dungeon ecology makes no sense
EDIT, 21/2/26: To Distant Lands has made a reply post. It's good! Here's a link for posterity.
Front and centre, here it is:
they just got here.
That's it, that's the post.
In a few more words:
you're using a stocking table and it's starting to look like a bit of a monster condo. Goblins in one room, wolves in the next, a troll three rooms over. What are they all doing here? Why have they not wiped each other out? WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHERE THEY ALL SHIT?
There isn't any shit. They haven't needed to shit yet. They just got here.
a dungeon is not a terrarium
"dungeon ecology", in my experience, often sparks visions of a self-sustaining food web frozen in perfect ecostasis(this is a made up word, sorry). The orc in room 24 eats the goblins in room 67, the goblin eats the spiders in room 54, the spiders eat the caterpillars you put in the intro text, and the caterpillars eat the rust-coloured algae you spent three sentences describing in room 12. Oh, and don't forget the shit. Um, yeah, the rust-coloured algae eats the shit I guess.
Ecology is entropic. Species migrate, adapt, die out. Climates change. The ecology of the location you are writing does not have to plausibly last forever. It could well be in mid-collapse. Hey, wait a minute. Could that actually be... more interesting than filling rooms with unmoving, demographically stable populations of creatures living in perfect ecological harmony?
You rolled a cave bear on level 4, which is canonically 100m below the surface. How did it get there? Maybe we could try to figure out how a population of cave bears is meeting the caloric requirements to subsist and reproduce in freezing pitch darkness.
...Or maybe we just say it wandered in. And it must be pissed off because it's dark and cold and there's only goblins to eat down here. And the goblins are pissed off because they're getting eaten by a cave bear. This shit practically writes itself!
migration creates tension
If your dungeon is ecologically stable, you will have to work harder to create tension. Turf is the primordial casus belli. Everybody hates an outsider. Why do the orcs hate the goblins? They just got here. Why haven't the orcs already killed all the goblins? Well, they just got here. "they just got here" is like fucking Flex Tape for plot holes.
I SAWED THIS DUNGEON IN HALF!
The dungeon is hostile
Closed loop dungeon ecology encourages thinking of the dungeon as an ideal place to put down roots. Rooms full of goblin families with little goblin toddlers running around painting ochre hands on the walls.
It's not! It's fucking horrible down here! The default assumption should be that the monsters are not here for good. They're actively, desperately trying to improve their situation in a hostile environment, snuffling around, making fires, discovering other monsters in the area, knapping flint, springing bear traps, burying their dead. Maybe they're trying to get the fuck outta there, digging tunnels and shit. If it wasn't for humans, it would probably be them on the surface, plowing fields, building cities and towns in the glorious sunlight.
The number of people who needed to read this is small. You, wise reader, probably knew this already. But hopefully you still got to enjoy nodding your head sagely and saying "hmm, yes, very wise."
So this wasn't a total waste of your time, here's a floor of a dungeon. It's a labyrinth -- more on that coming up soon.