. In a mundane dungeon, a player cowardly abandoning their allies to save their own skin is the story of a coward. In the metaphorical dungeon, that same character becomes an archetype or symbol of cowardice itself.
Dungeon Justification 7: Dungeons are Boardgames, Players are Players
For my final justification I want to present the most basic one, dungeons are illogical and silly spaces that don’t really make a ton of sense… so just lean into it.
Why are you in the dungeon? Fuck you, you are already in the dungeon. I wrote a short blurb that gives some vague justification as to why you’re here but it doesn’t matter. What matters is trying to solve problems and be clever in a confined space. Don’t think about what’s outside the dungeon, there is only dungeon, there has always only been dungeon.
Rosalind Chapman 