Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generation

The first Roleplaying Game book I ever owned was a Christmas gift of the AD&D 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide in 1981.  I had never been part of a D&D game and had no background on it so I struggled to understand the DMG. I ended up learning by reading the Moldvay Basic rules. But in the back of the DMG, I found Appendix A: Random Dungeon Generator which I used to create my second dungeon (my first dungeon was a continuation of the Haunted Keep in the Basic rules). I posted the maps of the dungeon not that long ago and even rewrote it.

Being forced like most people to stay at home right now I got the impulse to try out the Appendix A Random Dungeon Generator to play the game solo. I actually decided to use the Swords & Wizardry Core rules which are a sort of simplified AD&D 1st edition.

I needed some heroes so I took four, first-level humans from the back of B1: In Search of the Unknown:

Farned of the Great Church (cleric 1)

Alho Rengate (Fighter 1)

Nickar (Magic-User 1)

Luven Lightfinger (Thief 1)

I had them all start at their maximum class hp because I know how brutal 1st level dungeons can be on OSR heroes. This turned out to be not enough.

The random dungeon generator is a series of tables that let you design and stock a dungeon. The tables come with very little explanation. The key table is the first one. Table I the Periodic check is the table you roll on whenever the heroes advance. It then directs you to more tables. These can be doors, corridors, chambers, rooms, traps, stairs to another level, or wandering monsters. Continue straight for 60’ is only supposed to come up 10% of the time but I seemed to keep getting this result so I ended up with a very long dungeon. For monsters, you are supposed to use random monster tables in Appendix C.

As I was playing solo I made some changes. The traps that came up I reduced the damage to 1d6. For the monsters, I reduced the number appearing to 2-4. I also ignored the “human” result on the monster table because it generates an adventuring party which is just too much work to put together. Instead, I just re-rolled on the table.

Everything started out pretty quiet for the four heroes. They traveled down a long, stone dungeon hall and had a minor mishap with a flaming oil trap. They did not find any rooms until their first encounter and they found no treasure. The first encounter against kobolds went well. They dispatched them easily. Then they ran into some shriekers (and in S&W the shriek causes damage) and ran in the other direction. The shriekers appeared to have alerted more kobolds because they encountered four more in a hallway. Again they managed to kill the monsters with only light damage.

Then they ran into trouble. They got by a pit trap because they now had Luven out in front. But they encountered a door and Luven did not hear anything on the other side. They opened the door, entered a room and were confronted with four goblins. Really, four goblins should not be that big of a problem. But the dice went cold. Farned, Alho, and Luven all missed. Nickar expended his one spell and killed a goblin with a magic missile. Now it was four against three. But the goblins fight desperately and on the first round, Alho and Farned who were in the front were both injured.

On the next round, everyone but Nickar missed again. And Nickar hit a goblin with a dart doing 1 point of damage. The goblins pressed their attack and both Alho and Farned were killed The next round Luven was struck and killed with a single blow. That left Nickar, who only had 3 hit points and no spells. There was no point in running so he attacked with his dagger and missed. The three goblins surrounded him and slashed him to the ground.  A total party kill.

Appendix A Map

My solo adventure debacle took about 2 hours to run and had four fights with monsters. Some of this time was spent drawing the map in paint.net. I did not use graph paper so the dungeon could grow in any direction to any size. Unfortunately, the entire party was killed. It was still fun, although I could see it getting boring if I ran this all of the time.  I would like to look at customizing the charts to remove some of the odd results, tone down the trap damage and increase the number of rooms. I would also like to come up with new random monster charts. These could be tailored for each adventure. So if you were entering a wizard’s lair you might have the wizard and his kobold guards and a few random dungeon creatures. I could even have a Finale room worked into the charts.

I did spend time online looking to see if anyone had taken these charts and turned it into a random dungeon maker. I did not find any.  Which is odd, I would have thought it was a natural for this. I do have some other rules systems that are similar. Darkfast Dungeons has a solo option and strikes me as being a little bit similar. But Appendix A gives you the opportunity to play D&D in a solo manner which is really great. It also can be used for its intended purpose which was to generate a dungeon for a DM for a regular tabletop game.