Generic Ruins Pamphlet Dungeon PDF

Here’s the compliment to the Generic Bandit Tower and Generic Crumbling Tower. It’s the Generic Ruins trifold pamphlet PDF. Same emphasis on semi-random elements as the previous two towers to provide minor differences between two different ruins. I made the focus of each generic tower different: intact towers would be tempting to bandits looking for a defensible base, crumbling towers are easy for wildlife to take over as a lair. Ruins, though, provide less shelter, so they seemed like a good spot for standard undead remnants of the previous inhabitants.

I’ve also uploaded a corrected version of the Crumbling Tower. The link should be the same. Changes were minor, a handful of format errors that most people wouldn’t notice, a spelling error or two… but I did leave off “webs” on the entry for giant spiders. You probably could have guessed that, but still…

Some thoughts about developing the three generic pamphlets: I picked the state of repair of the tower as a way of categorizing the generic versions because the non-generic towers I’ve created themselves come in different states of repair:

• Death’s Kiss and CorpseBrood Towers are intact, like the Bandit Tower.
• The Shrieking Tower’s upper floors are crumbling.
• One tower planned for the future is nothing but ruins on the surface.

Thus, if players sneak a peek at The Shrieking Tower and decide it’s easy to deal with, they may blunder into a crumbling tower, thinking it’s not a danger. Having more than one tower look the same externally complicates the issue. They have to be smarter: gather rumors, observe a tower for a few hours, try to figure out what’s actually going on.

As hinted at a couple times, multiple generic towers improves the variety of possible towers. Here are ways you can mix and match:

• Connect the escape passage in one tower to an escape passage in a different tower.
• Use the bandit type table in the Generic Bandit Tower pamphlet to make small bandit camps at crumbling towers and ruins more interesting.
• Use the dungeon of one tower with the upper levels of another tower (bandit tower with ruined lower level, with or without undead.)
• Use any of the three dungeons as a level below the first dungeon level of a tower, reached via one of the stairs results. Replace the trap door on the second level (or lower levels!) with stairs up.
• Remove the bandits from the bandit tower and use predators or undead as the primary inhabitants of the upper levels.

You can also replace the escape passage (Result #3) with a short passage. Any wall in the passage that does not border an already mapped area may have a door. Roll multiple d6s, one for each potential door, and remove duplicates, to determine how many doors there are and what’s behind the door, using the same method as for the corridor leading from area 12. This allows for a potentially larger dungeon level than the small default dungeons given in the pamphlets.

Another possibility is to take the dungeon for one of the “named” towers, change or remove any reference to the weapon or special feature of that named tower, and use it as either the first level or a lower level of one of the generic towers. Special rooms like the vent in Death’s Kiss Tower can be:

• Left non-functional (opening vent doesn’t release a cloud)
• Changed to a room with a staircase down to another level
• Replaced with a short passageway full of doors, as described above
• Replaced with a room you designed or borrowed from another source

There are probably more possibilities, but that’s all I could think of for now.