My Dungeon GUILD project merges the procedural generation found in Happy Jak Games's Wyrd Dungeon with the character & gear systems from Disaster Tourism's GUILD: Sword & Magick for Hire to create a game that's fun for my seven-year-old to play but can still engage the rest of the family. In the end, it kind of plays like Minecraft Dungeon the TTRPG.
The Procedure
Step One: roll for Factions Occuring (d6 table, Wyrd Dungeon, p25).
Step Two: roll for Level Name (d66 tables, Wyrd Dungeon, p26-7)
Step Three: roll for Traps (2d6 table, Wyrd Dungeon, p30 - or Ld3-L roll); roll for each individual trap (d66, Wyrd Dungeon, p29)
Step Four: roll for Trappings (d66 table, Wyrd Dungeon, p28) - I roll once per level for a detail I can throw in somewhere to create a setpiece encounter
Step Five: roll for Treasures (Ld3-L); roll for each individual treasure (options for charts include Treasures table, Wyrd Dungeon, p33, Magic Items table, WD p 34, etc.) and place as is most interesting.
Step Six: roll for Monsters - for each room roll once on d66 table Enemy Examples (WD p18) or More Enemies (WD p36); just record the details for this table for now, we'll get stats later. There's nothing wrong with skipping monsters in a room if there's a trap.
Step Seven: distribute results amongst the number of rooms for that level (L+4)
Next Steps: There's a lot of stuff unfinished here. This is as far as we're getting today, though.
Factions
In the as-yet-unnamed megadungeon that's home to the Dungeon GUILD campaign, there are a series of factions who may or may not be present in each level. Wyrd Dungeon suggests a number of dungeon factions equal to the number of players in the campaign, plus one. The five factions in play in the dungeon are:
The Iron Glaives | The League of the Last Rites | Ones from Beyond the Heavens | the Cult of the Ninth Hand | The Light Foots
I don't have too many details on each of these factions, beyond the fact that every faction except the Iron Glaives are at war with the Light Foots, and even the Iron Glaives have only a tense alliance with the Light Foots. But, after rolling on a chart to determine how many rooms are occupied by members of each faction, only the Light Foots appear on level 2 (the occupy 3 rooms), so we will only worry about them at this point. However, I know very little about the Light Foot faction beyond their name, but we know they are present in 3 separate rooms in this level, so we'll talk more about them next time.
Dungeon Level Name
I'm really happy with what we rolled here: "The Silent Gatehouse." Whatever encounter we place there, silence is obviously going to have to be key. We're going to leave this as-is for now and move on.
Traps & Treasures
On the first level, we rolled a TON of traps. For just five rooms, I'm pretty sure we have four traps, and that really felt like too many. Instead, I rolled Ld3-3 for the number of traps as well as the number of treasures and ended up with 2 traps and 1 treasure. Treasure is not so common on this level as it was on Level 1, so it needs to be something very valuable that the players can use right away. For now, I just noted which rooms I thought should have traps on a map key numbered 1-6 (the number of rooms on this level) and came back later to fill in the types of trap.
Trappings
Okay, one roll and it'll tell me something I have to use somewhere on this dungeon level, no big deal. "Lava pools?" Wow. That's got a lot of flavor. I think the run-up to the Silent Gatehouse will have to include lots of these.
Monsters
Okay, we're having some fun now. Due to the way I want this game to feel (namely, less roleplaying and more smashing), I want an encounter in every room. However, I decided earlier to put the level's 1 treasure in a room with a trap. I've decided that this trap is going to be a big deal since the treasure is going to be as well, so I don't want a monster here, so I roll up 5 monster encounters, all drawn from the "More Enemies" table on page 36. Here are the encounters that we rolled up:
Room 1 - Metallic furballs
Room 2 - Enchanted dwarves
Room 3 - Killer salamander
Room 4 - Flayed nightmares
Room 6 - Riveting sphinx
Some fun stuff here: the killer salamander immediately invokes a connection with the lava pools we rolled up as dungeon trappings, so we're going to connect those two. Also, the riveting sphinx ended up in Room 6, which I've already planned will be the exit from the level (I just do that; Room 1 is entrance, the ultimate room is the exit). I love that this room has a sphinx in it because I love riddles and puzzles in dungeons; having a relatively high-stakes non-combat encounter at this point seems like a fantastic change of pace! Further, since the level is the SILENT Gatehouse, I think that the riveting sphinx won't talk during the riddling content and maybe the PCs lose if they talk, too. We'll see.
Next time, we'll go through the steps that I take to flesh out the rest of this level and we'll draw a map!
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