Monday, April 25, 2016

Dice Dungeon Generator

So in an attempt to do more mechanical exercises for D&D, I made a quick and dirty dungeon generator. I've given it a couple of tries, ran through some, and am running my girlfriend through a solo ACKS adventure through one. After some much needed tweaks, here we are. It doesn't take very long to generate, even with larger rooms. You can make some pretty big sprawling dungeons with this. And like with all things, you aren't beholden to the rules. If you want a secret passage to bypass half of the dungeon, you should do it. Make that dungeon yours! This just lays out the barest of bones. So grab some d6s and a d10 and let's get ready to generate!

Dungeon Generator

First, you have to decide how many rooms you want in your dungeon. You can simply roll a dice (I rolled a d30 and got an 11), pick a number, or just do the steps below until you feel like you have enough rooms.

Draw your starting room. I draw everything like a flowchart, with rooms being circles and hallways being lines. Next you can roll how many rooms connect into your current room. For each room, roll for their location, what stands in the way of them, and which vertical level the other room is. You can pick which ones to roll and which ones to leave out. If you want everything on the same level, simply ignore the second table and for the third table, use a d8 instead of the d10. If you want something that uses only the cardinal directions, like a building, then for the third table, use a d4 instead of a d10.

1d6 # of Rooms Connected
1-3   One
4-5   Two
6      Three

1d6 Vertical Level of Next Room
1      Above Current Level
2-5  On Same Level
6      Below Current Level

1d10 Location of the Hallway
1      North
2      East
3      South
4      West
5      Northeast
6      Southeast
7      Southwest
8      Northwest
9      Straight Up
10    Straight Down

1d6 State of the Hallway
1      Open
2      Closed
3      Locked
4      Blocked
5      Trapped
6      Hidden

From here, you interpret the dungeon results. Sometimes you get weird results, but they often lead to cooler rooms. If you have a set amount of rooms and you ever roll more Rooms Connected than you have rooms, those hallways are simply dead ends. Getting a room on the same level as your current one but with an entrance going straight up/down means the room is simply bigger and has a second level.

And that's it. You can use several dungeon stocking and dressing generators from various D&D retroclones. I've been using the ACKS one and that seems to work out really well in the solo game I'm running. Some point this week, I want to post up some game reports of those games. Let me know if there are any additions or changes you'd make to this. I'll see if I can scan and post up an example of usage with this.


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