The traditional dungeon is, as the name suggests, a dungeon: a brick-and-mortar thing, square in shape, and specifically separated from normal spaces. Those are the first dungeons I ran through in tabletop, and what my view of them was like. The first time I saw an organic dungeon—a malevolent forest that led everybody inside it astray–it blew my mind. It harked back to medieval European history, when the forest was indeed a place of danger, and that danger was just outside of the village.
After that, I learned about World of Darkness, where adventures were abstract flowcharts that just roughly described a set of cause-and-effect connections, each of which contained some conflicts. It offered a far more organic way to deal with adventures. Moreover, it brings along an interesting reminder: danger is not something that is separate from normal urban life, it’s right out there in the forest just outside of the village. The village is just that little bit of safety that we’ve carved out in the wilderness.