Did I mention yet how the sketchbox dice tool can be used for mapping out underworlds? I didn't? Man, that was the whole reason I started updating it, too...
The basic idea is that you use the techniques for randomly rolling village layouts to generate a dungeon or cavern system. Roll dice with pips on the sheet, each pip represents anything from one room cluster to one neighborhood; connect districts with tunnels instead of roads. Pretty simple.
For small cave systems, roll 1 die and treat it as a hamlet (each pip represents one to six caves; roll a d6 for cave layouts or randomly select a cave geomorph for each pip.) Alternatively, you could roll for elevation with d4s and roll 3 dice for cave layouts at the same time, as if you were rolling for above-ground terrain features, to establish the levels; any "level" without any six-sided dice is one large cave, and tunnels slope up/down to connect dice on different levels.
More extensive underworlds are rolled like villages or towns, treating each pip as a block of buildings or a district of 1d6 blocks. This is based on the assumption that such underworlds are the underground remnants of previously-above-ground settlements. For now, we're just concerned with rolling dungeon layouts, but in a future post I'd like to delve into interpreting the rings, rolling to see the status of tunnels and districts, and even how to do this on-the fly, so that you could leave your megadungeon notes as sketchy as the impromptu towns.
I'm liking this so far, anything to randomize adventure generation and simplify the "world creation" process is good for me. Thanks for all of your efforts in this.
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