Dungeon ambience for D&D

A dungeon is iron at three distances over a bed that already has voices in it. The recipe, dial by dial, and the environment to play.

A dungeon is a bed that already has people in it, and then iron at three distances: chains about every nine seconds nearby, a cell door every twenty-five somewhere further off, and prisoners at the very edge of hearing. The distances are what sell it. One distance is a room; three are a building, and the party has seen one of them.

It ships built in as Prison Block — 4 layers, 4 on to start. Open it in the app, or build it yourself from the recipe below.

What it sounds like

A cave is a natural space and a dungeon is a built one, and the difference is almost entirely in what you hear at a distance. In a cave the far-off sound is water or rock. In a dungeon it is somebody else: a door, a chain, a voice through stone. The place was made to hold people and some of them are still in it.

This recipe starts from that rather than arriving at it. The bed is not a drone, it is a prison hall with distant voices already in the recording, so the room is populated before a single event has fired. Everything scheduled on top of it is iron, and the only thing that changes between the layers is how far away it is.

The moaning at very far is the one to watch. It sits at 30% and fires about twice a minute, which is quiet enough that nobody comments on it for the first ten minutes and loud enough that everybody has heard it.

The recipe, dial by dial

This is the environment as it ships. Every layer is the same kind of thing — one sound from the library and a set of dials — so there is nothing special about which slot a sound sits in. The names are only names.

Layer	Sound	How often	Wander	Volume	Distance	Reverb	Echo
Rhythm	Chain clinks	every ~9.0 s	80%	40%	nearby	medium	2 bounces
Ambient	Prison hall, distant voices	loop	—	60%	close	off	off
Accent	Cell doors	every ~25 s	70%	50%	far	medium	2 bounces
Extras	Prisoners moaning	every ~30 s	80%	30%	very far	large	2 bounces

Master volume 80%. Every number above is read out of the environment that ships in the app, and printed in the words the app prints beside each slider.

Rhythm — Chains about every nine seconds, nearby, at 40%. The sound of the room they are standing in.
Chain clinks
Ambient — A prison hall, 60%. The voices are in the recording, which is why this one needs no crowd layer of its own.
Prison hall, distant voices
Accent — A cell door every twenty-five seconds, far. The first hint that there are other rooms.
Cell doors
Extras — Prisoners, very far, at 30%. On by default, and the reason the place feels inhabited rather than abandoned.
Prisoners moaning

What each dial does is covered once, properly, in Environments & layers.

Boards to load with it

The environment is the place; boards are the things that happen in it. These three ship built in and suit this one:

Doors & Traps — the cell door, the lock, the bolt
Alarms & Signals — the moment somebody notices them
Bones & the Dead — the previous occupants

Load them, then press + New scene and the environment and the boards come back together next week in one tap. Scenes covers that.

Make it yours

An abandoned dungeon

Turn Extras off and halve the chains. What is left is a building made to hold people that no longer does, which is a different kind of unpleasant.

Occupied, and awake

Pull the moaning in to nearby and double how often it fires. The geography collapses in towards the party. Use it once they have been heard.

Something worse than a prison

Torture Dungeon and Torture Chamber both ship built in and are not the same room — one is damp and industrial, the other belongs to a castle. Listen to both before you build anything.

None of this is destructive: the built-in environments cannot be overwritten. Change what you like, and press Save a copy as… when it sounds right.

The recordings

Every sound this environment uses, and who recorded it. Most of the library is public domain; the Creative Commons Attribution recordings are credited here because that is what the licence asks for. The full list is on Sounds & licensing.

Chain clinks — ChainsRattling.aif by klakmart (CC0)
Chain clinks — shackles.wav by zaqqazlowell (CC0)
Prison hall, distant voices — S12-24 Prison mess hall; distant voices; reverberant.wav by craigsmith by craigsmith (CC0)
Cell doors — Cell door.aiff by kd_jack (CC0)
Cell doors — G31-17-Rickety Metal Door.wav by craigsmith (CC0)
Prisoners moaning — Pain part 1: groan, torture, suffering, despair, man, male by kentspublicdomain (CC0)
Prisoners moaning — Pain part 2: groan, torture, suffering, despair, man, male by kentspublicdomain (CC0)
Prisoners moaning — Pain part 3: groan, torture, suffering, despair, man, male by kentspublicdomain (CC0)
Prisoners moaning — groans.wav by iggy1345 (CC0)

Open Prison Block in Thaumaturgy — it is free, there is nothing to install, and nothing to sign up for.

Updated 24 October 2026