There's a Tekumel product, "Best of the Journal 1: The Pettigrew Selections," available from Tita's House of Games, that has one of the better random dungeon generator systems I've seen.
It generates discrete zones for every level such as Shrine, Wizard's Tower, with a methodology for generating individual rooms for each zone and their inhabitants.
this is great! I read the original post by -C earlier and got some great ideas from it, and then I read your table and liked it even more. It's a lot simpler and the 'power' level is more to my game style (although I will change the +1 short sword to a regular short sword). My players are about to explore a recently abandoned city and this will be perfect for the random buildings they will walk in to. Thanks!
Thank you so much for the praise. It's no Vornheim, but I did put a little time into it (including my art). :-)
The rooms are organized by type (with the extra die roll) because of the way I build dungeons. (What's this section going to be, oh, pleasure rooms - I wonder what they'll be) I don't use the document for 'just in time' dungeon creation.
I see the utility in a single table, random roll dungeon, and will implement such in the next version.
If you want to make the chart do BOTH things: make it a d100 chart but cluster the rubrics together (like "domestic rooms:" are 31-51 etc.) and if you want a specific kind of room you roll d8, or 12 or 20 plus a specific number. Like: "To generate a domestic room, roll d20 +30" etc.
September 22, 2011 at 12:09 AM
So as some of you may know, -C put together this sweet pdf called "DM2: Tricks, Empty Rooms, & Basic Trap Design (30 Pages)" which is a nice thing to have when you want all the options right there. (Download it by going to -C's page and clicking on it in the right margin there.)
Now my nitpick is that some of the tables in there require way more rolling than they should to parse through the number of results they're providing. The Random Room table (and I don't know if -C wrote this or picked it up from a source in the bibliography) requires rolling twice on 2 types of dice--but there's only about a hundred results (with a few redundancies, like "seraglio" AND "Harem" ot "tomb" AND "crypt").
Anyway, I reformatted it as a simple d100 to match the way I'm likely to use a table like this:
I also made this thingy, which is the same table again paired with the "items found at the bottom of pits" table, repurposed as a "things found in random rooms" table and put in the Vornheim split-column format--you can roll once to have a random room all ready to go with a random item in it, or roll d100 twice to generate a unique pairing: (if your browser makes it hard to read due to bloggers new and worse picture protocols, hold down right-click on the mouse and you should get some options to view it as its own thing and then you can blow the picture up. And if you just save the picture it'll save a picture big enough to read, even if it looks small on yr screen.) [Image]
"Slightly More Useful Random Rooms"
6 Comments -
There's a Tekumel product, "Best of the Journal 1: The Pettigrew Selections," available from Tita's House of Games, that has one of the better random dungeon generator systems I've seen.
It generates discrete zones for every level such as Shrine, Wizard's Tower, with a methodology for generating individual rooms for each zone and their inhabitants.
September 21, 2011 at 5:16 PM
@blair--
since it's rare, the path of max awesome would be to post some samples on Algol so we can see if we wanna track it down. Right?
September 21, 2011 at 5:33 PM
It's still in print and costs $8...
...okay, I'll post an example tonight.
September 21, 2011 at 6:09 PM
this is great! I read the original post by -C earlier and got some great ideas from it, and then I read your table and liked it even more. It's a lot simpler and the 'power' level is more to my game style (although I will change the +1 short sword to a regular short sword). My players are about to explore a recently abandoned city and this will be perfect for the random buildings they will walk in to. Thanks!
September 21, 2011 at 8:31 PM
Thank you so much for the praise. It's no Vornheim, but I did put a little time into it (including my art). :-)
The rooms are organized by type (with the extra die roll) because of the way I build dungeons. (What's this section going to be, oh, pleasure rooms - I wonder what they'll be) I don't use the document for 'just in time' dungeon creation.
I see the utility in a single table, random roll dungeon, and will implement such in the next version.
September 21, 2011 at 11:59 PM
@-C
If you want to make the chart do BOTH things: make it a d100 chart but cluster the rubrics together (like "domestic rooms:" are 31-51 etc.) and if you want a specific kind of room you roll d8, or 12 or 20 plus a specific number. Like: "To generate a domestic room, roll d20 +30" etc.
September 22, 2011 at 12:09 AM