Dungeon

A dungeon is a room or cell in which prisoners are held, especially underground. Dungeons are generally associated with medieval castles, though their association with torture probably belongs more to the Renaissance period. An oubliette is a form of dungeon which is accessible only from a hatch in a high ceiling.

Etymology

The word dungeon comes from Old French donjon (also spelled dongeon), which in its earliest usage meant a "keep", the main tower of a castle. The first recorded instance of the word in English was near the beginning of the 14th century when it held the same meaning as donjon. Though it is uncertain, both dungeon and donjon are thought to derive from the Middle Latin word dominio, meaning "lord" or "master".

In French, the term donjon still refers to a "keep", and the term oubliette is a more appropriate translation of English dungeon. Donjon is therefore a false friend to dungeon (for instance, the game Dungeons & Dragons is titled Donjons et Dragons in its French editions).

Dungeon!

Dungeon! is a 1975 adventure board game designed by David R. Megarry, Gary Gygax, Michael Gray, Steve Winter and S. Schwab, published by TSR, Inc.Dungeon! simulates some aspects of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-playing game which was released the year before, although Megarry had a prototype of Dungeon! ready as early as 1972.

Dungeon! features a map of a simple six-level dungeon with hallways, rooms and chambers. Players move around the board seeking to defeat monsters and claim treasure. Greater treasures are located in deeper levels of the dungeon, along with tougher monsters. Players choose different character classes with different abilities. The object of the game is to be the first to return to the beginning chamber with a set value of treasure.

Original edition

David M. Ewalt, in his book Of Dice and Men, described Megarry's original edition of the game as "a Blackmoor-inspired board game that represented TSR's most ambitious production to date: a color game map, customized cards, tokens, dice, and a rules booklet all packaged in an attractive box".

Dungeon (magazine)

Dungeon Adventures, or simply Dungeon, was a magazine targeting consumers of role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. It was first published by TSR, Inc. in 1986 as a bimonthly periodical. It went monthly in May 2003 and ceased print publication altogether in September 2007 with Issue 150. Starting in 2008, Dungeon and its more widely read sister publication, Dragon, went to an online-only format published by Wizards of the Coast. Both magazines went on hiatus at the end of 2013, with Dungeon Issue 221 being the last released.

Each issue featured a variety of self-contained, pre-scripted, play-tested game scenarios, often called "modules" (commonly referred to as "adventures" or "scenarios"). Dungeon Masters (DMs) could either enact these adventures with their respective player groups as written or adapt them to their own campaign settings. Dungeon aimed to save DMs time and effort in preparing game sessions for their players by providing a full complement of ideas, hooks, plots, adversaries, creatures, illustrations, maps, hand-outs, and character dialogue. It was a resource containing several modules per issue, significantly cheaper than standard-format modules.

Dungeon (band)

Dungeon was a melodic power metal/thrash metal band based in Sydney, Australia, considered by some as one of Australia's leading metal bands. The group existed from 1989 to 2005, released six full-length albums, and toured heavily both throughout Australia and internationally.

History

(1989–1996) Formation and early period

The band was formed in the New South Wales outback mining town of Broken Hill in 1989 by guitarist Tim Grose featuring himself, bassist Eddie Tresize and drummer Ian DeBono. According to an extensive bio at the band's official website, Grose took on the singing role due to an inability to find a suitable vocalist. The band played popular rock and metal covers and shortly expanded to a five piece with the addition of Tim's niece Carolyn Boon on keyboards and Jason Hansen on guitar. Randall Hocking replaced Tresize and by the end of 1990 the group's line up featured Grose, Boon, Jamie Baldwin (bass), Dale Fletcher (guitar) and Darryl Riess (drums). By February 1991 however, only Tim Grose remained but a short time later guitarist Dale Corney joined him and the pair wrote and played as a duo for about a year before relocating to Sydney in 1992. A demo was recorded and Grose and Corney decided to rebuild a complete band line-up.

Dungeon (video game)

Dungeon was one of the earliest role-playing video games, running on PDP-10 mainframe computers manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation.

History

Dungeon was written in either 1975 or 1976 by Don Daglow, then a student at Claremont University Center (since renamed Claremont Graduate University). The game was an unlicensed implementation of the new tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and described the movements of a multi-player party through a monster-inhabited dungeon. Players chose what actions to take in combat and where to move each character in the party, which made the game very slow to play by today's standards. Characters earned experience points and gained skills as their "level" grew, as in D&D, and most of the basic tenets of D&D were reflected.

Daglow wrote in 1988, "In the mid-seventies I had a fully functioning fantasy role-playing game on the PDP-10, with both ranged and melee combat, lines of sight, auto-mapping and NPC's with discrete AI." Although the game was nominally played entirely in text, it was also the first game to employ line of sight graphics displays. Its use of computer graphics consisted of top-down dungeon maps that showed the portions of the playfield the party had seen, allowing for light or darkness, the different "infravision" abilities of elves, dwarves, etc.

Dungeon (disambiguation)

A dungeon is an underground prison or vault.

Dungeon or donjon may also refer to:

Role-playing games