Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Results of The Mythic Underworld Census, 2011

Been thinking about ways to organize overlapping random dungeon tables so you can target them toward making the kind of dungeon you want. Like if you need a cave for a bunch of dumb orc bandits you roll once and never have to ignore a result since it just gave you a magical alignment-sensing teleportation trap and a haunted library.

This may just look like a ball of chaos, but I think I can actually make it make sense on paper.

Click to enlarge.

5 comments:

Taketoshi said...

Why don't the fortress in mid-crisis and forgotten tomb stuffs overlap?

Depending on how one defines crisis, I can see a race to locate the foozle hidden inside the forgotten tomb against a rival party also struggling to overcome the various puzzles that protect it would be fertile (if not especially often tread) ground for an adventure.

Zak Sabbath said...

@taketoshi

I define a "fortress" as a place with intelligent beings that live or work there and traps and monstrs to match.

A "forgotten tomb" is, by definition, "forgotten"--meaning there are currently no intelligent living creatures who live there. The threats are traps or "automatic"--like a classic pyramid raid.

A race against a rival party would not turn the tomb into an occupied, working "fortress" under this definition by any means,

Taketoshi said...

Ah, gotcha--thanks for the clarification.

DukeofOrange said...

Venn Diagram from Hell! I'm totally on board with this. So many times when I'm stocking a dungeon do I find myself compelled to do a little re-write to make the random results fit. Then I'm pretty much justifying the weird changes rather than making the dungeon a cooler thing as a whole.

Sometimes a random result that doesn't fit gives me a great inspiration, and this might loose that. But then if I'm hoping for inspiration I'm probably not rolling on so specific a table anyways

Unknown said...

Probably going to get buried since this post is a few weeks old, but I liked the idea and ran with it. Here's the results: http://runeward.blogspot.com/2011/07/double-duty-table-generation.html