"Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor. He looks dead."

Sunday, April 3, 2011

The Dungeon of Random OSR Evilness

I have been thinking about a little project for a while now. I want to build a dungeon using just the B/X rulebooks and the free materials provided by the great members of the OSR blogoverse. I will be relying heavily of random tables as the challenge of making random results mesh into a coherent whole is something I really enjoy. I will also provide links to the material that I use. I am also going to keep this pretty minimal - because I am lazy and to maximize utility. I am hoping that a background/story for the dungeon will be an emergent part of the random process but I probably won't worry about it too much.

Let me know if there are any random tables or other free materials from OSR blogs that you would like me to try to include. I won't promise but I will try.

I am hoping that I will get to make use of this at some point either with my gaming group or with my kids. We will see how this goes. Maybe it dies out after three posts.

The first step I am going to do is generate a map using Dave's Mapper.

After some fiddling to make sure there were no stranded areas, this is what I have. I like it as there is an obvious entrance (the stairs in the southwest corner), a room with multiple decision points that can be reached quickly after entering the dungeon (the room with all of the pillars), multiple pathways, and some bottlenecks and hidden areas. Later in the process I will edit the map to provide routes down to lower levels.

Next step: Generate 1d4 Saturday Night Specials.

11 comments:

  1. Neat! Will you be using the random dungeon-stocking tables from the back of Moldvay's Basic as your base?

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  2. I will use the methodology in the basic rulebook for most of the stocking after I come up with the Saturday Night Specials.

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  3. Awesome...looking forward to seeing the project unfold.
    : )

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  4. You might find some useful tables on my site: www.apolitical.info/webgame/tables

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  5. Cool stuff.

    And I love seeing where my geomorphs turn up.

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  6. I've got tons of random tables (well, not tons, but quite a few) on my blog. They are collated on the House Rules subpage called, appropriately enough, Random Tables.

    http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/house-rules/random-tables/

    I would love to see a few make it in.

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  7. I've got a random monster generator on my blog. I'd love if someone else tried to use it :)

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  8. Cool... also if you use it for your kids :-)
    Could you also do a map for my conversion of my Dark Dungeon example adventure into B/X?

    I mean for this one:
    http://www.darkdungeon2.com/search/label/OSR%20Experiments

    Or, on second hand... anyone in for a shared project building a megadungeon?

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  9. Sure! Like a 30 one-page dungeon book or something?

    Totally up for it! tsojcanth+rpg at gmail :D

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  10. What happened to the blog? I love this thing.

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