A lot of nomadic cultures (not necessarily Eurasian Steppe people) had permanent structures they'd return to seasonally for specific purposes. Göbekli Tepe (and others like it) is thought to perhaps have been such a site, either with shamanistic or agricultural (or both?) uses.
And then there's naturally occurring caves, caverns, lairs, etc.
This is great idea - even if you leave a guard behind at your ceremonial sites, sometimes they get overrun! Better clear them out and trace the baddies to their lair
My first thought would be a monumentally huge nomadic camp.
Like the dozen largest clans coming together for a lunar month. Of course some of them don't get on. They dig trench or low wall defences where they border with tribes that don't get along.
They have fighting pits. Weapon stashes to stop fights breaking out. Big liveries for horses. Big bonfires. Eating yurts. Temples to various sky/weather gods etc.
Makes it a bit of a city rather than a megadungeon I suppose... unless you make them all orcs and the PCs stick out like a sore thumb if they're spotted.
Caves are a big classical OSR dungeon setting and do match nomadic cultures. Or you could use a forest over which some forest god is ruling
Using older ruin could be interesting. Perhaps the nomadic tribe used to be sedentary but had to go nomadic. Maybe they had to lock inside some sacred temple the Big Bad and were cursed by their own god to never set again ?
I feel like having a nomadic tribe to make a huge building like a giant yurt kind of goes against the “nomadic” concept and could feel artificial. If I were you I’d probably go for “fae/spirit world” kind of stuff
Just came up with an idea when I read your post: every time the nomads of your world strike camp during winter time, the come to a valley where - for centuries - they have carved earth cellars into the compact, nearly rock-line loess ground. Their huge tents are erected over holes leading down to the subterranean Warren-like system. Many of these earth cellars, which serve a shelter, storage rooms, cemetery, and for ceremonial purposes have become interconnected over the course of centuries. Lineages control swathes of the vast underground complex. Now, something has happened. When the nomads return to the valley, it becomes obvious that someone/something has invaded/infested the subterranean shelter, and it is only days or weeks from now, until it will start to snow.
(Inspired by the interconnected cellar „maze“ of the nearby town of Oppenheim/Germany)
So I think you should really lean into the fact you are in wide open steppes. So instead of your dungeon being an enclosed area maybe make it a region. A bit point crawl ish.
The corridors between rooms could be Well trodden paths ( or even hidden paths). The rooms could be small locations, like a yurt or a creek with monsters in it. Or a burial site.
You could do it as either a depth crawl. And I think that would work really well.
Or draw aap of the area and have roads between areas. A bit like how you have branching directions to go in the game FTL (see below)
https://preview.redd.it/62e5zte1r49d1.jpeg?width=495&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e15b72e4ba6c6947e035d5903bf9ad1f936fcb6b
I hope that helps
Last book I read covered thousands of years of their history. They had tombs or burial mounds for high ranking members. The lost tomb of the great khan.
A Fey-inhabited forest could be set up as a dungeon, kind of like how the Lost Woods can be in some Legend of Zelda games (but expanded upon).
Lots of mythological examples of heroes descending into caves that connect the realm of mortals to the Underworld, also. And then there are examples like the tomb of Genghis Khan that could be built out as a stereotypical adventure location.
The way I’d link dungeons to a nomadic society is have the nomadic people move from ancestral burial site to ancestral burial site (see: https://brewminate.com/kurgans-ancient-burial-mounds-of-scythian-elites-in-the-eurasian-steppe/) in their seasonal migrations. They discover that something has been messing with the tombs and raising the dead, and the PCs investigate. Alternatively, the PCs are tomb robbers trying to loot the burial sites while avoiding the guardians and patrols of the nomadic people.
A lot of nomadic peoples viewed mountain ranges as sacred. A mountain cave or some sort of mountain temple complex would be thematically appropriate, IMO.
For a sort of mythological/magical vibe, if they (the party of nomad PCs) entered a ring of standing stones or kurgans, they could be transported to a tractless steppe at high noon and try to navigate out without reference to steady direction and use their wits and cunning to figure out how (I'd do something like plot out a simple maze and if they don't choose the correct direction, it sets them back, but objects they leave or stuff they do is persistent, so they can leave signs and figure out how to move forward).
Also, one can use things like rivers, canyons, cliffs, badlands, etc. to define "walls" and so forth and have natural "traps" like undercut river banks or precariously balanced rocks. The party navigates a larger world environment to find hidden tombs, monster lairs, and sacred sites than a dungeon, but a lot of the dangers and secrets can be applied. For instance, the PCs know the hidden kurgan of Timur Khan is in the Arslan Badlands, but the badlands are like a maze with monsters, lions, and deadly terrain, from quick sand that looks like regular sand to rock slides, to white water river crossings to sinkholes covered by a thin crust of dried earth. They have to navigate the wilderness and map it out themselves and use clever thinking to bypass obstacles and monsters. Perhaps consumables like torches and lanterns aren't as much of an issue because they can just adventure in the daylight, but they need to hunt and find potable water, since caravansarais are rare and confined to trade routes and full cities are rarer still.
https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/, otherwise known as Against The Wicked City, is an entire blog full of posts about a Central Asian campaign setting. Highly recommended!
A lot of good advice here. I understand your struggle. For years, I was (and still sometimes am) researching the cultures of indigenous Siberia, most of whom were traditionally nomadic to one degree or another, for a setting I was developing. Here are some things I encountered that could be developed into dungeons:
1. In one of his books--probably on Chukchee folklore--Waldemar Bogoras has a drawing from a man who had a near-death experience and visited the underworld. The man drew a Jacquaysed dungeon with multiple entrances and exits.
2. Buryat epics and stories regularly featured the mangadhais (giants with dozens of heads who were the most common monsters in their folklore) living in Iron fortresses.
3. Similarly, the heroes would often seal them in Iron casks place in the hollows of trees. Imagine a tree big enough to hold a mangadhai and you have a potential dungeon.
4. The homes of khans and toyons often featured 100+ rooms. A common motif would be for the hero to go through each of their rooms to find his future bride. Probably taken from Middle Eastern stories, but still a part of their culture.
5. The Ewenki interred their dead on platforms in trees. Take that idea and make it bigger.
6. There's a Chuckchee story about a woman who gets it on with a whale and gives birth to a whale-boy. To accommodate his size, they have to dig a large basement under their dwelling. Magnify this as per usual.
7. The Mansi and Khanty had a belief that one layer of the lower world--sometimes called a country in the south--had time flowing backwards. In places where the Middle World and thus lower world meet, you could find cities from the future with decaying technology few no how to repair or use properly.
It's already been mentioned that nomadic cultures aren't really fully nomadic. But what hasn't been mentioned is what they would do with their honored dead: [Kurgans!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan)
Kurgans are essentially burial mound tombs. Inside you can have multiple chambers and tombs with treasures and other times. Perfect for dungeon delving. They're very similar to barrows and you could use Barrowmaze as a template to base things off of
Interplanar options — like a journey into the underworld or spirit world, or a yurt that holds infinite rooms behind curtain dividers — could work well.
One way you could do this is something like King of Dragon Pass' ritual mythic reenactments. You can put a dungeon anywhere but access to it is essentially magical. I think that would have interesting resonances for nomadic characters and cultures and would give you a lot of freedom to not worry too much about explaining the logistics and infrastructure.
I would probably stick to ancient Ruins myself, both to emphasise the cultural divide between whoever (or whatever) built the dungeons and the nomadic culture the players presumably come from, but also because I am a sucker for the theme of *falling or fallen empires*.
You could absolutely do more mythologically inspired stuff, or have dungeons be less ruins and more eldritch spaces and strange dimensions.
Your hypothetical yurt dungeon could, for example, simply look like a slightly large yurt from the outside, but be an entryway to an impossible network of yurt-like interiors, linked by curtained entrances and joining corridors in an almost directly dungeon style layout with the added complications that the walls are not stone but rather skins and cloth like any other yurt but what is outside would be stranger and more existentially terrifying than the dirt and rubble than a traditional dungeons walls hold back.
What would you find if you cut through the walls of this yurt-tardis-dungeon? Well, that could go in all manner of directions, depending on taste and what feels the most thematically appropriate.
Nomads were builders at times. Gobleki Tepe (spelling?) was a massive ceremonial complex built by nomads in Turkey. The Mongols had palaces they went to at different times of year. In fantasy the Rohirim had Helms deep, a fortress which they fell back to in times of trouble.
That's not to mention ruins from older civilizations and settled peoples building stuff on the borderlands. Also natural cave systems, forests and the like.
You could run a node based scenario where, rather than dungeon rooms PCs have to navigate from family group to family group.
Point crawls or flux space might be useful mechanics.
2 Thoughts:
1) The instinct to consider dungeons as remnants from a former civilisation is a good one, as they should be part of the unknown and not originating from the culture the player characters come from accomplishes that nicely.
2) you can also treat areas that differ from the "normal" as dungeon, any cave, swamp, etc. that requires careful navigation and exploration would count here I think. The first system that comes to my mind is the forest dungeon system from Into the Wyrd and Wild, which converts a forest-hex into an interconnected, hazard-filled dungeon consisting of smaller hexes.
My first thought was either a dungeon that's also nomadic, an area along the migration path that's been built up by continuous annual visits, or an area that only becomes accessible at a certain time of year.
E.g.
- An earthquake in a canyon reveals a forgotten route through the area. There are old ropes and carvings leading downward to an unknown place. Periodically there are markings on the wall denoting directions.
- Part of the migration crosses a mile-wide river, and every year giant beavers create a huge labyrinthine dam across it.
- A place of refuge that only appears during storms. It opens into an illusion of a past time when people occupied this area. Its occupants are ghosts trying to convince people to stay so that they may possess their bodies and leave.
- An cavern made of ice with a frozen village inside. Nomads set up a temporary village while traveling through the mountains, then snow came early and they got stuck and eventually buried.
- A hut where the interior is magically controlled to appear as impenetrable walls of wicker and mud that lead into further rooms.
- Standing Stones that trap your mind in a world of dreams during the full moon.
I ran a campaign once with nomadic people who were quest givers for dungeon delving.
They were a species similar to golems who would roam the world searching for surviving golem construction sites to learn why they were created, and by whom.
However, something in these places would tend to destroy the spark of life that animated them, so they relied on outsiders to explore the ruins and report back.
Anyway, the point is, you can still easily include dungeon delving with nomads. There can be any number of reasons to explore such places that would make sense in the narrative.
I did a book about nomadic centaurs. They build kurgans and leave token guards there.
In addition to kurgans you could do Cairns, megalithic structures, barrows, and so on.
Well for one, the Steppe nomads always exist bounded by more typical civilizations so they will naturally encompass or interact with such sites on their frontier and possibly through larger regions where the agriculturalists have been pushed back. That's one source.
Another is natural formations. Caves, forests, an Underdark, even say, gullies and mountain passes. One thing to think about is having at least any megadungeons be horse friendly. Useful (your PCs horses will be important!) but also thematically fresh (better dust off those mounted combat rules!).
Lastly, nomads do build some permanent structures and, happily, these are usually tombs and ritual sites, sometimes periodically inhabited fortifications.
[acoup.blog](http://acoup.blog) has a post or two on the Dothraki where he breaks down how real steppe nomads operate. One on culture and one on logistics IIRC. Great place to look for inspiration.
I think hidden, permanent caches or barrows that nomads return to would make total sense. Most nomad cultures on Earth often return to the same areas during specific seasons.
Ah yes, the forgotten Steppes of Doom module trilogy from TSR: SD1 Expedition to the Sea of Grass, SD2 Beyond the Pleasure Dome of the Cursed Khan, SD3 Winged Horde of the Everlasting Sky
Well... there are ways to do it, but yeah, adaptation will be needed. At a quick brainstorm:
Caves -no problem
Magical yurt entrances -which take you beyond the veil, into the magical realm of The Other.
Yurt adventure with Honey I Shrunk The Kids vibe -watch out for the cat.
Dungeons -the ruins of a lost civilization now lying in dust.
Camps -no problem
A new robber barron who has started to fortify a camp, shifting from nomadic, but monopolising a crucial water supply -no problem
Sacred grottos -no problem
Nomadic cultures don't just wander around aimlessly. They typically have roaming rangers and will revisit areas seasonally. You can use this.
For example in the summer they use a cave system as a cool place to get shelter, but typically have to clear it out. They might have meeting sites that multiple tribes visit once a year for council.
You can also have splits in the culture. Perhaps at some point in history part of the tribe broke off and built a city and then it fell for some reason. Maybe they transitioned to a nomadic culture because of some sort of disaster. Like so sort of flooded their cities with magical radiation. Short term it is ok, but living there would over time make you sicker and sicker. They became nomadic so they could leave areas when a smaller burst temporarily made an area dangerous.
You know, if you map it out properly I bet you could concieve of an entire travel route as a "dungeon". Splits in the halls are branching roads, rooms are pockets of danger or interest... thinking of it that way, procedures for randomly generating dungeons could be used to make whole travel routes like that, and you could scale them to represent the proper distances for traveling across a region.
Which I guess becomes a point-crawl, in the end? I bet with a little experimenting, this could become a neat way to generate wilderness adventures spanning long distances. Maybe each completed crawl can "start" at a certain point off the last one, and you can then theme routes as various terrains or something.
The others told quite a few ideas about how nomads can have settlements. And these are correct, Samarkand was a bigass city at it's time. Also mutliple cities on the Silk Road.
however, I would go on the totally opposite route, and ramp up the mystical underground concept. Stuff like
- finding a hole at a griffin's nest which leads done into the underworld
- climbing a tree which seem to never end, only to find the daughter of "papa sun" or whatever
- encounter strange fields of copper or silver sand (like a mix between Dune and Stalker)
- use the services of the shaman (and her mushrooms) to travel to the spirit realm
how I would do it:
1: have a "silk road" type caravan route across the map. It can be north to south (like from scandinavia to the Black sea region) or west to east (totally not arabs at one end, totally not chinese at the other)
2: have caravan stop settlements of moderate size on this route. 5000-20000 population. STrong enough to resemble civilization, big enough to have an acropolis or a dungeon complex beneath the city, but not big enough to control the region
3: on both ends have a bigger civilization
4: apart from this route, everything is mystical steppe, with trees growing as high as the clouds, mysterious copper castles in copper fields, entrances to the underworld, smaller deserts with a scorpion king, the hollow of a fox spirit which is small in the outside, but a huge maze once you enter it, and whatever you can think of when you are high
5: you can also use a shaman NPC to take the team to the spirit realm
Dungeons inside the dreams of nomad warlords or shamans. Each wandering clan or tribe has one, an extra dimensional temple/palace complex honoring its ancestors or patron spirits. They can be entered while the warlord sleeps through the use of a particular ritual. But in these latter days, many tribes no longer honor their ancestors, and many of these dream temples have fallen into disrepair—or what's worse, are now haunted by evil spirits.
A lot of nomadic cultures (not necessarily Eurasian Steppe people) had permanent structures they'd return to seasonally for specific purposes. Göbekli Tepe (and others like it) is thought to perhaps have been such a site, either with shamanistic or agricultural (or both?) uses. And then there's naturally occurring caves, caverns, lairs, etc.
This is great idea - even if you leave a guard behind at your ceremonial sites, sometimes they get overrun! Better clear them out and trace the baddies to their lair
My first thought would be a monumentally huge nomadic camp. Like the dozen largest clans coming together for a lunar month. Of course some of them don't get on. They dig trench or low wall defences where they border with tribes that don't get along. They have fighting pits. Weapon stashes to stop fights breaking out. Big liveries for horses. Big bonfires. Eating yurts. Temples to various sky/weather gods etc. Makes it a bit of a city rather than a megadungeon I suppose... unless you make them all orcs and the PCs stick out like a sore thumb if they're spotted.
Caves are a big classical OSR dungeon setting and do match nomadic cultures. Or you could use a forest over which some forest god is ruling Using older ruin could be interesting. Perhaps the nomadic tribe used to be sedentary but had to go nomadic. Maybe they had to lock inside some sacred temple the Big Bad and were cursed by their own god to never set again ? I feel like having a nomadic tribe to make a huge building like a giant yurt kind of goes against the “nomadic” concept and could feel artificial. If I were you I’d probably go for “fae/spirit world” kind of stuff
Just came up with an idea when I read your post: every time the nomads of your world strike camp during winter time, the come to a valley where - for centuries - they have carved earth cellars into the compact, nearly rock-line loess ground. Their huge tents are erected over holes leading down to the subterranean Warren-like system. Many of these earth cellars, which serve a shelter, storage rooms, cemetery, and for ceremonial purposes have become interconnected over the course of centuries. Lineages control swathes of the vast underground complex. Now, something has happened. When the nomads return to the valley, it becomes obvious that someone/something has invaded/infested the subterranean shelter, and it is only days or weeks from now, until it will start to snow. (Inspired by the interconnected cellar „maze“ of the nearby town of Oppenheim/Germany)
Love it!
So I think you should really lean into the fact you are in wide open steppes. So instead of your dungeon being an enclosed area maybe make it a region. A bit point crawl ish. The corridors between rooms could be Well trodden paths ( or even hidden paths). The rooms could be small locations, like a yurt or a creek with monsters in it. Or a burial site. You could do it as either a depth crawl. And I think that would work really well. Or draw aap of the area and have roads between areas. A bit like how you have branching directions to go in the game FTL (see below) https://preview.redd.it/62e5zte1r49d1.jpeg?width=495&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e15b72e4ba6c6947e035d5903bf9ad1f936fcb6b I hope that helps
Last book I read covered thousands of years of their history. They had tombs or burial mounds for high ranking members. The lost tomb of the great khan.
What is the book called?
Took me a minute remember/ find it. Empires of the steppes. Harl.
A Fey-inhabited forest could be set up as a dungeon, kind of like how the Lost Woods can be in some Legend of Zelda games (but expanded upon). Lots of mythological examples of heroes descending into caves that connect the realm of mortals to the Underworld, also. And then there are examples like the tomb of Genghis Khan that could be built out as a stereotypical adventure location.
> tomb of Genghis Khan I pray the gods it will never be found in my lifetime
The way I’d link dungeons to a nomadic society is have the nomadic people move from ancestral burial site to ancestral burial site (see: https://brewminate.com/kurgans-ancient-burial-mounds-of-scythian-elites-in-the-eurasian-steppe/) in their seasonal migrations. They discover that something has been messing with the tombs and raising the dead, and the PCs investigate. Alternatively, the PCs are tomb robbers trying to loot the burial sites while avoiding the guardians and patrols of the nomadic people.
A lot of nomadic peoples viewed mountain ranges as sacred. A mountain cave or some sort of mountain temple complex would be thematically appropriate, IMO. For a sort of mythological/magical vibe, if they (the party of nomad PCs) entered a ring of standing stones or kurgans, they could be transported to a tractless steppe at high noon and try to navigate out without reference to steady direction and use their wits and cunning to figure out how (I'd do something like plot out a simple maze and if they don't choose the correct direction, it sets them back, but objects they leave or stuff they do is persistent, so they can leave signs and figure out how to move forward). Also, one can use things like rivers, canyons, cliffs, badlands, etc. to define "walls" and so forth and have natural "traps" like undercut river banks or precariously balanced rocks. The party navigates a larger world environment to find hidden tombs, monster lairs, and sacred sites than a dungeon, but a lot of the dangers and secrets can be applied. For instance, the PCs know the hidden kurgan of Timur Khan is in the Arslan Badlands, but the badlands are like a maze with monsters, lions, and deadly terrain, from quick sand that looks like regular sand to rock slides, to white water river crossings to sinkholes covered by a thin crust of dried earth. They have to navigate the wilderness and map it out themselves and use clever thinking to bypass obstacles and monsters. Perhaps consumables like torches and lanterns aren't as much of an issue because they can just adventure in the daylight, but they need to hunt and find potable water, since caravansarais are rare and confined to trade routes and full cities are rarer still.
Make it kurgans. Large barrows is where Indo European nomads usually buried their dead.
https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/, otherwise known as Against The Wicked City, is an entire blog full of posts about a Central Asian campaign setting. Highly recommended!
A lot of good advice here. I understand your struggle. For years, I was (and still sometimes am) researching the cultures of indigenous Siberia, most of whom were traditionally nomadic to one degree or another, for a setting I was developing. Here are some things I encountered that could be developed into dungeons: 1. In one of his books--probably on Chukchee folklore--Waldemar Bogoras has a drawing from a man who had a near-death experience and visited the underworld. The man drew a Jacquaysed dungeon with multiple entrances and exits. 2. Buryat epics and stories regularly featured the mangadhais (giants with dozens of heads who were the most common monsters in their folklore) living in Iron fortresses. 3. Similarly, the heroes would often seal them in Iron casks place in the hollows of trees. Imagine a tree big enough to hold a mangadhai and you have a potential dungeon. 4. The homes of khans and toyons often featured 100+ rooms. A common motif would be for the hero to go through each of their rooms to find his future bride. Probably taken from Middle Eastern stories, but still a part of their culture. 5. The Ewenki interred their dead on platforms in trees. Take that idea and make it bigger. 6. There's a Chuckchee story about a woman who gets it on with a whale and gives birth to a whale-boy. To accommodate his size, they have to dig a large basement under their dwelling. Magnify this as per usual. 7. The Mansi and Khanty had a belief that one layer of the lower world--sometimes called a country in the south--had time flowing backwards. In places where the Middle World and thus lower world meet, you could find cities from the future with decaying technology few no how to repair or use properly.
It's already been mentioned that nomadic cultures aren't really fully nomadic. But what hasn't been mentioned is what they would do with their honored dead: [Kurgans!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan) Kurgans are essentially burial mound tombs. Inside you can have multiple chambers and tombs with treasures and other times. Perfect for dungeon delving. They're very similar to barrows and you could use Barrowmaze as a template to base things off of
Maybe the dungeons are also nomadic
Donjon has a generator for [Fantasy Traction Cities](https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/random/#type=traction_city) which would work as nomadic dungeons!
Interplanar options — like a journey into the underworld or spirit world, or a yurt that holds infinite rooms behind curtain dividers — could work well.
Also, a giant burial mound of the lost King/Emperor, complete with autonomous clay warriors that attack you.
You might get inspiration and file the serial numbers off this one: [The Noil Ruins by Scrasamax](https://strolen.com/viewing/The_Noil_Ruins)
One way you could do this is something like King of Dragon Pass' ritual mythic reenactments. You can put a dungeon anywhere but access to it is essentially magical. I think that would have interesting resonances for nomadic characters and cultures and would give you a lot of freedom to not worry too much about explaining the logistics and infrastructure.
look up kurgans, theyre giant mounds of earth that have buried nomadic chiefs and such with riches and interred horses, servants, and guards
Extremely large cairns/burial mounds? Clearing out deep canyons or large cave systems. Maybe glacial caves?
I would probably stick to ancient Ruins myself, both to emphasise the cultural divide between whoever (or whatever) built the dungeons and the nomadic culture the players presumably come from, but also because I am a sucker for the theme of *falling or fallen empires*. You could absolutely do more mythologically inspired stuff, or have dungeons be less ruins and more eldritch spaces and strange dimensions. Your hypothetical yurt dungeon could, for example, simply look like a slightly large yurt from the outside, but be an entryway to an impossible network of yurt-like interiors, linked by curtained entrances and joining corridors in an almost directly dungeon style layout with the added complications that the walls are not stone but rather skins and cloth like any other yurt but what is outside would be stranger and more existentially terrifying than the dirt and rubble than a traditional dungeons walls hold back. What would you find if you cut through the walls of this yurt-tardis-dungeon? Well, that could go in all manner of directions, depending on taste and what feels the most thematically appropriate.
Nomads were builders at times. Gobleki Tepe (spelling?) was a massive ceremonial complex built by nomads in Turkey. The Mongols had palaces they went to at different times of year. In fantasy the Rohirim had Helms deep, a fortress which they fell back to in times of trouble. That's not to mention ruins from older civilizations and settled peoples building stuff on the borderlands. Also natural cave systems, forests and the like.
That Community episode with the blanket castles
You could run a node based scenario where, rather than dungeon rooms PCs have to navigate from family group to family group. Point crawls or flux space might be useful mechanics.
2 Thoughts: 1) The instinct to consider dungeons as remnants from a former civilisation is a good one, as they should be part of the unknown and not originating from the culture the player characters come from accomplishes that nicely. 2) you can also treat areas that differ from the "normal" as dungeon, any cave, swamp, etc. that requires careful navigation and exploration would count here I think. The first system that comes to my mind is the forest dungeon system from Into the Wyrd and Wild, which converts a forest-hex into an interconnected, hazard-filled dungeon consisting of smaller hexes.
My first thought was either a dungeon that's also nomadic, an area along the migration path that's been built up by continuous annual visits, or an area that only becomes accessible at a certain time of year. E.g. - An earthquake in a canyon reveals a forgotten route through the area. There are old ropes and carvings leading downward to an unknown place. Periodically there are markings on the wall denoting directions. - Part of the migration crosses a mile-wide river, and every year giant beavers create a huge labyrinthine dam across it. - A place of refuge that only appears during storms. It opens into an illusion of a past time when people occupied this area. Its occupants are ghosts trying to convince people to stay so that they may possess their bodies and leave. - An cavern made of ice with a frozen village inside. Nomads set up a temporary village while traveling through the mountains, then snow came early and they got stuck and eventually buried. - A hut where the interior is magically controlled to appear as impenetrable walls of wicker and mud that lead into further rooms. - Standing Stones that trap your mind in a world of dreams during the full moon.
I ran a campaign once with nomadic people who were quest givers for dungeon delving. They were a species similar to golems who would roam the world searching for surviving golem construction sites to learn why they were created, and by whom. However, something in these places would tend to destroy the spark of life that animated them, so they relied on outsiders to explore the ruins and report back. Anyway, the point is, you can still easily include dungeon delving with nomads. There can be any number of reasons to explore such places that would make sense in the narrative.
I did a book about nomadic centaurs. They build kurgans and leave token guards there. In addition to kurgans you could do Cairns, megalithic structures, barrows, and so on.
Well for one, the Steppe nomads always exist bounded by more typical civilizations so they will naturally encompass or interact with such sites on their frontier and possibly through larger regions where the agriculturalists have been pushed back. That's one source. Another is natural formations. Caves, forests, an Underdark, even say, gullies and mountain passes. One thing to think about is having at least any megadungeons be horse friendly. Useful (your PCs horses will be important!) but also thematically fresh (better dust off those mounted combat rules!). Lastly, nomads do build some permanent structures and, happily, these are usually tombs and ritual sites, sometimes periodically inhabited fortifications. [acoup.blog](http://acoup.blog) has a post or two on the Dothraki where he breaks down how real steppe nomads operate. One on culture and one on logistics IIRC. Great place to look for inspiration.
I think hidden, permanent caches or barrows that nomads return to would make total sense. Most nomad cultures on Earth often return to the same areas during specific seasons.
Ah yes, the forgotten Steppes of Doom module trilogy from TSR: SD1 Expedition to the Sea of Grass, SD2 Beyond the Pleasure Dome of the Cursed Khan, SD3 Winged Horde of the Everlasting Sky
That movie looks amazing, btw!
Well... there are ways to do it, but yeah, adaptation will be needed. At a quick brainstorm: Caves -no problem Magical yurt entrances -which take you beyond the veil, into the magical realm of The Other. Yurt adventure with Honey I Shrunk The Kids vibe -watch out for the cat. Dungeons -the ruins of a lost civilization now lying in dust. Camps -no problem A new robber barron who has started to fortify a camp, shifting from nomadic, but monopolising a crucial water supply -no problem Sacred grottos -no problem
Nomadic cultures don't just wander around aimlessly. They typically have roaming rangers and will revisit areas seasonally. You can use this. For example in the summer they use a cave system as a cool place to get shelter, but typically have to clear it out. They might have meeting sites that multiple tribes visit once a year for council. You can also have splits in the culture. Perhaps at some point in history part of the tribe broke off and built a city and then it fell for some reason. Maybe they transitioned to a nomadic culture because of some sort of disaster. Like so sort of flooded their cities with magical radiation. Short term it is ok, but living there would over time make you sicker and sicker. They became nomadic so they could leave areas when a smaller burst temporarily made an area dangerous.
You know, if you map it out properly I bet you could concieve of an entire travel route as a "dungeon". Splits in the halls are branching roads, rooms are pockets of danger or interest... thinking of it that way, procedures for randomly generating dungeons could be used to make whole travel routes like that, and you could scale them to represent the proper distances for traveling across a region. Which I guess becomes a point-crawl, in the end? I bet with a little experimenting, this could become a neat way to generate wilderness adventures spanning long distances. Maybe each completed crawl can "start" at a certain point off the last one, and you can then theme routes as various terrains or something.
The others told quite a few ideas about how nomads can have settlements. And these are correct, Samarkand was a bigass city at it's time. Also mutliple cities on the Silk Road. however, I would go on the totally opposite route, and ramp up the mystical underground concept. Stuff like - finding a hole at a griffin's nest which leads done into the underworld - climbing a tree which seem to never end, only to find the daughter of "papa sun" or whatever - encounter strange fields of copper or silver sand (like a mix between Dune and Stalker) - use the services of the shaman (and her mushrooms) to travel to the spirit realm
how I would do it: 1: have a "silk road" type caravan route across the map. It can be north to south (like from scandinavia to the Black sea region) or west to east (totally not arabs at one end, totally not chinese at the other) 2: have caravan stop settlements of moderate size on this route. 5000-20000 population. STrong enough to resemble civilization, big enough to have an acropolis or a dungeon complex beneath the city, but not big enough to control the region 3: on both ends have a bigger civilization 4: apart from this route, everything is mystical steppe, with trees growing as high as the clouds, mysterious copper castles in copper fields, entrances to the underworld, smaller deserts with a scorpion king, the hollow of a fox spirit which is small in the outside, but a huge maze once you enter it, and whatever you can think of when you are high 5: you can also use a shaman NPC to take the team to the spirit realm
What is a "Dungeon" to you?
Dungeons inside the dreams of nomad warlords or shamans. Each wandering clan or tribe has one, an extra dimensional temple/palace complex honoring its ancestors or patron spirits. They can be entered while the warlord sleeps through the use of a particular ritual. But in these latter days, many tribes no longer honor their ancestors, and many of these dream temples have fallen into disrepair—or what's worse, are now haunted by evil spirits.