Dr. Timm Woods - Random Tables: Dungeons and Lairs: The Game Masters Companion for Creating Secret Entrances, Rumors, Prisons, and More

Random Tables Dungeons and Lairs

The Game Masters Companion for Creating Secret Entrances, Rumors, Prisons, and More

Dr. Timm Woods

Text copyright 2022 Timm Woods. Design and concept copyright 2022 Ulysses Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. Any unauthorized duplication in whole or in part or dissemination of this edition by any means (including but not limited to photocopying, electronic devices, digital versions, and the internet) will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Published by:

ULYSSES PRESS

PO Box 3440

Berkeley, CA 94703

www.ulyssespress.com

ISBN: 978-1-64604-351-4

eISBN: 978-1-64604-374-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932317

Acquisitions editor: Casie Vogel

Managing editor: Claire Chun

Project editor: Tyanni Niles

Editor: Renee Rutledge

Proofreader: Anne Healey

Cover and interior design: what!design @ whatweb.com

Production: Winnie Liu

Artwork: coverdungeon Midnight Coffee Design/shutterstock.com, dice kericanfly/shutterstock.com; interiorshutterstock.com

To my students, who teach me every day.

Inky darkness stretches before youthose with darkvision see a pathway leading far into the depths of the earth. The stone of the archway above you is etched with ancient and unintelligible runes. Warm windlike a deep, monstrous breathwafts forth, and the sound of distant clanking can be heard. You are likely to be eaten by a monster. Beware, foolish mortal

and WELCOME to the DUNGEON!

Your adventure has only just begun! This book is your key to the dungeons, crypts, and other ancient sites that fill the worlds of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) like Dungeons & Dragons. Every dungeon needs explorers and adventurers to delve into its depths, slay the monsters, and grab the loot. But behind every great dungeon is a great Game Master (GM), the designer and mastermind of the whole experience. Its up to the Game Master to decide what is around every corner, behind every door, and guarding every chest of treasure.

If youve ever been a Game Master, then you know it takes hard work and creativity. Tabletop role-playing games are fun to play, and running them as the Game Master and storyteller can be even more rewarding! But running these games can come with a lot of hats to wearand thats before you even start to talk about creating unique locations and challenges to fill your game world! Dungeon crawls in particular can sometimes feel boring or repetitive if they arent regularly injected with new elements or inspiration. Especially for newer GMs, designing your own dungeons can be a complicated and intimidating prospect.

One solution is reading established published adventures and studying famous dungeons from the pastboth real and fantastic. These can give amazing ideas and exciting inspiration for how to create your own dungeons. But what if you had all those ideas at your fingertips?

This book of random tables gives you access to the best ideas that dungeons have to offer, all in one place. Its hard to imagine every possibility that could occur to adventurers exploring vast and intricate underground complexesand now you dont have to! If you are searching for inspiration and new ideas, or simply trying to break away from the usual elements of your dungeon designs, then look no further than this book!

Inserting randomly generated content can be one of the most fun ways to approach Game Mastering. Random dungeons can be an excellent way to learn about how to Game Master, experience and explore the full catalog of dungeon possibilities, and find out what sort of dungeon elements you and your players like to run and play.

Generating dungeons with random dice rolls creates chaos, which can be a welcome delight in any adventure. It helps both experienced Game Masters and their veteran players break out of ruts, even the ones you might not notice. If youve never tried it before, it can be a fun experiment to run a whole session of dungeon crawling on the fly, improvising by randomly generating the content as you go. Experienced players will often be entertained just by knowing that the Game Master plans to use random content! Telling them the idea ahead of time allows players to get in on the fun, anticipating that whatever might be around the next corner will be just as surprising to the Game Master as it is to them.

Of course, it may be that you need a dungeon, and you need it now. It can happen to the best of Game Masters! Maybe you are pressed for time and didnt get the chance to plan; the players are here, its game time, and you dont have an adventure ready. Maybe you did plan a particular idea for the session, but the players are uninterested or are just looking for a classic dungeon crawl instead. Theres nothing wrong with giving the players what they want, and with this book, you always have a dungeon up your sleeve!

Or, it could be that you have time to plan, but you want inspiration. Dungeons can risk feeling like cookie-cutter clones without distinctive and unique details to set them apart. The tables in this book are filled with all manner of ideas that you may not yet have explored in the dungeons youve designed for your adventuring parties. You dont need to imagine everything yourself! This book will help shake things up at your table and lead players to new and unexpected themes, encounters, and other surprises.

To use this book, you will need your trusty dice sets on hand. When you wish to use one of the tables, roll the appropriate die indicated by the table, be it a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, or d100; then, find the result that corresponds to the number you rolled. Some tables will ask you to apply a modifier to the roll according to certain details about your dungeon. Those details will need to be established before rolling.

Let one roll inform the next in an unfolding story. Sometimes results that seem contradictory are interesting opportunities, but other times an incompatible result (such as an ice door in a lava-filled room) simply doesnt make sense and can be re-rolled or reinterpreted. You can stretch your imagination to make some surprising ideas work together; for example, if a dungeon built by a flying race has a surprising quantity of pits, this might indicate that they felt threatened by nearby land-dwellers. A villain whose bedroom randomly contains a statue of their greatest fear might seem silly but makes for a juicy narrative, and finding the story that the results generate for you can often be half the fun!

Often when you are building a dungeon, you may have some details that are already established, such as the location of the dungeon or the villain who inhabits it. Feel free to choose some details and roll others. This often makes for the most interesting dungeons! These tables will serve you well when filling in the blanks in a dungeon that might already be 10, 50, or 90 percent complete. Jump around and use the tables where they seem necessary; start and stop generating content as you see fit.

Even if you dont have so much as the seed of an idea for your dungeon or if youre generating one now in the middle of your game, you can still use these tables to generate an entire dungeon from scratch. To do so, follow these instructions:

First, you need the basic details, found in part 1, Dungeon Essentials. The tables there will help you generate the core dungeon type () surrounding it. These details will be the basis to anchor all of the rest of the dungeon.