Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Slightly More Useful Random Rooms

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:

1 Aviary
2 Bestiary
3 Cage
4 Cell
5 Work Pit / Workshop
6 Kennel
7 Oubliette
8 Padded Room
9 Pen
10 Prison
11 Stockade
12 Assemblage
13 Antechamber
14 Amphitheater
15 Audience Hall
16 Courtroom
17 Great Hall
18 Throne Room
19 Zoo
20 Statuary
21Torture Chamber
22 Trophy Room
23 Seraglio
24 Arena
25 Banquet
26 Combat pit
26 Pool / Water Room
27 Den
28 Game Room
29 Office
30 Gallery
31 Meeting Chamber
32 Mine
33 Museum
34 Music Room
36 Pool
37 Sauna
38 Stable
39 Bathroom
40 Garage
41 Treasury
42Bedroom
43Cistern Room
44 Tannery
45Closet
46 Dining Room
47 Dressing Room
48 Foyer (Entry Room)
49 Hall
50 Lair
51 Larder / Pantry
52 Lounge
53 Map Room
54 Privy
55 Planning Room
56 Reception Chamber
57 Salon
58 Servants Dorm
59 Storage
60 Waiting Room
61 Wardrobe
62 Well Room
63 Vault
64 Vestibule
65 Armory
66 Arsenal
67 Barracks
68 Guardroom
69 Gymnasium
70 Interrogation Room
71 Mess Hall
72 Training Room
73 Chantry
74 Chapel
75 Crypt, Human
76 Crypt, Animal
77 Confessional
78 Crematorium
79 Embalming Chamber
80 Meditation Chamber
81 Monk Cell Mass
82 Grave Robing Room
83 Shrine
84 Scriptorium
85 Temple
86 Forge
87 Vestiary
88 Smokehouse
89 Classroom
90 Conjuring Room
91 Divination Chamber
92 Inscription Chamber
93 Laboratory
94 Library
95 Morgue
96 Observatory
97 Study
98 Solar
99 Summoning Room
100 Kitchen

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.)

6 comments:

Blair said...

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.

Zak Sabbath said...

@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?

Blair said...

It's still in print and costs $8...

...okay, I'll post an example tonight.

Everloss said...

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!

-C said...

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.

Zak Sabbath said...

@-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.