Dungeon Delver's Guide: Random Dungeon Delves
One of my favorite sections of the Dungeon Delver’s Guide (on kickstarter now) is the Random Dungeon Delve system, a generator that you can use to create or fill a dungeon. It’s similar to the dungeon-creation charts that have appeared in rulebooks throughout the editions, but with every aspect tuned around theme and emergent story.
In fact, it’s not just one random dungeon generator at all! We’ve got sections for eight different dungeon themes—bastion, cavern, laboratory, mine, ruin, sewer, temple, and tomb—each spanning 20 character levels. With each theme about 5 or 6 pages long, the Dungeon Delve system is 45 pages long!
(Note — we’ve also unocked stretch goals for an online dungeon generator which will do all this for you!)
In this section of the book, our goal is to allow the creation of a dungeon that feels carefully planned out, even if you’re rolling up each room on the fly as your players enter—and to provide tools that are reusable dozens of times without running into immersion-breaking repetition.
You can use the Dungeon Delve system in a couple of ways. You can generate a dungeon from the ground up (or down), complete with floor plan and the contents of each chamber and passageway. You can also use it to fill in the rooms of an existing map, or just to provide extra polish to an existing adventure.
Today, to preview the Random Dungeon Delve system, let’s build a small shrine full of sinister cultists for, say, a level 5 party. For our demo, we’ll make three rooms. The complete random temple generator is on this page, so you can follow along.
First of all, even in a mini-dungeon like this, we can make use of the NODES system. At the very least, we’ll want a novelty that sets this dungeon apart, some sort of encounter that escalates the stakes, and a big set-piece at the end.
We’re going to start big. In the first room, I rolled on the Temple: Novelties table. I rolled a 6: “A giant-sized throne, empty or supporting a Gargantuan inanimate skeleton.” We’re going to go for the skeleton here. What kind of creature was this in life? A giant? Given that the dungeon is a temple, is it something more extra-planar than a giant, such as a fiend or celestial? We don’t need to figure it out quite yet, but let’s tentatively describe the skeleton as possessing furled, skeletal wings, just to keep our demonic and angelic options open. Furthermore, at the skeleton’s feet lies a massive, rusted sword, far too heavy for the adventurers to lift.
I’m tempted to squeeze some sort of discovery into this room: maybe a treasure. Flipping over to the Temple: Minor Treasures table, I roll a 4: “Jeweled holy symbol, gem, or bag of coins worth an amount appropriate to the tier.” At level 5, that’s an item worth 1,000 gp. I think that if the characters investigate the skeleton, they might spot a tarnished ring loose on its bony finger. The ring is big enough to be a bracelet on a Medium creature! It bears a black jewel carved with a holy symbol to some god. What god? Maybe not one that the adventurers immediately recognize.
Let’s move onto room two of the dungeon. So far it’s been a safe and profitable dungeon crawl, so let’s raise the tension a bit with an encounter. On the Temple: Escalations table, I roll a 3, “Denizens: a faction that predates and is hostile to the local overlord (roll or choose from Set Pieces)”. There are multiple options to choose from for five different level bands. At level 5, our options are “2 or 3 mummies, skeletal champions, or walking statues”. If you’re using Level Up’s Monstrous Menagerie, you’ve got three encounter options to choose from. If you’re using the Monster Manual as your primary monster book, you can run a mummy encounter. (On every encounter table, every roll offers options drawn from both the Monster Manual and the Monstrous Menagerie—supplemented by Dungeon Delver’s Guide monsters—so you’ll have a playable encounter no matter which book you’re using.) I have access to the Monstrous Menagerie, so I’ll choose two walking statues to inhabit this room. To match the gigantic skeleton in room 1, and to deepen the sense of mystery, we’ll say that these statues have (nonfunctional) stone wings.
One interesting thing about this encounter: the text mentions that the creatures here are hostile to the local overlord. As the text suggests, we can roll on the Temple: Set Pieces table to figure out just who that local overlord is. After all, we’ll be placing them in the third and final room of the dungeon! A roll of 2 on the Set Pieces table gives us this: “Return of the Kings. Freed after a long imprisonment, immortal monsters prepare to venture forth and restore their ancient empire or religion. They need knowledgeable advisors—or captives—who can inform them about the state of the modern world.”
At level 5, the party finds itself facing a “deva or forgotten god with two high priests.” We could use the forgotten god from Monstrous Menagerie, but the deva also feels like a solid choice, especially since we gave wings to the big skeleton in room 1.
Taken as a whole, what story does this dungeon tell? There are several possibilities, but the way I see it, the deva and its attendant high priests are imprisoned minions of an ancient and dangerous god. The walking statues in room 2 are the angel’s jailors. So was the immense winged skeleton in room 1, for that matter, before it died of old age or other causes. The deva has spent hundreds of years cowering in the final room of this dungeon and isn’t even aware that its chief jailor is dead. When the adventurers blunder into the room, the angel will be very interested to hear just how they managed to get by that accursed guardian. “Oh, really? Seems to have been dead for some time? Well then, the world is ready for the wisdom only I can bring!”
Of course, this is just the bare bones of a dungeon. You might want to roll up some room contents to give additional color to the rooms; maybe use the Treasure Hoard table; and possibly fill out the dungeon with some extra rooms. And it might be fun to ponder the conundrum of the skeletal, winged jailor. What was it? An angel of a rival deity? A storm giant with a holy mission? Or is its identity an unexplained mystery that will be solved in the next adventure? And what about that permanent gate behind the deva’s throne?
If you like this sort of random, emergent dungeon and want to play around with making one, this article previews the complete Temple section of the Dungeon Delver’s Guide Random Dungeon Delve system.