RANDOM WIZARDRY DUNGEON: Punched Up With The Dungeon Design Course

YOU DON'T NEED MUCH TO RUN A DUNGEON...

In the Designing Dungeons document, we advocated for creation focused on play rather than publication. And this often doesn't require extensive notes and your dungeon doesn't have to spread over even a whole sheet of paper, but I would encourage something greater than just 5-10 rooms.

Here, I used the Wizardry instruction book as a source of inspiration for both the dungeon's size and the monsters that might populate it. Also used this random generator that reorganizes the AD&D Appendix A tables. Wizardry being a key inspiration behind the hit show Dungeon Meshi, which is a recent reference for dungeon crawling.

A fun and usefual thing about the Wizardry dungeons is they exsist on a 19x19 grid- which can help communicate maping to players. Here is the map I came up with:

And to go with my map, I scaned through the enemies from the game that seemed to correspond to the first level of the dungeon. I loved the sprites from the old game so I arranged them into a little encounter table:

And here is the total key that I ended up with- barely two pages. I worked here with paper and pencil  because I think sometimes it nice to completely get away from the digital.

...BUT YOU MIGHT WANT A LITTLE MORE

So cool. I have a looping ~24 room dungeon with monsters, traps, treasures, and even some pits and collapsing bridges over water. Not bad for randomization- but it can be punched up.

Even sticking to the confines of the two pages there, you can see that on the second page, I still seemingly have 4/5th of it blank which can be filled in with stuff.

What I would first reach for would be two chapters in the Designing Dungeons course: 

• Chapter 3 Refining the Theme: Random generation can provide some suprising results, but they often are just hinted at. In the dungeon above we have two concentrations of kobolds and a lot of undead kobolds. Maybe two different factions? Is there a kobold necromancer? And what's up with the vorpal bunnies? We also need to determine perhapes a dungeon lord (maybe the kobold necromancer) and a "key" treasure.
  
  
• Chapter 5 Dungeon Checklist: I think the checklist is one of the greatest tools to quickly help ensure a dungeon is up to snuff. Each of the parts of it will allow a DM to punch up common, well-worn elements of dungeons design, like kobolds, to something more interesting that random generation often over looks- like a reason to talk, to experiment, and to be suprised.

HOW TO VOTE

The ENNIES are a fan-choice award, so who goes on to win is based on voting. 

If you got something out of the course - if the procedures have helped you overcome writer's block or if you found some useful resources for your own GMing practice - I would very much appreciate a vote! 

1. Go to the ennie-awards.com's voting booth

2. Click on Best Online Content

3. Select Designing Dungeons Course: Or, How to Kill a Party in 30 Rooms or Less, Joshua McCrowell & Warren D as #1.

4. Press submit! 

5. Receive my eternal gratitude for your support.

Voting continues from July 10th to July 19th.

If we win, my collaborator Josh and I have a very silly acceptance video prerecorded. It will be worth a vote for me just to laugh at our little video.