In a nutshell: Random dungeon generator in the form of a card deck. $5 PDF available from DriveThruRPG here.
What It Is
A print-and-play PDF file of 54 cards, nine to a page. Each has a number and suit, so they can also be used as normal cards (say, action cards for Savage Worlds). They fall into four main groups.
- The jokers. One has the instructions for the product, the other has short oracles for creating NPCs and quest items.
- The aces. These represent the dungeon entrances, all have a table for random determination of the quest which draws you into the dungeon, and one also has a table of random background noises.
- The kings. These are the quest rooms which contain either stairs down or whatever your party is trying to find.
- Other cards. Each of these has one or more rooms and a table of random contents, which may be monsters, traps, treasure or random dungeon dressing.
Most of the cards have dungeon dressing on them – furniture, small treasures, corpses, that kind of thing – which have no mechanical use, but my experience of using similar products tells me that players will focus in on them and either use them or concoct wild stories to explain their presence, all of which enhances the game.
In addition to the cards themselves, there are card backs, and plain and gridded cards for your custom designs.
How it Works
To use the cards, you first set aside the jokers (which you probably won’t use), aces and kings, then shuffle the rest. Picking an ace at random as the dungeon entrance, you proceed to explore, drawing a new card each time you move on, taking care to connect up all the passages shown on the cards. As you enter each new area, you roll for the monsters, treasure or traps inside. Eventually, you aren’t able to connect any more rooms, at which point the dungeon is complete. Now, you select one of the kings and use it to replace one of the existing cards.
What Do I Think?
I expect the dungeons this deck generates to be quite small, good enough for a single session; half the cards have only one corridor to connect, a little under a third have two, and half a dozen have three. Half a dozen of them have side entrances or rockfalls which you could use as additional entrances, if so desired.
I suspect the product is intended for use by a dungeon master for unanticipated side quests, but if you always replace the last card drawn with a king, it could work well solo. You could also connect a number of the generated dungeons with corridors to make a larger one.
Regular readers will know I am a sucker for dungeon generators; I have loads of them, most of which have never been used in anger, because the simple ones lack enough detail to be interesting, and the complex ones take too much time and effort, which I’d rather use for playing the game. The Deck of Many Dungeons strikes a middle ground, fast and easy to use, while still having a relatively complex layout.
Halfway Station 3.0 
Comments on: "Review: Axebane’s Deck of Many Dungeons" (3)
It’s a fine balance to get a tool that is neither too vague to be useful nor too specific to fit into a story narrative or a campaign.
The product mentioned looks well positioned to be useful without being handcuffing.
Another tool I saw in the wargaming world is chit draws (replaced or left out of the pool until something happens). You can easily set relative probability of occurrence, you can get a wonderful range of outcomes, and it is fairly fast in use. It can create the equivalent of a D1000 or D10000 table of outcomes with varying probabilities for entries (by showing up 1 or more times) and also by chaining the meanings of some chits. And yet it is also faster than rolling many dice or looking through long tables.
I think you might even be able to build a dungeon builder using such an approach instead of cards. I’ve thought of trying that for combat results too.
Another interesting approach from Dirk Henn’s Shogun board game (a much better game than the Milton-Bradley Shogun of way back) was to use a tower where you dropped in a cube for each of your units, your units, and the ones already salted into the tower (some salted at game start, others for ones that are temporarily resident in the tower rather than in the result tray). You toss them in, there’s a quiet clatter, and some number of your forces and other forces (0 or more for each) will come out. So can other neutral cubes (as everyone uses the tower and all colours can be stuck in the tower). Sometimes you toss in e.g.: 2 reds and 3 greens and the outcome comes out as 3 reds and 2 greens and a grey. The grey is not counted and the result is victory red. What happened to the 3rd green? Inside the tower still! Where did red 3 come from? Inside the tower shook loose! It turns out to be a good way to create some randomness (a decent amount) from known inputs of force.
I think using such a tower could be done using coloured cubes for various meanings and in this way of looking at it, we might have cubes that rolled out and said : You deal X to a foe, they deal Y to you, and here are some other effects or events that come out of this situation. Could make for a fun and different mechanism for resolution of fights (either round by round or once for the whole fight if you want great speed) and still generate other outcomes.
I love dice, so do most of us. But sometimes it is nice to try the other options.
Some years back, a few of us made a hybrid of the western rules Desperado and the western rules With No Name. Desperado was a good skirmish game, but you had to roll and then roll a bit more to resolve results. the ?WNN game used card resolutions or a table. So we created a way to do damage results using a card deck so that damage in Desperado could be much faster using drawn cards. Going back far enough, Star Fleet Battles had a damage table (the DAC) and it had a well though out logic which let some boxes that could only be hit once before moving deeper, others you hit repeatedly (hull in an area for instance) until they ran out then you moved deeper. But the damage cards they had as an option didn’t give the same careful balance but was faster and felt more exciting though sometimes you got really pasted as an outcome.
I do like results that can be rich for story purposes, but fast and exciting in play.
Funnily enough, thinking about it, the 2D6 table that was the SFB Damage Allocation Table and its ‘some things get hit once and move on, others damage the same component type until it is expended’ on any particular 2 to 12 roll (2D6) could be used in developing a dungeon generator or other forms of generator. Or at least it might.
That’s a wonder of gaming – many ways to build generators and result engines.
Just grabbed this because I like dungeon generators. Looks to be ok for small quests – I run 13th Age fantasy so some monsters will have to be converted but otherwise looks to be fun.
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