Dev Blog #1 (A New Dungeon Approaches!)

Hey Game Fans, this is a new feature for the blog. Today I’m going to walk you through using our Mega Dungeon Generator to build your own dungeon. So, for the next... I’ll say six weeks, I’ll walk you through the steps of putting together a dungeon, and then if y’all are interested, I’ll add monsters and treasure from a sampling of other RPGs so you can feel what it looks and plays like in your favorite game. Let’s spin some dice and see what happens, Friends.

So, let’s look at the process and dig in to the fun.

The Process

1. Step 1: Determine Dungeon Depth

2. Step 2: Starting with the 1st floor, perform the following Processes

     Process 1: Determine the Floor’s theme

     Process 2: Generate the starting number of doors

     Process 3: Layout the Starting Room of the Dungeon as follows

           1. Sub-process: Generate Room Shape and Structure

           2. Sub-process: Generate Doors out of the Room

           3. Sub-process: Determine Room Oddities

           4. Sub-process: Generate Corridors leading to next room (proceed as you like)

    Process 4: Generate Additional Rooms using the Subprocesses above (repeat until you have exhausted the supply of doors)

    Process 5: Determine Population Density

    Process 6: Populate Rooms with either Inhabitants or Encounters

         1. Sub-Process: Determine relative danger of the floor

         2. Sub-Process: Room by room, determine specific monster Inhabitants or Encounters

    Process 7: Place the way down to the next floor in the last room generated

3. Step 3: Repeat Step 2 for the 2nd floor (Repeat for all additional floors of the complex)

Simple right?

No, I admit it is a complex tool, and it’s something that you cannot do on the fly. What it will do is let you, in your free time, design a mega dungeon for your favorite game system. So, let’s get it in process.

Dungeon Depth:

So, the first step in the process is to determine how deep the dungeon goes. The Dungeon depth is the number of floors that the dungeon has in it. Like the title says, this is a MEGA DUNGEON GENERATOR. It’s got depth, and it’s got a lot going on. A deep enough Mega Dungeon can be a campaign setting of its own. Let’s see how deep this dungeon is and then start figuring out some other answers to questions. To the Dice!

*Makes fumbling noises with dice, rolls them, consults the document.*

Okay, so looking at things, we’ve got an 18 floor Mega Dungeon. That’s a healthy dungeon, and it can certainly be a campaign setting of its own. With that idea in mind, let’s build the first level of the dungeon and answer a few other questions along the way.

FAQ: Gee mister designer person, why don’t you have a table for the overall dungeon’s theme instead of having individual floor themes?

Answer: When I laid out this project originally, I considered that, but after running a couple of permutations, I decided that the variety of individual floor themes was more interesting design ground than a single theme for the entire Dungeon. Some themes work best for short, single floor adventures, where others just make little sense as a mega dungeon theme. I went with single floor themes.  

Now that we have our dungeon floor depth, it’s time to generate the first floor.  

Floor Theme:  

So each floor has a theme that ties it together narratively. There are 100 individual themes, and they range from the mundane to the downright bizarre. The purpose of the Floor theme is twofold. First, it gives you, as a designer, a key to tie the elements together and give you ideas for how the rooms interact with each other. Second, it informs the characters (and their players) of what sort of things to expect in this floor level. Some times these will be very obvious things, like a crashed alien space ship level. Other times, these will be more subtle choices, as players explore an ancient prison complex. Each Theme has a host of questions that should help you anchor your design around the space you’re building and help you keep the theme close at hand for when you add room details.  

*Fumbles with dice again, thinks he should really keep these closer*

So, after consulting the dice and the book, I’ve rolled up “This floor has been repurposed by a natural disaster.” So what does that exactly mean, and what do I do with it?. I have thoughts all ready, having looked at it for a few minutes. First off, there are several natural disasters that could I could have used, but I think I’m going to go with a volcano. In this area’s past, a volcanic eruption occurred, and it had a dramatic effect on the landscape. The first floor of this dungeon feels like the epicenter of the eruption, and that’s going to shape a few important details.  

First things up, design details. Lava forms tubes when it flows, and it also leaves obsidian and a few other materials in its wake. Lava also has a distinctive appearance that I can use to describe the environment that it has affected.  

FAQ: Why Lava? 

Answer: Eh, it worked at the time and has some elements I can use both descriptively to explain the dungeon to other folks, and narratively tie things together. You can use whatever natural disaster is your... well, I guess favorite?

So, Quick Recap

Total number of Floors: 18

Floor 1 Theme: Repurposed by Lava

Step 3: Determine the number of doors

The number of doors is an essential dungeon design element, because it will give you a rough idea of how many rooms are in the dungeon. Some dungeon floors are going to be bigger than others, and knowing how many doors there are should give you a starting point to determine how many rooms they attach to.  

*Rolls Dice*

Ok, we’ve generated 21 doors for the first level of this dungeon, which is slightly higher than the average of 18. Now that we have doors, it’s time to build rooms, and this is really the heart of the Mega dungeon process.  

So, the process works like so. Roll 1D3 to determine how many Room Shape Structures you are working with. For each Room Shape, determine its size and shape. Once that’s done, determine how many Room Oddities it has. Then, if you have multiple, figure out how they connect.  

So Room 1 has two Room Shape Structures, a 6 x 6 Square and a 4 x 4 Hexagon. Neither has a size inconsistency, but I need to generate ceiling heights. As I’m not using the option for individual ceiling heights by section, it’s time to generate 1 ceiling height for the entire room, and that comes to 15 feet.  

Now that we have a room ceiling height, we generate room Oddities. We generate three oddities per room structure. So let’s roll some dice and see what happens.  Our room has: Fog, Jail, Maze, Braziers, Shifting Internal Space, Training Room.  

Now that’s a lot of stuff to work out, but I can see a layout in this (and one that won’t drive a Cartographer to substance abuse). Narratively, this place was a training space for warriors that used a complicated maze to train them in low visibility conditions. It also had a shifting internal layout to confuse and disorient as part of that training. Braziers lit portions of that room, and there was a jail at the end of that maze structure.  

*after futzing with Inkarnate for a bit* 

Now I’ve put together a basic map of the area, which I’ll add some dungeon dressing to in a minute to explain the shape. 

So, we’ve got a dungeon room that changes its internal layout every 5 rounds. I also covered the area in fog, which makes it hard to navigate through. Braziers strategically cast heat and light around the space. At the end of that structure is the jail (represented by the Hexagonal area).

This room already sounds like an experience and we haven’t even figured out who/what is living in it. (That’s another step though, so let’s roll on through). 

Once we have room shape and oddities done, it’s time to determine the number of doors in the room. After consulting the dice, we end up with three doors out of this room. After looking at the way I lay the room out, I’m going to put two of them out of the South wall of the 6 x 6 square room, and one coming out of the south angled panel of the hexagon. 

Now that doors exist, It’s time to build corridors. 

The First Corridor; for door number 1, turns out to be 15 feet wide, but only five feet long. I exercise a bit of stretching for this (but you could have drawn it as it sits) and connect door 1 and door 2 together into a connecting hallway. The output door from their corridor then turns into a double door. This corridor generates no oddities.  

The Third Corridor (since Corridor 2 merges into Corridor 1) is 5 feet wide and fifteen feet long. The Corridor has Wall Art as an oddity, which takes the form of obsidian flows in the lava tube. It’s beautiful, natural art that flows with the narrative theme of the dungeon floor and is something to see in a dungeon.  

Now I have a starter dungeon, a beginning map, and an idea for where this dungeon is going to go. We’re going to stop here for today, but we’ll have part 2 of this series up next Friday on the Dev blog on itch, and our home blog. We’ll see you all then.  

https://inkarnate.com/m/GXgGZd--lava-map/