Last-Minute d6 Dungeons: Map Glyphs

I’m looking at the Last-Minute d6 Dungeons series (links below) and wanting to simplify it some more… but also, wanting to make it more readable.

Here’s what I mean: I plan on creating customizable dungeon maps that use these techniques. It would help people a lot if I could put an instruction right on the map, so that the GM using it wouldn’t need to turn back to an instructions page. Instead, the introduction would give a couple simple icons and how to interpret them.

Example A: Side Passages

The glyph for this shows three boxes, each representing a d6. The position of each door or doorway along the main corridor is the position of each d6, in order.

Look for the lowest d6 roll first.

• If it is Odd, the exits start on the North or West side of the corridor.
• If it is Even, the exits start on the South or East side of the corridor.

If the second or third exits exist, it will be on the same side as the first exit if the d6 that represents it is odd, or the opposite side if the d6 is even.

(There would, of course, be another glyph for tunnels that run vertical on the map instead of horizontal, but I didn’t make one yet. It would look like the above glyph, but rotated 90 degrees.)

Example B: Tunnel Junctions

Same 3d6 roll as for Side Passages, but the position of each d6 is the order of branches or exits clockwise around the compass. (This is what the curved “triangle” represents.)

• If two of the dice match, the d6 that doesn’t match tells you which direction to skip (left, middle, right.) Branches or exits will be in the other two directions, in clockwise order.
• If all the dice match, roll another d6 and check the result: 1-2 = turn left, 3-4 = middle or straight, 5-6 = turn right.

In either Example A or Example B, the number of matches tells which table to use to look up the d6 result (loose, doubles, or triples,) as per the Drop Dice Exits post.

Links to Last-Minute d6 Dungeons series:

1. Tunnels
2. Tunnels update
3. Exits
4. Drop Dice Exits
5. Side Exits Update

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Last-Minute d6 Dungeons: Side Exits from Tunnels

Readers may have noticed that the Wednesday installment of the Last-Minute d6 Dungeons (links at end of post) reduced everything down to one (semi-) drop dice method to determining exits, but there was something missing. When rolling for side exits from tunnels, the drop dice method only tells you how far along the tunnel section each exit is, but doesn’t tell you which side of the tunnel it is.

I was aware of this, but left it out for a reason: I wasn’t happy with the methods I came up with. There’s basically four obvious methods of dealing with it.

1. Roll 1d6 or flip a coin for each exit to determine which side.
2. Don’t roll again. Just pick the side that makes the most sense (no connecting back to already-mapped areas, for example.)
3. Make the exit roll do double duty. If d6 result is odd, exit is on North or West side of tunnel, whichever makes sense. If d6 is even, exit is on South or East.
4. Same as #3, but only for first exit in tunnel section. Second exit will be on the side alternate, and third exit will be on the same side as first exit.

Method #1 adds extra dice rolls, right after we trimmed some out, so it’s no good.

Method #2 is fine as a general principal to modify random results where needed, but the whole point is to make a random generator.

Method #3 is a bit predictable. For example, a loose (no match) d6 result of 1 is a side tunnel, but under this rule, all side tunnels would be on the same side of a tunnel. Method #4 fixes this a little, but still could be more random.

But since we are also rolling dice of different colors (two light-colored, one dark-colored,) we could make use of that to modify Method #4.

5. If the dark d6 result is odd, the first exit is on the North or West side of the tunnel. If the dark d6 is even, the first exit is on the South or East. Second exit will be on the opposite side, and third exit will be on the same side as the first. Modify any result that would lead back into already-mapped areas.

If we really feel the need for more randomness, flip the second or third exit to the alternate side if the d6 result is the “opposite” of the dark d6. In other words, if the dark d6 is even but the d6 for the 2nd exit is odd, that exit is on the same side of the tunnel as the first exit.

Links to Last-Minute d6 Dungeons series:

1. Tunnels
2. Tunnels update
3. Exits
4. Drop Dice Exits

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Last-Minute d6 Dungeons: Drop Dice Version

I did some testing for the Last-Minute d6 Dungeons series (d6 Dungeons 1, d6 Dungeons 2, and d6 Dungeons 3,) and decided the ratio of rooms to tunnels was too low (Oops! All tunnels!) The problem is the Side Exits roll, which works fine in its original iteration for the semi-random dungeons pamphlets, but that is because that version only has a 42% chance of at least one tunnel, instead of a 97% chance.

One solution would be to replace the Side Exits roll with the Exit Destination roll, but treat it as a freeform drop-dice roll.

1. Roll 3d6 for each tunnel.
2. The position of each d6 is the position of each door or doorway (read left to right as West to East for horizontal tunnels, North to South for vertical tunnels.)
3. For dice that match, only use the position of the first d6.
4. Read the d6 result from the appropriate Exits subtable below, depending on whether its a triple, a double, or a loose d6 with no match.

d6	Loose d6 Result
1	Simple Corridor
2	Minor Debris
3	Missing Ceiling/Floor
4	Well or Fountain
5	Staircase or Ladder
6	Statue/Monument

d6	Doubles Result
1	Animal Pens
2	Storage (roll 1d6 again)
3	Jail Cell(s)
4	Food Prep
5	Living Area
6	Guard Station

d6	Triples Result
1	Armory (Weapons/Armor)
2	Execution Chamber
3	Temple or Shrine
4	Forge
5	Library
6	Magical Lab

In some cases, the GM could improvise a second roll to specify the variants. The only example specifically referenced on the table is “Storage”, where another d6 is rolled and the same table read again as a clue to what is stored in that room. Similarly, a well or a fountain could be dry or full of fresh, stagnant or poisoned water, or acid (2d6 reaction roll, with Dry as the middle result.)

This same Exits roll could replace the Tunnel Turns roll, but using two light-colored dice and one dark.

• If no dice match, each position represents one of the three direction (left, right, straight ahead.)
• If only two dice match, read the dark d6 first to find out which direction is blocked.
  • First Position: No door or passage North in a horizontal West/East tunnel, No door or passage West in a vertical North/South tunnel.
  • Second Position: No door or passage straight ahead.
  • Third Position: No door or passage South in a horizontal West/East tunnel, No door or passage East in a vertical North/South tunnel.
• If all three dice match, read the dark d6 as the direction to use (First Position = North or West, etc.)

Inside rooms, roll 3d6 for exits in the same way.

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Last-Minute d6 Dungeons: Exit Destinations

I may be making changes to the Last-Minute d6 Dungeons and its update, but before I did so, I thought I would address the missing portion: what’s behind that door?

Usually, a room, although in rare cases, it would be another tunnel. The GM would roll on a table, but there would in fact be several tables, for different dungeon themes and styles, and there may even be multiple tables for one theme/style.

But here’s a generic approach: roll 2d6 on the table below. If the roll is doubles, use the information in the (If Doubles) column.

2d6	Room Type		(If Doubles)
2	–>		No Floor
3	Jail cell(s)		–
4	Food		Farm/Pens
5	Lair/Living		–
6	Storage		Special
7	Monument		–
8	Kill Chamber		Flooded pit
9	Guard/Defense		–
10	Crafting		Tunnel
11	Debris/Ruin		–
12	–>		Tunnel

Doubles generally means a special version of the general room type: A 4 result means food prep (kitchen, fire pit) or food storage, but double 2 means a food source: a farm or animal pen.

Since a result of 2 is always double 1, it is always one specific result, On this table, it’s a room without a floor. Double 5 or 6 is a tunnel.

The “Special” doubles result next to “Storage” means it’s special storage, like an armory or library.

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Last-Minute d6 Dungeons: Update

I decided to make some changes to the graphics from yesterday's post.

What's Different: 

• Switched the dice results so that they are numbered left to right, top to bottom, which might be easier to remember.
• Switched to absolute orientation (horizontal or vertical, using compass directions) instead of relative orientation (left or right,) since not everyone can handle imagining themselves rotating in space.
• Labels for the d6 results printed on the diagram.
• Made it clearer that dice can be rolled at either end of a tunnel section to see if the tunnel continues, branches, or turns.
• Added doorways and room shapes to make it clearer where these would be drawn on the map.
• Summary of instructions in lower left.

Technically, it would have been better to center the hypothetical rooms relative to their doorways. But I use Alex Schroeder's Gridmapper for quick one-off diagrams like this, and there are limitations to what it can do. If I do a more refined version of this as a PDF, I can do fancier illustrations in Inkscape.

Last-Minute d6 Dungeons

I want to revisit the semi-random dungeon generation technique. I originally developed this for my dungeon expander pamphlet series, the idea being that a GM who suddenly needs a dungeon or needs to expand an existing dungeon can just grab a random pamphlet and create a random one with a minimum of rolling. But I’ve had some ideas on how to update this for a while.

The original system involved a pseudo-map of a corridor with six potential exits and six possible kinds of exits. What I’m proposing now is a more universal framework.

d6	Exit Location	Tunnel Direction
		Right Side
1	First Third	Turn Right
2	Middle Third	Turn Right
3	Last Third	Straight Ahead
		Left Side
4	First Third	Turn Left
5	Middle Third	Turn Left
6	Last Third	Straight Ahead

1. Start with a Basic Tunnel Segment (24 paces, or 60 feet long) heading in any direction.
2. Make a Side Exits Roll (3d6) to determine where each side exit is (See Exit Location column on table above.) On doubles, the exit is a Portal (standard door.) On triples, the exit is a Special Portal (heavy door.) Otherwise, it’s an Exit (open archway.)
3. Make a Tunnel Roll (3d6) to determine the basic tunnel shape. On triples, the tunnel dead-ends in a Portal (standard door) straight ahead. Otherwise, each d6 result represents a tunnel direction, which means the tunnel may turn, branch to one side, end in a T-junction, or become a four-way intersection (See Tunnel Direction column on table above.)
4. For every Portal or Special Portal, make a Chamber Roll to see what’s behind the portal. (More on this later.)
5. After making one or more rolls for a room’s contents, end with a Room Exits Roll (Probably 4d6.) Each d6 represents one exit’s direction (1-4 = one wall of room, numbered clockwise starting at the top; 5-6 = up or down.)

You may notice the pattern of bold name followed by (italic parenthetical information.) Extracting that, we get this summary:

• Basic Tunnel Segment (24 paces)
• Side Exits Roll (3d6)
• Tunnel Roll (3d6)
• Chamber Roll (1d6 or more)
• Room Exits Roll (4d6)
• Extras:
  • Exit (open archway)
  • Portal (standard door)
  • Special Portal (heavy door)

The bold names are the underlying framework of the system, but the italicized information can be changed for custom dungeon types. For example, changing Basic Tunnel Segment to a shorter length like 12 paces or 30 feet makes tighter, twisty-er dungeon designs, while changing the Side Exits Roll to 4d6 packs more tunnels and rooms into the space. Changing Exit from open archway to curtains changes the feel of the place, perhaps making it more like a temple or palace. Swapping Exit and Portal (so that exits only appear on doubles) makes doors more common than archways. Changing Special Portal to portcullis might make more sense in a true castle dungeon or prison.

Chamber Rolls are left vague for now, but the basic idea is that there is a table of room types, possibly two separate tables, one each for portals and special portals. But there could be different tables for different dungeon themes. This is something I’m still working on, but would most likely be a 1d6 or 2d6 table, perhaps with extra numeric entries reachable only when there is a bonus to the role (for example, a +1 for every 2 full levels of depth, so that some room types only show up on deeper levels.

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Demonic Dangers Dungeon Expander Pamphlet PDF

Here is the promised map for this week, another spooky Dungeon Expander offering for October: Demonic Dangers, a pamphlet dungeon for mid-level characters (at least 4th level, but perhaps 6th or higher would be better.) It took longer than usual to make the dungeon because I put a little more work into the cover illustration (and into the map itself, for that matter.) I probably should not be wasting this much time on the illustrations, but at least I’m learning a lot more about SketchUp.

Demonic Dangers features random simplified demons. Since the standard D&D demon descriptions are too long to include in a pamphlet dungeon, and even my condensed demon descriptions from Our Infernal Neighbors would take up too much space, I went with a mix-and-match approach using the standard animal encounters that are also in the dungeon. Demonic abilities are short and improvised. You can, of course, replace the demons in the pamphlet with whatever demon write-ups you usually use.

    

    

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d6-Only Random Maps

I've talked about random map tricks before, but I'm not sure if I've done anything restricted to d6 rolls, kept as simple as possible (no dice map/drop dice techniques, easily memorizable so that you don't need to consult a table...)

You've already seen one such trick in the Generic Tower and Dungeon Expander semi-random dungeons. In a long corridor like the one in the pic, roll 3d6 for each side of the corridor and keep only one die out of every set of doubles or triples. The remaining dice, in order, are what's behind the door, using a simple d6 "table" expressed as a map. (I've modified the room order for this example by making a result of 5 = the Tunnel and result 6 = the Staircase.) Optionally, at the end of the corridor, roll 2d6 and use one die result if you roll doubles, otherwise leave it as a dead end.

The next trick would be to apply this to room exits as well. Roll 4d6 for a room, only keeping one die from each set of doubles, triples, or quads. Results 1 through 4 are doors in each of the four walls. Result 5 is a ladder in the middle of the room (I used a trap symbol, because I couldn't find a better option in Gridmapper.) Result 6 is a staircase. Roll another d6: on 5+, the ladder or stairs go up, otherwise they go down.

But these two tricks work best when used on a "seed map" of tunnels, using Trick 1 in each section of tunnel, followed by Trick 2 to find the second exit in any room discovered. So Trick 3 is to roll 2d6 multiple times to find the direction of several tunnel segments. The first die indicates the tunnel starts at the map edge indicated or in the center of the map. The second die indicates where the tunnel heads. Results 1 through 4 are one of the compass directions. Results 5 and 6 are the center of the map, again indicating a ladder or staircase. The tunnel segments are all a standard length, say 240 paces (60 feet,) after which it may extend as indicated in Trick 1. Don't discard doubles for this roll: instead, doubles indicate a U-turn for results 1 through 4, or a landing stage between two ladders or staircases. (This is what the short "L" segments represent on the map.)

How many tunnel segments you need to create a seed map is mostly a matter of taste, but I'd say three would be a decent start.

Cryptic Catacombs Dungeon Expander Pamphlet PDF

Another pamphlet in the 9 and 30 Dungeon Expanders series is up! And this time, it’s spooky!

Cryptic Catacombs is an undead-themed dungeon expansion. It’s compatible with my other Dungeon Expanders, the generic towers in my tower series, or … well, anything, really. Connect this to any staircase or ladder and use this to start an instant dungeon or expand an existing one. Oh, and although the main monster encounter list has only four undead typed, I slipped in two new bonus undead.

I avoided doing a crypt-themed pamphlet (although I did slip in one generic crypt in the first expander) because I wanted to push myself out of the obvious zone. But now it’s October, and in the generous spirit of Hallowe’en, I just had to do some undead. The style has changed a little (used SketchUp to create the base levels, instead of starting in InkScape.)

    

    

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Lankhmar and Urban Geomorph Ideas

Instead of Map Monday, this Monday I’m going to follow up on the Lankhmar review I did last week. There was a reason why I did it. I’ve been having some thoughts about how I should do town and city maps.

You see, the published town and city maps I’ve seen that take the fully-mapped, fully-keyed approach, like Carse or Tulan of the Isles, don’t quite meet the quality I’m looking for in a city map. It’s not that there is anything necessarily bad about them. I keep mentioned Carse because I do like the way the map looks, with its little 3d buildings. And the locations described in those products can be pretty good. But keying all the encounters and locations for an entire town, let alone for a city, just seems like a tedious way to present it. You’d have to study the book thoroughly to find out all the hidden conflicts, secrets, and schemes it contains, and to familiarize yourself with where all the shops and services of various varieties are located, or provide some really, really detailed cross-references, the kind I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a published product.

That’s why I prefer only keying a few important locations at the start and creating a more general map of a city, which I can fill as needed using improv rules, like the rules I’ve already written about here. That’s why Lankhmar, City of Adventure, despite a few flaws that make it kind of unwieldy, still interests me. It’s that promise of “Just-In-Time” mapping that pulls me in.

And it’s what’s leading me towards a certain solution. I already have a plan for Last-Minute Cities, a compilation and expansion of my improv town and city rules. But I think urban geomorphs may also be part of the answer. And it’s something I’ve been trying out already. This map is a draft version of one I’ve been working on. When finished, and when I add more urban geomorphs, GMs will be able to drop them into a Lankhmar-like city map with blank spots for geomorphs… or, I’m thinking, replacing city blocks on other maps that were never designed to use geomorphs.

Remember Revelode? It’s a town with a few keyed locations, but mostly just unlabeled buidlings. Suppose you took a block of 3 to 6 building and replaced it with that geomorph? It would be a quick customization. And if there were a map key available for that geomorph, it would be an on-the-spot solution to quickly filling in an urban adventure area. Of course, there are aesthetic differences between that geomorph and the maps in the Instant Village series. But that’s not insurmountable…

Expect to see more on this soon.

Bug Burrows Dungeon Expander Pamphlet PDF

Another pamphlet in the 9 and 30 Dungeon Expanders series is up! Bug Burrows. The natural, easy way to make themes for dungeon expanders would be to focus on types of living areas and work spaces: libraries and labs for magic-users, shrines and religious areas, etc. And there will certainly be some of those. However, I wanted to try something a little different to stretch the concept a bit… so I made a monster-themed expander instead.

As usual, you can connect this to any staircase or ladder, or in this case chutes and shafts, in other dungeons.

Pit Perils Dungeon Expander Pamphlet PDF

As promised, today we have another pamphlet dungeon in the new 9 and 30 Dungeon Expanders series: Pit Perils. It includes a Connection Level, so you can use it as you would the Generic Semi-Random Dungeon: add a staircase or trap door in any other dungeon and expand it, or to a random structure to create an instant dungeon anywhere. Or, ignore the level maps and just use the rooms to replace overused random rooms in the main map. You could even draw your own basic tunnel map and use the rolls described in the pamphlet to place random rooms.

The pamphlet’s theme is “pits”. All the rooms have pits of some kind: the four generic rooms have simple pit structures, the four special rooms are a little more elaborate and dangerous. The plan is to do more themed pamphlets like this, which allows you two options when creating a random dungeon:

1. Pick one or two themed pamphlets for a specific dungeon, or specific dungeon level(s), to create a unified feel to that area.
2. Start with one pamphlet as your base and shuffle the other expander pamphlets. When you start repeating rooms in the first pamphlet too much, choose another pamphlet at random and start using those rooms instead.

In theory, you can roll these dungeons during play: the random tables aren’t very complex. However, what I had in mind was that you would draw a sketch map of a planned tunnel system and place the rooms, possibly adding books or letters to locked chests or tables if your dungeon is part of some on-going adventure. Clues to a mystery, background for finding other dungeons, useful information for problems the adventurers are trying to solve. This can all be done in about half an hour, with the aid of the pamphlets, and gives you an opportunity to customize the dungeon key or monster list to make it feel less like a random dungeon.

Generic Semi-Random Dungeon Pamphlet PDF

It’s back to the dungeon grind this Map Monday, with a new pamphlet dungeon: Generic Semi-Random Dungeon, first of the new 9 and 30 Dungeon Expanders series. This new series is compatible with the generic towers in the Watchtowers of the Golden Hills series. You may remember that the random results included tunnels and stairs down. Either of these can be connected to one of the two levels in this pamphlet, allowing for a slightly larger dungeon with more variety.

You can also add a staircase or trap door in any other dungeon, either one of mine or someone else’s, published or homemade, and expand it… hence the name “Dungeon Expanders”. If you are using random wilderness generation that generates a random structure of some kind, like a cottage or ruins, you can add a trap door or stairs inside and use this as the start of an instant dungeon.

I plan on releasing another Dungeon Expander later this week, perhaps tomorrow. I’ll explain more about using Dungeon Expanders then.

FlameShout Tower Pamplet Dungeon PDF

Today’s Map Monday goes back to the non-generic towers with FlameShout Tower. No random underground structures here! No usable structures above ground, either. In fact, it’s eerily ruined…

It’s a little different from the other towers. I won’t spoil the details, but my thinking behind this one was that the other surviving weapons were not necessarily usable by PCs, unless they plan to set up base there, or come up with some clever scheme. But this tower produces renewable, portable weapons that could cause some trouble.

Side Note: Almost didn’t make it on this one. Had plenty of time, came up with the idea a week ago, had no plans for the weekend… then I was wiped out by illness. Wasn’t even online for a couple days. And I’m still woozy. But I made it through! Just let me know if there are any delirium-caused typos.

Also, I’ve added a “tower” tag to the towers to make them all easier to find.

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.

Generic Crumbling Tower Pamphlet Dungeon PDF

Today’s map is another trifold pamphlet dungeon designed to work like and work with the Generic Bandit Tower. It’s the Generic Crumbling Tower.

As I mentioned in the Semi-Random Maps post, the generic towers with randomized content help to increase the apparent number of towers. Adventurers will find lots of intact bandit towers, half-intact crumbling towers, and less intact ruined towers (coming tomorrow.) These will act as a diversion so that players will be surprised when they find a tower that looks the same, but has some unique feature.

Crumbling towers are almost always lairs for wild animals, although it’s possible that a small band of bandits has started to move in. The above-ground levels are very simple for the crumbling towers. Only the dungeon level and the occupants/treasure are randomized.

I’ll have more to say when I upload the next pamphlet tomorrow.

Generic Bandit Tower Pamphlet Dungeon PDF

There was no Map Monday yesterday, but the map is finished now. It’s another trifold pamphlet dungeon, this time a Generic Bandit Tower.

Wait, what?

As I completed my first three pamphlet towers, in the back of my mind I was still thinking of the plan I mentioned in the Semi-Random Maps post. There would be a lot of towers, and the PCs are searching for a particular tower. Furthermore, just in case the players have seen one of the Watchtower series pamphlets, there had to be a way to avoid giving away which tower was which… so there has to be more than one example of an intact tower, more than one crumbling tower, more than one completely ruined tower, and so on. I didn’t want players to say “The tower is intact? Oh, OK, it’s CorpseBrood Tower” and have an immediate plan to deal with it. There needed to be an incentive to investigate further.

So what I wanted was some generic towers with randomized content to act as red herrings. The Generic Bandit Tower is the first of these. The above-ground levels are nearly identical for each bandit tower, but the race of bandits is different for each tower, and the leaders can be of still another race. Plus, the dungeon level is mildly randomized, too, and there’s a chance that the dungeon of one tower has a connection to the dungeon of another nearby tower. It makes exploring the towers just a tiny bit more interesting.

I plan on releasing another generic tower pamphlet this week.

Semi-Random Maps

No Map Monday this week, because I took the weekend off. Thought I’d take the time to talk a little about someone else’s maps, and some ideas I had related to it.

Dyson Logos had some posts last month about geomorphic halls. These are dungeon level maps with 1 to 3 blank squares where geomorphs can fit, the idea being that each GM using one of those maps would have a unique dungeon, because of the geomorphs, and the geomorphs could change each time the dungeon is revisited. I believe Dyson actually posted maps like these a couple years ago as well, and traces the idea back to the City of Lankhmar TSR product which had unmapped squares on the city map and a booklet of city block geomorphs.

I’d wanted to do something similar for a while. It was part of the idea behind the mega-dungeon plug-in modules on the Maps page. The difference there is that I was imagining a more generic tunnel map with a few “empty” rooms added, then you’d plop down one or two plug-in modules somewhere on the map and change the empty rooms to the indicated “support” rooms.

I had a similar idea related to the “Watchtowers of the Golden Hills” pamphlet dungeons. Before I did the pamphlets, I had been thinking of a sort of interlocking set of dungeon modules based around towers. The PCs would be searching for a particular dungeon, but wouldn’t know exactly where it was, only that they’re looking for an old ruined or abandoned tower as the entrance. I had some geomorph tricks or other random dungeon gen tricks in mind so that each GM’s version of the tower dungeons would be different. The inspiration for this was more or less the Judges Guild Frontier Forts of Kelnore module.

I may still do the tower thing. At least, my current plan is to make a couple more tower pamphlets and 1 to 3 larger modules with tower entrances so that GMs can run a quest in a similar way, letting players explore ruined tower entrances trying to find the “real” dungeon.

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Pamphlet Town: Revelode PDF

This week’s Map Monday takes the “instant village” up one level to a full town in the Revelode town PDF. I wanted to make sure I had at least one settlement of each of the lower three size ratings: hamlet, village, and town. I knew cities would just be impossible to handle in this format.

This will probably be the only town I will do in the pamphlet format, because the labeling on a town map this small usable, but just barely. To make the map bigger, I’d have to cut a lot of description, which kind of makes a town pamphlet useless. It might be doable with neighborhoods, though, allowing a little bit of mixing and matching or rearrangement, making each GM’s final town unique.

Pamphlet Village: Redwinter Hamlet PDF

This week, Map Monday is another “instant village” pamphlet, or rather an instant hamlet: Redwinter Hamlet. I may have put too many secrets in it for so small a settlement, but it makes a good fit for a settlement near the Twisted Wood, in addition to the various “towers of the Golden Hills” pamphlet dungeons.