Random Dungeon Generation Roundup

Hello and welcome to the roundup post. I've done a series of posts on random dungeon generation methods, all of which can be found under this tag. This is the "summary post" for that series, where I'll talk about what I liked, what I didn't like, the sidebar trek into Solo play, and some other things.

For convenience, here is the list of posts in chronological order:

• Random Dungeon Generators Part 1 - 5th Edition D&D's DMG guide
• Shadowdark Random Dungeon Generation
• Four Against Darkness
• Ironsworn Delve
• Solodark

Bonus Content: I did a post on Final Girl which doesn't quite fit the format but was a lot of fun.

The Goal

When I first started this series, I'd intended to go down a path where I'd use random dungeon generation methods to fuel making more maps (and encourage myself to make more icons for the OSRaon icon pack). What wound up happening is about halfway through it turned into an exercise into creative writing through solo play. Quite a departure from the original plan.

So, let's take each system one-by-one and give it a breakdown.

5th Edition D&D - Dungeon Master's Guide

In the first post, I looked at the dungeon generation methods that are found at the back of the 5th Edition DMG. Those are an iteration on previous generation methods from earlier work, with some added color.

What I liked

• Room Generation can build big maps, the odds are strong that you'll get many rooms out of it.
• Can generate stairs connecting to multiple floors.
• Lots of re-playability.

What I didn't like

• It can go on forever - you just go until you decide to stop and wrap it up.
• Room shapes can get repetitive. I encourage you to ignore them sometimes and make shapes that are more visually interesting.
• Door placement is pretty prescriptive. I think ignoring the placement suggestions and just using the number suggestions might be more prudent.

Overall

It was fine, but for generating maps, it felt like overkill for me. I might occasionally use the tables as an oracle for "I don't know what's going on here" but it was just a bit... much.

Shadowdark

Shadowdark's random dungeon generation I hadn't encountered before I read it (though I think the basic premise might exist elsewhere? Someone shout about this and I can update the post), and it's a lot simpler. Take a handful of dice, throw them on a table, and draw around them in whatever shape you deem fit. You then use oracles to populate them.

What I liked

• Simplicity, you get as many rooms as dice you pick up and toss
• Speed: Draw outlines around the rooms as the advice takes you
• Speed x2: The number on the die is also the contents of the room
• Freedom to play with ideas outside of a lot of tables and things.

What I didn't like

• Nothing - it's small and streamlined, hard to find things to critique.

Overall

Useful! I'll likely use this method again in the future. It's quick and gets out of your way.

Four Against Darkness

So Four Against Darkness is kind of a fun hybrid between a board game and a tabletop RPG. The way you generate the dungeon is a core part of playing the game, so I opted to just play the game while I was in there.

It was fairly slow to get started as I learned the rules, but it sped up considerably after I had figured out how to play the game. It features geomorphs (a term that I believe stems from Dungeon Geomorphs, a TSR publication, which itself is a riff on Geomorphology).

What I liked

• The game itself is pretty fun, but seems like it'd have limited re-playability without expansions
• It was a nice "in between" option from the other methods.
• Geomorphs are quick to draw

What I didn't like

• The Geomorphs were limited in number, and rotating them sometimes was odd.
• Lots of dead ends. The rooms don't connect if you magically make a door (because of how you must retrace your steps to escape).

Overall

The game was good, but I can't see myself replaying it just for dungeon generation. If I were to use the geomorph method again, I'd likely just use one of the many other geomorph books and use that for idea generation.

Ironsworn Delve

This is about the time that I swerved 180 degrees into full-on solo play. Ostensibly, this system can generate a "map" but it's not designed to create "traditional" dungeon maps. Instead, it's designed to move you from point to point (not unlike a point crawl) where you encounter things in the narrative.

I can't really compare this method to the previous ones, since it's its own beast (but go check out my post on story game scenarios), but it was a lot of fun, and something I want to talk about.

What I liked

• Ironsworn's a great Solo RPG in the first place, and Delve adds onto the core system in a way that helps generate interesting locations.
• A lot of what appeared was congruent. I didn't touch the Oracles very much during the game.

What I didn't like

• I could have used some more help on how to combine the various "themes" of the dungeon to create more unique ideas.

Overall

I loved Delve (and I already loved Ironsworn) and the overall experience was a lot of fun. For a "mapping" tool, it's great to generate ideas on the fly, but I'm not sure I'd use it for anything more than an idea generation tool for a more traditional map (in the context of "traditional mapping").

Solodark

Rounding out the generation mechanisms, the last one in the series was the draft "Solodark" rules from the Arcane Library discord. They're incomplete, so I used the Mythic GM Emulator (affiliate link) to fill in some blanks when I needed an oracle to help.

I wound up using the map from the previous Shadowdark post to run some characters through.

Since this wasn't a mapping exercise, it was a solo play exercise, so there's nothing to say about the mapping bits. It was pretty fun to play Shadowdark as a Solo game using some draft rules though, so please do check that post out.

Overall

Okay! Moment of truth here - what method did I like the best for map generation.

Based on my style of map creation, using my creativity to do the mapping, I think Shadowdark's Method is the clear winner here. It's concise, fast, and leaves a lot of room for me to be creative.

The least useful one is 5e's method. It's long, and I probably could have generated the same map myself without a random generator.

So there you have it, the end of a map series - I hope it was useful for everyone. I'm not sure yet if we're getting back to mapping next time or if we'll do some more solo play. See ya then!