Empty Rooms in Dungeons

If you've been reading this blog you know my recent Scarlet Heroes games have seen me taking my two heroes through the Beneath Brymassen scenario from Basic Fantasy's  "Adventure Anthology 1".  As I was going through the dungeon I ran into a couple of effectively empty rooms. They weren't completely empty there was some description, but they WERE effectively empty.

That bugs me. What is the purpose of an empty room? How does that improve the game? What level of excitement does it add to the player experience.

None, in my view.

I'm not demanding a combat encounter in every room, I don't necessarily want my games to turn in combat slogs, but I do want the room to exist for a reason. Now that reason might be to give the players a place to rest up, but even then if its effectively empty it'll be boring. These "empty" rooms should be able to intrigue the party that wanders in, it should peek their interest. The point being that the room with no encounters should provide something some kind of resource to the PCs, something that makes it meaningful.

The form that the resource takes can vary wildly. It could be as simple as adding to the lore of the dungeon, a manuscript history for instance (Balin's tomb), a water or food source, perhaps only grass that can refresh the torches, but its should add something. Long bending corridors suffer the same problem, long empty hallways offer nothing to the player. Why does it suddenly bend to the left? There should be some rational reason for it. Having such reasons provides verisimilitudes that bring the story to life.

If you can point me at an adventure that dodges the empty room bullet, please post a comment linking to it.