dungeon generator

d20 rooms split between d4 floors. Alternatively you got d6 floors with d8 rooms each.

You can expand a dungeon easily but it's hard to fill a dungeon that's too big when you run out of ideas. Start small and don't use up all your ideas in one place.

For each floor take as many random dice shapes as you need rooms and drop em on grid paper. Draw a room around each die. The numbers can be influence size, shape, and/or exits. Even numbers mean empty (no monsters) odd means a monster inhabitant.

Next, connect the rooms. I let the points on the die, the number facing, the orientation to other dice, and my own whim dictate the direction and angularity of the corridors. Remove each die as you finish drawing the connections, marking rooms that have monsters with some sign 

Look at what you have so far. Are there any choke points, issues, improvements, or features or ideas that jump out? Write down all your impressions stream of consciousness on a separate sheet of paper. Make any adjustments to dungeon layout now.

If you had any ideas for room keys start writing them. You can be verbose if you like but try to trim them down to a few sentences max as you continue iterating. Forget worrying about being good or fun at the table, just have fun right now.

Remember the golden rule: quit and come back if it stops being fun.

TIP: set yourself a timer, say 15-20 minutes. Try to finish a whole floor before the timer ends. If you stop and you still have some ideas going just let it be and come back to it. You'll jump back into the flow quicker next time. If you run out of time just erase the extra rooms or fill them with monsters, statues, collapsed columns, furniture, mushrooms, robot parts, bottomless pits, and rivers of acid.

Theme

The organizing idea of a dungeon is the theme. Each dungeon should have a principal theme, and each floor could have a variation of that theme. You may or may not have an initial theme at this point. If not, roll on the spark table below for ideas. To make a variation roll on one or both spark tables again and smash the result with the previous theme.

#rolled | element 1 | element 2

1. | Military | Fire

2. | Famine/plague | Earth

3. | Graveyard | Water

4. | Factory | Forest

5. | Experiments| Sky

6. | Grandeur | Galactic

7. | Melancholia | Caves

8. | Medicine | Hollow

9. | Forlorn hope | Swamp

10. | Crystal | Vapor

11. | Ancient Magic | Conjoined

12. | Solitude | Stone

13. | Primordial | Poison

14. | Prison | Building

15. | Beasts | Withering

16. | Weather | Knowledge

17. | Machines | Mutated

18. | Mushrooms | Hidden

19. | Precipices| Separated

20. | Hallowed | Organs

Filling the rooms

For each monster room, roll a monster.

For each empty room, roll for contents:

1-2. Really empty

3. Really empty, with treasure

4-5. Trick/Trap/Obstacle

6. Trick/Trap/Obstacle, with treasure

Decide on the contents, whether it's random bric a brac or traps, based on the theme. Here's another spark table for room contents. You can throw on the first table once for a simple usage, twice for a "what was it originally? what was it now?", the same on the second table for more ephemeral ideas, or combine the two and even mix with the first table to go really far out. The second table is good for trap effects.

It can help to take the spark you roll and free-associate some names based on it, and use that to get an idea for the room. Example: for "Abandoned Drift" in a dungeon whose theme is "Melancholia Poison" you could call the room "Prison of Oaks" "Void distemper" "Revolving catastrophe" "Slime warren" "Ocean of Dreams". You might roll one more spark element to help break a block, but avoid rolling on the tables a bunch of times.. all the extra detritus just muddies the waters.

Remember to just take a break if you feel a serious block coming. Many times if you quit before the ideas stop all together it'll start flowing again more quickly.

Try to keep a description of the room itself to a single sentence! Remember that 15 minute timer? You might be the kind of person that shuts down when the pressure is on. It can help you as a person to practice working through those feelings.

Oh, sorry, did you think this blog was only about d&d? Haha.

Sorry, here's that table:

#rolled | element 1 | element 2

1. | Barracks | Gravity

2. | Apothecary | Vaporized

3. | Workshop | Evoke

4. | Ballroom | Decrepit

5. | Leisure | Drift

6. | Jail | Sewage 

7. | Library | Crushed

8. | Storage | Ransacked

9. | Judicial | Overrun

10. | Foyer | Sealed

11. | Refectory | Unstable 

12. | Office | Split

13. | Clinic | Contaminated

14. | Atrium | Buried

15. | Agriculture | Dissolved

16. | Disposal | Deluge

17. | Mine | Torched

18. | Abandoned | Forgotten

19. | Mistake| Mistake

20. | Economy | Temporary

If there's rooms containing monsters next to each other consider making them a faction or at least allies. Decide what they're doing in the room and what nearby rooms they know about/have influence over. Give them things they want, as well as problems and enemies. A single room entry might look like this:

Room 6 - Prison of Oaks 

12 blind mushy mushroom men make out with rotting trees growing thru cracks in walls, fed by a continuous light cast on a brass idol of a monkey. The monkey idol is burning hot to the touch. The mushroom men are drowsy/drunken and barely hostile to interrupters. In the middle of each is a blue crystal worth 50 gp.

Once you get the first draft done go over it again, see if any new ideas come up. Next, cut out stuff you hate. Don't be afraid to just leave some rooms totally empty. Add some locked or secret doors, extra corridors, dead ends, more dangerous obstacles, weird effects, highways that connect disparate sections, flooded or caved in areas, alternate entrances, and elevators/stairs/chutes that skip whole floors forming shortcuts.

How much treasure should you put in? Here's my formula:

( Number of expected players * dungeon floor * 2000 + 20% )

I rarely though sometimes make treasure in the form of coins and gems, though that can have some great old school flavor. Mostly it's furniture, weird junk, or pseudo magical junk that players often walk right past.

Half of it is in monster possession, half of what remains is hidden where nobody would look, and the rest is just laying around under/in stuff, or is heavy or bolted down.

Oh yeah last thing make a d6 or d8 encounter table for each floor. You might save deciding what monsters to use until you get your table, or draw the monsters in the table from what you already keyed, or pick totally new monsters for the encounters. I like my encounter tables to have one or two entries from main dungeon factions, then the rest be unique encounters.

The rules for making monsters in Worlds Without Number is great for when you're feeling dumb. Actually WWN is just great.

(PS All art is made by AI because I'm lazy as fuck)

How to do a dungeon

UndeadWaffle on the OSR discord has been writing prolifically about his campaign lately. Not to be outdone I'm gonna riff on his stuff. 

Recently he did a write-up on his method of making dungeons. He uses the BX stocking method and comes up with ideas and monsters before he writes his dungeon.

I do the opposite. I generally start with layout first and work backwards to an idea, letting the development happen iteratively and organically from the layout.

This works for me because I rely heavily on procedurally generated content. The world starts out as random chaos and meaning begins to take shape as the pieces are developed.

I don't like long prep. I can easily spend all day tinkering if I let myself, which leads to burn out and damaged relationships. D&D is addictive.

The process

First I pick where I want a dungeon to go. This is probably a randomly chosen hex. I roll 2d10 for the number of rooms to start with. On graph paper I begin drawing rooms, sometimes throwing a d6 to help decide room size, orientation, and shape. I have a very intuitive mind and even randomly selected numbers can spontaneously generate rooms, shapes, traps, etc in my head. If I start having ideas I write them down, either as snippets or a table to roll on.

For my layouts I like to have a large main room with d4+2 branching paths, usually bisected by or connected to a main 'highway' which can quickly get occupants to a distant end of the dungeon. Highways are important because they form the backbone of transit around the floor - monsters use it, players use it, it's generally both dangerous and more likely to have divers travelers willing to barter, trade, or ply secrets, as well as rob, accuse, and solicit.

Each dungeon floor has 2 or 3 'areas' connected by choke points. Each area has 6-12 rooms, ordered chaotically, then connected with twisting passages, loops, and detours. I draw straight to final draft, letting ideas bubble up and vanish into the ether, forgotten. This i consider the 'pre-history' of the dungeon. Most dungeons are older beyond time out of mind, having been repurposed dozens of times over the centuries. I consider dungeons to be quasi-alive and malevolent. The original builders likely had minds unlike humans and altogether sinister, so I have no qualms about letting the layout make no sense. Dungeons are the bowels of the earth - treasure troves of dead gods, prisons for inhuman fiends, and bacterial cultures for transdimensional entities.

Once the layout is done I throw dice for each room to determine contents, adjusting at whim as I go.

1-2. Empty

3. Trap

4-5. Monster

6. Special

Empties have a 1:6 chance to have treasure. Traps have a 2:6. Monsters have 3:6. Specials are usually horrible. Generally there is something of low value, or medium value though cumbersome and awkward to transport, in every room. A few coins, a huge sheet of beaten copper, a forty pound demon skull, a crystal sarcophagus, ebony furniture. Etc.

Lots of empty rooms are important because death is almost a given. The idea here is to get in and get out. I've written before about my combats and I'll write about them again soon. I don't pull punches and my monsters are smart. The players have to be smarter. I refuse to except less.

By this point I've probably had enough ideas to give me a sense of at least some of the monster inhabitants. If there's clusters of occupied rooms I'll make these factions and use the factions to determine meaning.

Say I have 4 occupied rooms close together and the dungeon is located in a swamp (my favorite terrain type). These could be kobolds, Scorpio men, or zombies. Or maybe zombie kobolds and necromancer Scorpio men. I dress up the rooms around them with rooms for feeding, breeding, torturing, praying, communing, hiding, workshops, temples, and store rooms. Often rooms serve multiple purposes since real estate is limited. The faction probably has a leader, so I give them a private room, maybe near the temple or work rooms, provide them with secrets exits, protective traps, funds, furnishings, want artifacts. Often the faction will have a hierarchy, with a second in command, a priesthood, and a work force.

Factions always have friends, enemies, goals, prejudices, and obsessions. They're basically conglomerate NPCs. Sometimes the idea comes fully formed, sometimes I roll on tables. I make a few short notes.

After deciding the monster inhabitants I make the wandering monster table, either a d6 or d8. I like to have 1/2rd be weak or mindless monsters, and the remaining split between intelligent or powerful monsters. Some are taken from factions and placed monsters, some can only be found as wandering monsters.

Some OSR writers dislike long wandering monster lists, claiming it's better to a have a few interesting encounters than a long list of boring ones. My problem is rather that I have too many good ideas and I have to pare them down so they don't go to waste. I also like to make a note next to each entry to give them something to do, which I may not use when the time comes. An example of this:

1. D4 intelligent dingos, frantically looking for their pet dead cat.

2. Pet dead cat. Writhing full of maggots.

3. 2d6 goblins, holding court. Goblin lawyers well dressed, defendant is a severed elephant head with tusks worth 800gp each.

4. 2 goblin merchants, giant porcupine pack animal. Sell cooking equipment, linens, knife sharpening (will try to steal magic daggers they're given to sharpen)

5. Petulant ogre, two empty tuns, nursing wretched hangover.

6. D8 gnomes, probably convinced players stole something from them.

7. Purple worm!

8. Manticore and pet succubus, ended up here by mistake.

9. 2d12 zombies, organizing potion cupboard.

10. Vampire, stuck in mist form.

I could keep going all day. I'll use the note I wrote if it seems interesting in the moment or just throw for reaction.

After monsters are done it's time for traps. There's two types of traps: recent and occult. Recent traps were made and maintained by denizens. These include most genial booby traps.

Occult traps are maintained by nobody. They operate according to inscrutable laws of anti-physics, and exist for no reason other than their own sadistic glee. They may have been spawned as artistic expressions by the dungeon itself, by the original builders, or at some point in forgotten history it doesn't matter. These include glowing tiles that teleport you 3 feet down, urns that incinerate anything placed within, and cracked windows that hold back a flood of black water.

Specials are when things get really weird. Usually they're not as dangerous as traps, but potentially dangerous. A painting that inserts itself into your memories, a statue that insists you have a tea party with it, a room where it's constantly raining, or a tree that answers questions about botany, or a machine that turns meat into metal, or a metal vat containing liquidized ghosts  It's stuff to tinker with or find a way to leverage to your benefit. Or avoid.

I usually do empty rooms last because they're the most difficult. By definition empty rooms aren't barren - they just don't contain monsters, traps, or specials. I find it difficult to write descriptions of rooms that don't do anything, so I usually just cram them with nonsense furniture, broken machines, moldering books, broken masonry, tools, furniture, alters, etc. I should probably write some tables to automate this. If a dungeon dies on the operating table it's probably because I can't think of stuff that's boring but still interesting.

There. That's my method. Somewhere along the line everything starts falling into place. Reasons, meanings, hooks, rumors, but it doesn't need to. A dungeon doesn't exist for players to loot it, or to serve some outside purpose. Dungeons exist to keep things away from the world, to imprison things better forgotten, and to hide, sulk, ooze, and mangle. I don't care if players can't clear it, and I don't care if they nuke it from the atmosphere, and I don't care if the local lizardmen come and fill it up with black puddings after the players leave.

My motto is: the world isn't here to entertain you. If you come to my game you should know that you're here to entertain yourself with this weird little puzzle box I make in my free time.

I find the best art is made by the artist, for the artist, not her expected audience. My favorite musicians are shut ins with no dreams of fame. My favorite writers shriek with glee at their own stupidity. The game, to me, is figuring out what to do with this stuff and chasing obsessions and tangents into places you can't go if you planned it that way.

Happy corpses.

Tales of Mordhearse on Itch.io

I wrote up a fancy 2 page pdf for the Tales of Mordhearse hyperlite ruleset, slightly altered, and containing an example dungeon. It's hosted on itch.io. The game owes its chassis to Into the Odd and Zelda & is intended to get people playing with little to no experience. All the gaping holes are on purpose--you're supposed to make up the stuff that fills in the blanks.

Starving in the dungeon

Everything get simplified. Everything that's not in the book gets adjudicated. Lots of moving parts that requires extra tables and chart referencing is too much stuff to keep track of. Since your character's survival is predicated on their HP all of the bad shit that you suffer should affect their ability to stay alive and recover from combat.


Eating food is healing
At the end of the day you have to eat food and get some sleep to recover one HD hp. If you don't do both of those things you don't get to recover. It's that simple. If you don't sleep at all you roll with disadvantage on everything until you get sleep. You can go hungry as long as you want, but those hp won't come back til you eat so it's self-regulating. If a PC eats their favorite food they roll with advantage when healing.

In the wilderness you can roll bushcrafting checks to see if you find food, 4 hours per check. This works better if you're familiar with the locality/climate/denizens, or if you're a skilled hunter or tracker. Most of the time bushcrafting stuff is related to Wis. Being skilled gives you bonus points. The less fruitful the clime the harder the check.

Raw meat keeps for about a day or two. Adventurers have pretty hardened stomachs and can survive eating mostly funky stuff. If you cook it it'll keep for a few days. If you find some way to preserve it, like with salt or some kind of mild edible acid, it'll keep indefinitely. If it's definitely rancid the PC will smell it, but everything underground smells rancid.

If you make a meal by combining ingredients everybody eating it gets some +1s to healing based on complexity and deliciousness. Probably it won't be delicious though because you're eating goblins and giant slugs. I'm talking like if someone managed to find or bring something palatable into the dungeon, that normal people eat. Like blood sausage or pickled octopus.

What about in the dungeon?

Finding food underground has to be roleplayed because it's not just lying around like it is in the normal world. If another monster doesn't eat it, the dungeon itself will. You could try eating that slime growing from that drainage pipe. Catch a rat. Gnaw some old bones. Mostly you're gonna have to eat monsters. Hope you brought some cooking gear.

How long does it keep?
The surface levels of the dungeon probably has stuff that's kind of like the stuff in our world and obeys things similar to our rules. It keeps for 1-3 days usually.

The deeper you go the more the rules breakdown. Deep underground reality becomes toxic. Wounds turn septic quickly, diseases spread fast, and everything rots into goo and is consumed by something else within hours, like in a jungle made of hate. By the next day dead things are typically mummified or transformed into putrefied ichor. You have to eat it then and there.

Is this thing gonna make me sick?The answer is probably yes. When eating monsters make a Con or Poison save. If you fail you get sick. Either roll with disadvantage for a while or don't heal your HP or take some stat damage or be completely immobile while you hallucinate and scream and vomit for 2d20 hours. If somebody is a healer of some kind and has access to herbs and can explain what herbs their using and how, they can make a Int check to see if you get better. Then they mark off a use of their herbs.

Disease and mutations
are more or less the same thing to me. The difference is if it's curable or not. Diseases do stat damage and get worse, but probably you'll also get scales or feathers or start rotting or your tongue will turn into a hand and start trying to choke you. Probably worms will crawl out of your anus at night and be so itchy you can't sleep, or your genitals turn black and shriveled, or you'll get a crystallizing rash that spreads. It depends on the thing you eat, whatever that thing is like is what happens to you. You don't turn INTO that thing, but consuming its essence starts having an effect on your DNA. You might be able to cure it by eating more of whatever you ate, but that's probably just be an old wives tale. Maybe your god can hear your prayers all the way down here, and they care enough to listen.

Underground cookbooks
They exist but they're mostly written as jokes by charlatans and taking them seriously could get you killed or worse. Drow don't write cookbooks because drow don't eat food, they have highly trained slaves to brew mixtures of purified essence for aesthetic pleasure, like extractive of the colors a sentient being views as it dies while being tortured, the more subtle and wordless the better. Stuff underground mostly just kills and eats everything it can find without concern for taste. If there are any sources for what's good underground they're written by other adventurers in barely legible script as part of their logs, and can be found on their dead bodies.

Can we get fancy?
You can get as fancy as you want, but it's not going to help your situation. This isn't "Delicious in Dungeon". You're eating stuff that still want you dead even in death. This stuff isn't part of the natural world, there is no food chain or ecology down here. Monsters sprout from each other's nightmares, through rips in aetheric space, or spontaneously generate from mucous touching ashes or septic neck wounds. You're ingesting pure cardinal sin, ire, hate, greed, and venom. It tastes and smells like sewage, turns into a hard knot that blocks your intestines, and your body has no idea what to do with it. Its chemistry is not even of this world.

What about cannibalism?
Probably your safest bet, really. Stuff from your world isn't inherently toxic. You might go crazy eating people though. Veins of the Earth handles this nicely.

I didn't bring a cookpot... Can I hollow out this huge skull and brew soup in that?Now you're thinking like an adventurer! You just earned a +1 on your Con save to see if that beholder brain soup shreds your mind into pieces.

The moral of the story is bring food. Bring lots of food. But food is heavy. Next I'll talk about encumbrance.

Fast dungeon design for lazy people

If you get stuck consult the I-Ching

1. Steal, scrawl , or randomly generate a map. Look at it, does anything jump out? Write it down. Roll some dice on fun tables and riff off a couple o things.

2. Come up with d6 factions or d4 monster infestations that inhabit the place. How do they relate to each other? What are the major resources they're using there?

3. Generate various other critters that might be there. Start considering what various (d8?) locations might have been/currently be for. Bonus points if they don't make sense.

4. Outside of the "tribal stronghold" area, key some monsters using random tables. Place a few according to some idea you've got so far. Let weird combos arise and guide you toward interesting design choices.

5. Once the inhabitants are here figure out what stuff looks like based on who lives where/what they're doing. Giant centipedes might live in cavernous areas with glowing fungus and dark interconnected pools, Cockatrices build nests on high walls using bones and their tarlike saliva.

6. Add treasure they like. Orcs might purposefully hoard cool stuff, giant spiders might have forsaken adventurer's gear in websacs.

7. Doors/secret rooms/stairs/traps/tricks...........

8. Once you have a rough draft make a second draft rearranging anything new you thought up.

9. You should have a mostly empty dungeon splattered with coolstuff here and there, and some idea about how all the coolstuff relates to itself. Fill in all the extra rooms by rolling dice or using percentages

1-2 monster (33%)
3 trap (16%)
4 special (16%)
5-6 empty (33%)

3in6 monsters have treasure (50%)
2in6 traps have treasure (33%)
1in6 empty rooms have treasure (16%)

You want enough treasure so that a Fighter could get to the next level TIMES the number of expected players (TIMES 0.8 for 80%, if you're giving XP from defeated monsters but I don't), then take that number and double it because your players aren't going to find everything. Hide the extra half in stupid places they'll never look.

THUS a Fighter needs 2000XP to get to level 2. Using this formula a first level dungeon will have about 128,000 GP worth of treasure in it. But only 6,400 worth will be laying around in the open or on monsters waiting to be found. The other 6,400 will be hidden in secret walls, inside paintings of opulent feasts, buried in the sand, hidden in statues that try to bite off your hand, or tucked inside rotting elephant carcasses.

If you're considering giving XP for collecting magic items you're on your own. I consider magic items to be something else, and most of them come with a cost.

10. Look at nearby levels and determine what may or may not happen when the players intervene. Leave what actually happens up to play, but it's good to have a general idea of the mechanations within the loose naturalism.

11. Keep notes during play, re-populate accordingly.

I'm working on some Abulafia generators for making interesting treasures, rooms, and traps. Most random dungeon generators just spit out boring stuff (10000cp, a trap where a pit opens up with spikes, every room has cobwebs and manacles). I'm a fucking cyborg and I like to get random generator gibberish to feel out things. I'd rather paint on hewn bark than clean canvas.

Idea for treasures: generate some GP values like 3d8xdungeon level+player level, do that for d% of the rooms each. Hide treasures equal to the GP value in each room. If you roll a maxval on a room make it a special magic treasure.



I-Ching gibberish for dungeons:

Line 4:

Progressing like a Five Skills Rat.
Persistence is dangerous.

Trying to progress without the ability to do everything that is needed. Going on may get one into trouble.
(It is said of the Five Skills Rat, that:
It can fly, but it cannot go past a roof,
It can climb, but it cannot do an entire tree,
It can swim, but it cannot cross a ditch,
It can dig, but it cannot conceal its body,
It can run, but it cannot before a man.)

Sounds like a PC

Subvault dungeon

I'm trying to draw up more dungeons as a creative exercise because my brain is numb and I forget things easily and also I get depressed when I don't sit by myself somewhere and frantically scribble in a notebook. It's just gotta be that way OKAY???

I don't care for dungeons with tons of detail. It's too much crap to sift through and my brain doesn't work that way. I like when dungeons imply that something is there, but doesn't really show you, so you can daydream about it and fill in the stuff on your own. Like paint by numbers but with blood and swords.

This heap of forgotten trash is called the SubVault of the Wandering Plague. Is the wandering plague you? Is it the monsters? Is there some rampant disease barely contained within? Hoho! Play on to find out!

The room descriptions are intended to be evocative rather than perscriptive. The idea here is that I puke out what I think is cool and if someone else can harvest anything from it all the better. A loose attempt at dungeon ecology is made but a creative person with a wee bit of drive can probably find loads of stufff in there. The theoretical GM would need to interpret a lot and do some actual preperation (gasp!) before running this. At least enough to know what the fuck is going on. With that in mind I've also provided a number of tables which fill in the blanks. What's in this room? What goodies were the baboons hiding? Can I use this to kill stuff? All the important questions.

The SubVault is a small branch of the Undervoid colonized by batmen and lizardmen from nearby sectors. They really don't like each other but life goes on. Both have enslaved pit gnomes just as nature intended. Shroom goblins also have a habitat here, living in synthesis with the native orb spiders.

Also there's deeper remnants of this sector's past. A train station, an abandoned research facility, a reservoir. The new denizens are using this stuff for their own ends, but they don't comprehend it. There's some giants living to the southwest. They've live here a long, long time. They're sick of living. They stay because there's a fire demon trying to escape and they don't know what else to do but try to keep it at bay. They're about ready to give up.



Tune in tomorrow for more I think

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS
1. shroom goblins
2. lizardmen
3. batmen
4. pit gnomes
5. corrosive jelly
6. orb spiders
7. golem of skulls
8. rival adventuring party!

WHAT ARE THEY DOING??
1. Lost & aggressive
2. starving/hunting
3. hauling loot
4. arguing
5. fleeing from....
6. signing a truce
7. exploring
8. carrying wounded
9. eating a............
10. fighting..........

BONUS ROUND
1. knows where the good stuff is
2. willing to trade
3. knows the way
4. secretly diseased
5. one of them is a wizard
6. maybe royalty
7. hiding something??
8. traitors
9. captured a fairy
10. doomed grandiose plan

SMALL TREASURES
1. brass trinkets w  sequins
2. slightly rusty tools
3. dead body
4. a gem of minor value
5. weapon cache!
6. chains/rope/pulleys
7. torches/lamp oil
8. a bomb
9. is this food?
10. elegant heavy furniture
11. sinful and hedonistic art
12. tastelessly opulent clothes
13. exotic medicinal herbs
14. ritual stuff (silver, incense, monkey paw...)
15. orb spidersilk (weave w moonwool to make mythril)
16. poison (roll fav tables)
17. potion (as above)
18. ring (only barely cursed)
19. wand (d6 charges)
20. amulet(does it do anything?)

CONDITION roll this table for any reason (utility of plan, state of treasure, safety of bridge)
1. garbage
2. workable
3. good.
4. FANCY
5-6 roll again/stolen>>1. magic 2. owner wants it back 2-6 valuable

DANGERS!!!
1. fire
2. ice
3. water
4. collapsing
5. needles
6. gas
7. teleporter
8. biohazard
9. undead
10. cursed
11. sunken
12. vorpal
13. pitfall
14. siren
15. makeshift
16. fortification
17. diseased
18. illlusory
19. WarZone
20. roll twice

GOOD STUFF
1. healing
2. ESP
3. truesight
4. blink
5. float
6. enchanted
7. talking
8. shapeshifting
9. blessing
10. expensive
11. growing
12. hiding
13. glowing
14. edible
15. finding
16. muting
17. shaking
18. telekenisis
19. purifying
20. roll twice!

Treasure Form
1. jewelry
2. equipment
3. weapons
4. armor
5. art
6. clothes
7. monsterparts
8. ancient/lost/lore
9. books
10. artifacts
11. really big
12. really small
13. portal
14. container
15. vial
16. rod
17. energy
18. ghostly
19. tech
20. map to cache

Trap form
1. pressure plate/tripwire
2. machine
3. alter/bookcase
4. chest
5. door
6. statue
7. puzzle (free roll on any tables!)
8. liquid
9. wall
10. orb/light/gate
11. furniture/artifact
12. pile of dead bodies

Trap activation/shutoff
1. lift
2. lever/switch/button
3. transmute
4. given
5. eyes
6. lose
7. center
8. knock
9. look
11. voice
12. blood
13. flood
14. smash
15. heat
16. light
17. spirit
18. magic
19. intent
20. dreams

special--the hidden way through
1. trapdoor
2. ladder
3. chute
4. alcove
5. tunnel
6. teleporter
7. bag
8. door
9. vault
10. temple

Dungeon as a living entity

Santiago Caruso

The Dungeon isn't a really place built by people, though parts may be added on by mortal hands, or something made by mortals may become a Dungeon. It is something that grows from the world itself. The Dungeon is the inevitable decay of Law towards an entropic state, it emerges when things begin to break down. The Dungeon has its own mind, its own plans, its own desires & processes. It moves and changes by subtly bending smaller-scale living things to its will. The Dungeon is patient and plotting.

This is why traps reset themselves, why the architecture makes no logical sense, why doors open for monsters but are stuck for players, why everything is trying to kill you. The Dungeon is itself a living ur-trap, with bait to lure and teeth to gnash.

The Dungeon's desires: to Lure, to Harvest, to Grow

 How dungeons grow
Dungeons start out as a sharp rock in a wasteland, or a forest about to catch on fire, or a sinkhole. It catches some prey, feels and tastes its blood and screams, and wants more. It harvests their suffering and uses the magical energy to establish itself. It changes the landscape bit by bit via evolution, adding a vine here or a cave there. The more and smarter things it kills and eats the more it grows. Eventually it finds a way to attract manflesh, then the game is really one. The older and deeper a dungeon the craftier it gets.

Each body caught in a pit, strangled, slashed, burned, beaten, within its walls issues a life force which is consumed by the Dungeon.

Kris Kuksi

Corridors emerges and stretch and shift, taking the shape of something of a sympathetic nature to the surrounding area. Damp cold stone crawling with roots and insects. Hand-cut marble and brass trim. Tile mosaics depicting dolphins and men having sex. Highly detailed carved soapstone tentacles wreathing and tangling together. The Dungeon is a touch artistic and inventive in its architectures, it wants to inspire curiosity.

For this reason too Dungeons bury themselves in the ground, hiding spooky entrances, with rusted gates and skulls. Foreboding but speaking to an inner lust of curiosity and tale it knows all sapient races have.

dungeon as the in-between
Not all dungeons grow from a dangerous piece of the landscape. The most dangerous and horrible ones grow out of loneliness. A tomb constructed to house a king, stuffed with his magic spoon and mythrile sword and precious wives, and left to rot. The stinking vapor of his failed career and laments of the trinkets desiring a new master coalesce and take shape.

A family lives in an old house for generations. They store their most treasured belongings in the attic. Grandpa's gun, great-grandma's love letters, a locket containing the umbilical cord of a stillborn child, a box of weird shit belonging to some forgotten uncle collected during the war and never spoke about but he hid it and secretly looked through it and reminisced, forgotten under a floorboard.

The family died out, the house passed through various hands, most of the stuff cleared out, but some of it was left. The attic wasn't used as much and the stuff sat there and grew lonely, it missed being reminisced over. Eventually that part of town gets blighted, falls into ruin, the house is left standing, delapidated.

All horror movies are about dungeons. You were attracted by something, now you can't escape, and there's a thing that wants to give you a fate worse than death for its own confusing and malignant satisfactions.

Places that were known, used, then forgotten can grow into dungeons. The creepy stairs leading to your cellar is an embryo. The pile of stones that look like a house in the woods is mimicking something. Dungeons grow where things are lost or forgotten, unlooked at by human eyes. They collect in the dust and rot and grow like bacterial colonies where the fresh air doesn't reach to clear it out.

If you don't do spring cleaning, open up and air out your house the rot might set in. You'll start having bad luck, have to move out, then the house will be vacant and the poison can grow.

Dungeons don't exist in physical reality. Dungeons can be measured from the outside but not the inside. A torn apart ancient monastery with a creepy staircase that made up its own lies about a sacrificial cult, twisting the echos of the good natured old monks into something it can use. Behind the door is a different reality created by the dungeon.

treasure as lure
dungeons get their treasures by luring in idiots, eating them, and keeping their stuff to use to lure more idiots. sometimes it does this by spreading rumors on the wind like pollen to attract adventurers. sometimes it does this by being on a layline or having some resource to attracts wizards and dwarfs to embiggen it and manufacture fancy trinkets, before constructing their doom.

that's why we laugh at wizards and dwarfs. there's inherent folly built into their cravings. They build and search and hunt and experiment while what they make is actually the fertile soil for a dungeon to grow. Wizards and Dwarfs are the worms that turn mountains and caves and metal and gold into dungeons.

Wolfgang Grasse

monsters as symbiotic parasites
Monsters are like gut flora, or part of a root microbiome for dungeons. The Dungeon gives them a place to live away from the light and infest and be horrible, and in return they help it kill things and keep them from leaving.

Goblins move in. Kobolds infest. Hobgoblins form a stronghold. Ogres seek shelter. Oozes seep out. Every dungeon needs an ecosystem of lesser creatures to aid in digestions.

looting dungeons
It doesn't want to be looted, its loot is its stored nutrience, but to give the impression that it is lootable. It can't just snap its jaws on every person that walks in or people would stop going in. If you take magic stuff out of it some of the mystery that keeps it going is lost.

The Dungeon doesn't want you to leave, but as you do, loaded with sacks of cold, it smiles coldly to itself, for others will be coming soon.



A universe dies when it becomes one enormous dungeon, sprawling for infinite, before collapsing on itself back into singularity.