Random Dungeon System

If you follow me on social media, or have joined the Discord, you’ll probably have seen some of my recent posts about the random dungeon generation system that I’ve been playing around with.

The idea itself is nothing new, but it’s something I’ve wanted to have a go at for some time now – and it’s largely inspired by the old Advanced HeroQuest game (that I’ve recently dug out of the attic :) ).

However, it’s my aim to have it work with any system really (be it a dungeon-crawler board game, or a full blown RPG) – specifically to help facilitate solo/co-op play.

So, to begin with there’ll be…

1) A set of 2D dungeon tiles

(pictured above is an example of what I’ve  got done so far)

2) A bunch of new slot-in doors

3) A deck of cards and a number of tokens to help generate the dungeon (the cards will be used for the layout of the dungeon itself, and the tokens to trigger a few specific events).

(you can see some very early versions of these in this test game of Advanced HeroQuest above)

4) A page of random charts that we can fill in to generate the monsters, traps, hazards, treasure, etc. for each quest (so there might be a ‘furniture’ chart to add some of the existing scatter terrain to a room for example, and notes on how that may be interacted with).

And while the aim is to have it be a system neutral kinda thing – I’m also kinda tempted to have a go at writing my own (simple) dungeon crawler game to go along with it at some point (but something like that is a bit of a pipe dream at the moment).

* * *

So yeah, I’ll likely be concentrating on getting the rest of the tiles and doors done this month (unless I get side-tracked with another mad-cap idea :S )

(note that, even though this is a bit of a personal project – I’ll still be releasing the new tiles/doors in the usual way – as it never hurts to have more options right? - however, I'm not sure if the cards/tables will be of interest to many folks - so it would be good to hear if you'd like me to share my early ideas for those too... though be aware, they're still a bit rough around the edges and need more playtesting).