Dungeon Maintenance

Dungeons are the convenience food of adventuring: all the necessary perils and treasures in one neat package. There's even a type of gameplay, Dungeon Crawling, which consists of little but rooting through them. If you play Role-Playing Games at all, you've certainly encountered them. Most likely you've never stopped to wonder why the treasure chests are always full, or what the wandering monsters eat when they can't get adventurers. Have you?

You sheltered sod. Some of us have to work our butts off to keep those things together. Did you think that dungeons just grow out of the ground, like plants or dwarfs? Fantasy economies may be royally screwed up, but they could never handle a constant influx of high-powered magical artifacts. Or being eaten by the endless streams of monsters!

Oh yeah, the monsters. Your average dungeon is balanced, challenging, and themed. Nowhere in there is the word "ecosystem." We have to keep the place brimming with top predators - main diet: each other. All of them are pissed off, either to begin with, or from the things we have to do to stuff the treasure in them. Turn your back at the wrong moment, and a chaos ooze gets into the landshark pens and you've got two hundred extra blobs of ooze on your hands. When they're not fighting, they're sick, hibernating, or otherwise busy being animals. Many's the time the chimeras all went into heat, and the guys in Procurement had to do an all-nighter to paint spiders red and stick in some new spells.

The worst part is the clean-up. Light forbid that the heroes miss the Key to Eternity because it's covered in moulted gryphon feathers, right? Some of these beasts crap things that catch fire and try to kill you, so just try to imagine our mops. Go on. And the big chest at the end needs another Guthbrand, the Sword That Smites All That Is Impure, so you find yourself carrying the thing through the corridors trying desperately not to think of tits, so that it's actually a relief if you can focus on the sounds a rock mole makes when it chews through the walls and steps on the Pressure Plate that releases the boulder that you now have to roll up the slope for the twenty-second time.

I don't need this, you know. Most of the firm may be tied up underground, but I could get a transfer to restocking villagers' houses, maybe replanting the grass...

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Examples:

Video Games

• The entire premise behind Dungeon Keeper and What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? is spotlighting that being an evil overlord and having a dungeon created to slaughter hapless adventurers is hard work.
• This is Brick Road's passion in EarthBound (1994), setting up signs in his dungeon describing tricks of the trade and asking guests if they enjoyed their trek through it. He carries on his passion once he becomes Dungeon Man (an anthropomorphic tower), taking the time to set up more signs about everything he's learned about dungeon making.
• In Adventure, the progenitor of the Adventure Game and Interactive Fiction genres, completing the main quest causes the cave system to close for the evening. The player is stranded behind the scenes.
  You are at the northeast end of an immense room, even larger than the giant room. It appears to be a repository for the "Adventure" program. Massive torches far overhead bathe the room with smoky yellow light. Scattered about you can be seen a pile of bottles (all of them empty), a nursery of young beanstalks murmuring quietly, a bed of oysters, a bundle of black rods with rusty stars on their ends, and a collection of brass lanterns. Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: "Do not disturb the dwarves!"
• DragonFable has a starter level quest that lampshades this. You meet Robina, who takes you to distribute gold on wild animals for adventurer purposes. Of course, the animals don't see any reason to carry gold, so they need to be knocked unconscious first...
• Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle : Our heroine can get to an empty treasure chest before the government official responsible for refilling them. She's outraged by this lapse in standards.
• In Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards, many of our hero's deaths cause a sequence where his body is lowered into Sierra On-Line's underground workshop ("Where Adventurers Are Made, Not Born!") and dumped into a giant bit bucket. The machinery recycles it into several Larry bodies. The commander attaches a head from a rack to one of them, and raises Larry back to the game's starting position. Subordinates repair a Graham from King's Quest and a droid from Space Quest, and a dragon is down for maintenance.
• In Leisure Suit Larry 3 the characters visit Sierra studios. This involves damaging the props for Police Quest and being caught in the antigravity generator they use for Space Quest. Larry is hired to make the Leisure Suit Larry series, and they all live happily ever after.
• Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale: A golem is in the service of the dungeon, helping refill treasure chests, distributing monsters and changing the pathways.
• Planescape: Torment has the Modron maze - a construction intentionally built to be a dungeon to crawl. It contains monsters that acknowledge they lack a motive for being there, and such items as "A Clue!". And there are Modron who maintain the dungeon. Modrons are beings of pure Law, from a plane that is all mechanical. They are living robots and can't go outside their programming. The dungeon is an attempt to figure out why adventurers constantly risk their lives to explore dungeons, but they haven't quite figured it out.
• In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, there's a quest where you get to man a control booth for the dungeon Xedilian. A party of three adventurers enters, and for each one, you are given the choice of using a deadly trap or a sanity-destroying trick.
• In Fallout Tactics, there's a guy whose job it is to go around restocking all the Nuka Cola machines. In Fallout: New Vegas, there's apparently a robot out there doing the same for the Sunset Sarsaparilla machines.
• Illbleed: In the Killerman level the player goes "backstage" and sees all the props and costumes and stuff from earlier levels of the game. Which makes a certain amount of sense because the whole thing is supposed to be an amusement park (except that it really kills you? And Killerman is Killerman real? ... Okay, nothing in ILLBLEED makes sense).
• The Interactive Fiction game Janitor is based on this premise: you're the janitor who has to reset the dungeon to its initial state after an adventurer has defeated it.
• Also from the world of Interactive Fiction is (the far less in-depth) "Wandering Monster Ready Room", where you play a wandering monster waiting for hapless adventurers to happen across you. (Turns out it's a pretty tedious and thankless job.)
• Augmented Fourth has a hidden control room, and it's full of gnomes. Lenny the Head Gnome shouts orders, approves NPCs, oversees puzzle construction, and gets irritated at you for entering a restricted area. You can do so ten times and watch him get ever more disgusted.
  Lenny: "D'you put that music in the volcano yet, Larry?"
• One of the playable characters in Eternal Darkness is an architect who is forced into doing a little dungeon maintenance for the Big Bad. That probably explains why this dungeon stays in relatively good state for over two millenia until another character finally blows it up.
• Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel: This gem about Inexplicable Treasure Chests, which makes you wonder just how many times Tyria has restocked them.
  Aoto: Hey, there are treasure chests in the Tower right?
  Tyria: Well, no one would bother to come if there were no treasures.
  Aoto: Actually, I think the fact that there are treasure chests inside the Tower is surprising in the first place. Who the hell put such a thing inside the tower anyway?
  Tyria: Why, of course it was me. They were created at the same time as this Tower's creation.
• It's not intended as one of these, but there was once a bit of a fad among Dwarf Fortress players who are also tabletop gamers for using their own fortresses as the map for a Dungeon Crawl, often with a Mines of Moria-style Dug Too Deep plot. Particularly sadistic dungeon masters have been known to use Boatmurdered. The game itself also has a few elements of this trope; stone-fall traps only work once before they have to be reset, projectile weapons fitted to traps have limited ammunition stockpiles and all other weapon traps have a chance to jam (often because some unfortunate goblin got Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on it), all of which your dwarves will have to fix at some point.
• Viscera Cleanup Detail: After the heroes have defeated the alien invasion, who has to mop up the body fluids and patch the bullet holes? You do.

Anime and Manga

• Basically the entire point of Delicious in Dungeon, one of the running themes of which is the repercussions of Dungeon Crawling on dungeons. Dungeons are largely self-sustaining. Monsters have ecosystems of their own, and adventurers killing too many of one type of monster may have dangerous cascade effects. Tiny-to-microscopic monsters called "dungeon cleaners" eat corpses and foreign matter and repair any damage with their secretions, up to whole sections of wall blown to bits by an explosion and down to replicating weathering on individual bricks. Dungeons themselves are Genius Loci that respond to the desires of adventurers inside them, rearranging their interiors to generate Benevolent Architecture and Malevolent Architecture as necessary. People who want nothing more than a drink or a place to rest will quickly find clean fountains and empty rooms, but the more selfish their wants, the harder it becomes for them to progress. However, at one point the oddly convenient toilets set aside throughout the dungeons are brought up, which it turns out Senshi placed deliberately to harvest fertilizer for his golem fields.

Comic Books

• Hellboy: One strip has a bunch of animated skeletons setting themselves up to provide the appropriate dungeon atmosphere before Hellboy shows up fighting some forgotten thing from beyond the stars. After the fight, they pick themselves up and start leaving like actors after a show (a skull mentions he might be picked to play a part in Hamlet).
• A story in Knights of the Dinner Table focused on the care and effort B.A. takes into making a dungeon not only challenging and fun, but self-sufficient as well. On that particular dungeon, of course, the players end up scoring a Total Party Kill within five minutes down the dungeon's waste disposal system.
• Nodwick explored this several times. At one point the heroes explore a dungeon that's been revamped and put under new management, complete with brochures touting it like one would promote a beach resort. It turns out the dungeon's "managers" are professional kidnappers who are hired to abduct embarrassing nobility and use transformation and enraging magics to turn their victims into monsters, then letting adventurers dispose of them. Later on, the heroes end up owning their own dungeon and end up facing foreclosure because they're not keeping it up to community standards of sufficient vileness, given their "community" consists of other dungeons with names like "AAAIIIEEE!" that Piffany describes as being worse than a kitten cannery.
• Donjon Zenith is all about this trope. The Dungeon is a profitable business, run by a competent staff (or not so much competent ...) trying to give customers, er... adventurers what they want.

Fan Works

• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: Most of this is handled by magic: traps automatically reset and treasure chests refill, and any changes to the dungeon not secured with a permanency spell undo themselves once the party leaves. That being said, there are some nods to logistics: traps and treasure chests resetting cost mana, minions have their upkeep increased if they don't have something to eat, and themed floors and specialized rooms will provide foodstuffs for the relevant minions.

Literature

• Carolyn Cushman's Witch and Wombat novel has the titular witch escort tourists through staged encounters and dungeons in her real magical world, with them thinking it's a virtual reality program, in order to siphon off magical energy from them.
• In Dark Lord of Derkholm, a Corrupt Corporate Executive takes people from our world to a fantasy world and forces the locals to stage typical high fantasy quests for them. The book's main focus is on what said locals have to do to prepare for the tourists — and how disastrous the effects are for the world as a whole.
• Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, an RPG Mechanics 'Verse Light Novel about Dungeon Crawling, has a mechanism to make crawlers cleaning up after themselves. All monsters in the Dungeon contains a magic stone that acts as the major plunder in this universe, and removing this stone causes the body to disappear (sans any Random Drop). As a result crawlers have a financial incentive to clean up themselves, or through the use of Supporters.
  • Side stories by the author have expanded on this theme: for example, monsters can reproduce (rather than being born by the Dungeon itself) but it doesn't go well, making the descendants of those who escaped to the surface a very weak Underground Monkey inversion. The Dungeon also has "pantries" which produce a universal monster food, always far enough away from the vertical routes between floors that it's not worth the effort of visiting for normal adventuring.
• No More Heroes: Humboldt is a helpful dwarf who (with his unseen clan) maintains the traps and monsters of the legendary Crypts of Ramen and reads generic unhelpful prophesy to any True Heroes who come through, as well as serving snacks. Humboldt starts to explain why his clan have been cursed to tend the dungeon but the non-heroic Eddie cuts him off as he's tired and not really interested.
• In Soon I Will Be Invincible, supervillain Doctor Impossible talks about the frustration if spending months building an Elaborate Underground Base, filling it with deadly traps and then watching a Superman Substitute tear it all apart in seconds.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Tomb of Horrors has a host of fiends bound to it and forced to repair any damage done and clean up whatever is left of the latest adventurers.
  • Short story "Search for the Forbidden Chamber" in Dragon magazine #1. The protagonists encounter barricades labeled "Greyhawk Construction Co., Ltd.", a reference to Gary Gygax's famous dungeon.
  • BD&D module IM3 The Best of Intentions has a 36 level dungeon created by an Immortal (deity) and intended to train adventurers up to 36th level. One of the Immortal's avatars spends his time restocking the dungeon with monsters and treasure.
  • Module WG7 Castle Greyhawk (the "joke" version). In the lowest level of the dungeon below Castle Greyhawk is the Random Monster Generator, which creates and distributes all of the monsters that infest the dungeon.
  • Forgotten Realms has Undermountain, the territory of ancient Halaster Blackcloak, also known as "the Mad Wizard" — and it takes a lot to deserve such a nickname on Faerûn. So he set up the vast cave complex as a dungeon giving adventurers some good Mind Screw, mostly just for fun. Start with a piece of art in dynamic Malevolent Architecture genre, littered with refuse of his and his apprentices' experiments. Except for various unsavory beings he just allowed to live there, Undermountain was maintained in this shape by Halaster's spells, his pre-programmed spells, his own gate network, his custom magic items, overlapping fields of his permanent enchantments — you get the idea: Detect Magic discerns only the strongest auras in all the statics.
  • The dungeons' improbability became a subject of both serious study and parody by the game's makers. For example, Dragon Magazine, had a series of articles called "The Ecology of..." that explored the life cycle of a fictional creature and how it fit in with others. (The oddest monsters were explained as inventions of mad wizards created precisely to serve as living deathtraps). And of course it also made fun of the concept in its comic strips, with characters often lampshading the facts.
  • It's hinted that Elminster, the Old Mage, has, on occasion, gone round dungeons just planting magical items for adventurers to find. Admittedly he has a purpose for it - it's in furtherance of his duty to his goddess, Mystra, who promotes the spread of magic.
• Paranoia adventure Orcbusters. The wizard's dungeon has a "Wandering Monster Ready Room", where wandering monsters wait until it's time for them to go out and wander around the dungeon. This is a parody of the "wandering monster" tables in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

Webcomics

• The Kingdom of Hilla in Latchkey Kingdom has so many dungeons that the responsibility of maintenance is split between the Kingdom, the Dungeon Rats, and Yomunculi. At one point the dungeons are shut down for their winter ice-themed remodeling.
• Oddly enough this is played in Anthros and Dungeons, of course it's played in such a way that it would drive most people navigating the dungeon Completely Insane
  • Apparently the dungeon's maintenance crew cleans up every room after you leave it, which can cause some massive headaches if you have No Sense of Direction
• Eario in Brawl in the Family has this job in relation to the Super Mario Bros. series.
• The day-to-day job of the main cast in Dungeons & Denizens, as pertaining specifically to their boss's dungeon. Which isn't even run all that differently from an amusement park for the occasional tourists adventuring party passing through.
• Dungeon Construction Co depicts the trials and tribulations of a Dungeon construction company and attempts to answer questions like, "This tomb has been sealed for a thousand years. Why are the torches still lit?".
• Oglaf: A Mook in "Gravity loves masonry" warns an adventuring party away from a Booby Trapped door so he doesn't have to reset all the rocks that would fall on them. He leads them into another trap, but that one isn't his problem.

Web Original

• The Life and Times of a Power-Up Deliveryman from Something Awful is a foul example.

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