Semi-Random Megadungeon "Saturday Night Special" Generation Using Existing Resources

Read here for a definition of megadungeon "Saturday Night Specials." The below procedures can also be used for generated lair/mini/micro-dungeons as well.

Step 1

Roll a d20 and cross reference the result with the dungeon level on this chart that is for use with the excellent "The Underworlds" article from The Best of the Journal: The Pettigrew Selections. This determines the nature of the Saturday Night Special. Although this above table is designed for use for Tekumel games, it should be useful for most mileus. Results may refer to an ancient/ruined City, Palace, Fortress, etc., or a discrete portion of the megadungeon being used for the generated purpose by the current inhabitants (City = Warren of Derro; Palace = Pleasure Den of a Rakshasa; Fortress = Secret Headquarters of an Assassin Cult; etc).

Note that I strongly recommend the aforementioned The Pettigrew selections as a random megadungeon element generation resource, available from Tita's House of Games.

Also note that shrines and temples should have a fair chance of containing some fabulous treasure that horribly curses those that thieve it; a wonderful horror comic and pulp fiction cliche that seems woefully underrepresented in D&D.

I interpret Wizard's Tower to represent a magician's lair and not necessarily a subterranean tower; although an ancient tower buried deep in the earth by the ages or a tower in a gigantic cavern are both pretty cool.

For my usage Canals means constructed or artificial subterranean waterways: sewers, the Black Reservoir, cave rivers all fall in this category.

Nexus Point is a technical Tekumel term for "transdimensional wormhole portal thingy;" in the context of this method we can use it for teleportals, micro-planes, dimensional gates, time travel device, etc.

In the original article Ancient Tunnel refers to the Humanspace Empire era subways tunnels deep in Tekumel's crust; for non-science fantasy-ish campaigns they obviously refer to Atlantean or Lemurian equivalent relics.

Step 2
Generate a name for the special with the Beyond The Black Gate - Random Megadungeon Area Name Generator.

Step 3
Use Dave's Mapper to generate a map of the area of the special; note that you can turn on a 10-foot grid with the buttons along the top. This serves as a workable maze generator, and this does the trick for caves.What I do is generate a geomorph-map and than only use the portions that appeal to me while rearranging elements so as to remove the regular corridor placement. For most specials you probably only need a handful or two of rooms, for usage with Step 4 you will need roughly 8 to 20 rooms (d6+d8+6?).

Step 4
Using the elements generated in Steps 1, 2 & 3, think of a theme for the Saturday Night Special. For example: On level 6 of the megadungeon I generate a result of "Palace," the name "Screaming Archmaze of the Bone God," and with Dave's Mapper and the maze generator I cobble together a sprawling maze. Obviously the luxurious yet labyrinthine domicile of some sort of powerful undead aristocrat with a a functioning small cult.

Now go over to Playing D&D With Porn Stars and Read This. What you do is come up with lists of monsters, traps and treasures appropriate for your Saturday Night Special, start with the first room and work your way to the last room dicing up the contents as you go.

For the palace maze of the Bone God I come up with the following monster list off the top of my head.
8 - Villain: The Bone God, the Lich-ified remains of a God-Emperor from ages past
7 - Lieutenants: Hoochie-mama Vampire consorts
6 - Guardian Beast: Pet Froghemoth
5 - Assistant Managers: Mummy Cleric
4 - Tough Guys: Cultists with Cleric or Magic-user leader
3 - Grunts: Talkative zombie guards
2 - Servants: Dancing & singing skeleton butlers & maids
1 - Vermin: Eye Dropper

Note: Yes, I pretty much come up with the idea of putting a Froghemoth in every dungeon I think of, regardless of how wildly inappropriate it is.

Step 5
Flesh out with Tricks, Traps and Empty Room Design from the Hack & Slash blog. Also, the Wilderness Hexploration Document from the New York Red Box forum has a decent temple generator as well as other random generation resources, you could use the Island tables from it to determine what's on a island in a Canals special.

WE ARE 138!!! and a Quick Idea for Gaming Tekumel...

138 followers that is; you haveno idea how long I've been waiting to post this video. Now I can go back to not carring about the numbers.

Anyways, it struck me today that one of the grievances against gaming in Tekumel is that "it would be a confusing exercise in anthropology-porn" or some nonesense.

Now I love Tekumel; I love reading about Tekumel; but I don't care one bit about understanding the whole of Tekumel and expressing it properly.

To me Tekumel is a Jack Vance novel. Everyone looks like a character from Apocalypto or the Bhadava Ghita but meanwhile there's a whole lot of polite verbal swordplay a la PG Woodehouse and The Importance of Being Ernest going on. Hereby comes the integral conflict of Tekumel: it's a bunch of painted dudes with feathers stuck through their noses (who are totally into the impalements, human sacrifices, bloodsports and ritualized warfare) that are immersed in a seething Comedy of Manners.

In my imagination every human on Tekumel speaks with a sterotypical, olde tyme "British Upper Class Twit" accent. Ahhogya have some sort of "Uhg! Guvnehr!" labourer accent, etc. Conversations are as follow:

"Pardon me for this unseemly interruption my good sir. I must apolgize but we are woefully unfamiliar with your delighful city and were wondring if you could be kind enough to provide directions?"

"Gentlemen, your termerity is appalling! Surely you must be aware that accosting a personage of my station is considered a grave assault upon decency. You mustl hold me blamless whilst you are writhing upon on the impalement stakes as society itself demands such consequences."

"There must be some misunderstanding? We are only seeking direct... Sir! Please unhand me sir! Gentle lord, could you please order your employees to unhand us? I believe there has been some misund... AAARRGHHHHUGHHHHH!!!! THE PAIN OF IMPALMENT!!!! MY BOWELS!!!!"

My Favorite "Example of Play" Courtesy of MAR Barker

Player : (After considerable argument) "Person number two is carefully reaching out with the point of his spear. He pushes just one coin off the altar toward himself . What happens?"

Referee : (Laughing fiendishly) "That's all it takes to set off the trap. A great metal cage falls clanging down  over all of you. I believe you were all up near the altar - nobody specified leaving any of the party behind to guard the door, and I thus assume you were all within the 20 foot square area covered by the cage. (Rolling percentile dice, giving the party a 20 percent chance to have had one or more stragglers outside the cage area - none were). When the cage falls, you also see that the idol on the altar begins to arise. What you thought was its metal surface was actually its armour. At the same time secret doors in the north and south walls also swing open, and fifty smaller versions of the idol file into the room expectantly. You have now encountered the Demon Kurritlakal, the Cracker of Bones, Eater of Skins, Father of One Thousand Progeny, Spawn of Great Durritlamish . . . "

- Empire of the Petal Throne - The World of Tekumel, page 102

Blair's Big Dumb Planet Algol Megadungeon

Apologies for the lack of posting lately, I've been sick and somewhat run down. Work and illness have been interfering with my gaming, and the latest Fallout installment has been sucking up a lot of my attention as well.

But I've been a doing a bunch of work on my Algol megadungeon. At this point, I have the following mapped out:

Level 1 - 143 rooms
Level 2 - 144 rooms
Level 2.B - 39 rooms
Level 3 - 82 rooms
Level 3.B - 9 rooms
Level 3.B.3 through to 3.B.7 - 34 rooms
Level 4.A - 28 rooms
Level 4.B - 22 rooms
Level 4.C - 22 rooms

The level labeling system is kind of funky right now; the oddball named levels are sub-levels or sub-complexes within the megadungeon. Of course there are byzantine interconnections between the levels.

I've paid attention to the erudite Gabor Lux's past works analyzing dungeon construction and flow, and the big levels are designed with that in mind by incorporating "loops" within the dungeon avenues. In effect there are several "neighborhoods" within each main level, as well as "freeways," complexes of corridors that allow one to travel throughout much of the differing areas of the level without having to deal with doors or major barriers; thereby allowing the giant worms and flying jellyfish means of traversing the dungeon.

A big influence has been Empire of the Petal Throne's Underworld and megadungeon innovator M.A.R. Barker's work. For my own game, one of the tentpoles of the megadungeon monster stocking will be from D&D variant EPT. The other three tentpoles being Carcosa, Arduin and the original Fiend Folio (including White Dwarf FF content), with some cherry picking from Talislanta. In any published version most such critters would be replaced with original or OGL content, but in my own game I get to use Gorbels without turning them into little exploding, clinging toddler-robots first.

As an aside, I've read previous online musings about using the Fiend Folio as an alternate Monster Manual instead of the aforementioned MM, and I have to say, I can see it working. There's definitely a nice range of humanoids in the kobold-equivalent to ogre-equivalent spectrum. Plus, forget everything you know about Gibberlings and read them with through a pulp Swords & Sorcery lens.

I'm going with a sparse monster distribution, with 1 "encounter" for every six rooms or so; with allowances for some encounter groups controlling several rooms. The general vibe I'm going for with this aspect is vastly ancient, abandoned decrepitude punctuated with moments of terror. With pockets of really bad areas.

At the 1-to-6 monsters placement-to-room ration, it works out to 24 monster encounters for the first two levels...which is quite a lot, and leaves me with a lot of room on my plate for the Tekumel/Arduin/Carcosa/Fiend Folio buffet...

Further Musing on the Tekumel Underworld Feature Table

I've been thinking about that Tekumel Underworld Contents Table I posted a couple of days ago.

Although it is presumably for usage in a Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, the contents seem eminently useful for bog-standard vanilla fantasy, as well as weird gonzo fantasy. I really dig how the table is organized along the lines of traditional D&D "dungeon levels."

Let's start with Levels 1-3. Looking at the table, at the upper, "basic" levels of a dungeons complex, the probability breakdown is as follows:
City - 20%
Catacombs - 20%
Shrine - 10%
Temple - 5%
Tomb - 15%
Cache - 5%
Maze - 25%

Hohoho, chances are that adventurers are going to have to content with a maze during their initial forays into the dungeon complex! Although many dungeons are "maze-y" I interpret this to be a confusing, complex labyrinth. It may have been constructed with the intention of it being a maze, or it may be a complex of rooms and tunnels that have degraded and crumbled into a confusing mess.

Cities and catacombs are both even at 20%. I imagine cities to be the ruins of a fairly large settlement, somehow sunk into the earth by telluric forces or else initially constructed in the subterranean regions. I can also see a city result indicating a complex of rooms and passages inhabited by some variety of social, sentient beings such as trad D&D fare such as goblins and orcs.

Catacombs brings to mind tunnels with heaps of bones piled in niches, piled up to make walls, dessicated corpses linign the walls, and so forth. A cross between the Catacombs of Paris and "The Real Life Beherit Album Cover" of the Palermo Catacombs. Whereas tombs contain corpses in sturdy sarcophagi, the bodies are just piled up or hung from the walls in catacombs!

Tomb...is a tomb. Not much exposition or imagineering needed here! Usually good loot and dangerous traps and/or guardians. The James Ward tables for tombs from The Best of Dragon Vol.1 would be a good resource.

I imagine a shrine to be a single or handful of rooms, a simple(r) fane. Perhaps still functioning, perhaps abandoned.

Temple brings to mind a sprawling complex, an underground cathedral, inhabited by hordes of crazed cultists. Shrines are dusty, temples are bejeweled.

Cache?!?! Despite the incongruity, cache works for me. Imagine the Ancient or Dark Ages version of a bomb shelter. Some rich noble and their family/followers builds a hidden underground bug-out shelter in case of disaster or a need to hide. As long as the contents haven't been looted, there should be some good stuff in a cache!

One Little Chart That Says So Much...

While looking up the info on the Empire of the Petal Throne reprints, I stumbled across this table for generating the nature of Tekumel underworld complexes by "dungeon level."

I'm definitely going to have to put it in my collection of useful DM tables, and I think I may have to order "The Pettigrew Selections" for the Underworlds article alone!

Three Crucial Root Dungeon Design Texts & Saturday Night Specials

The Underworld & Wilderness Adventure, Dungeon & Dragons vol. 3

- "The Underworld," pgs. 3-8

Empire of the Petal Throne: The World of Tekumel

- "Developing An Underworld," pgs. 98-102

Europa fanzine, Issue 6-8/1975

- "How to Set Up Your D&D Campaign" by G. Gygax, pgs. 18-22

also recommended:

The Best of Dragon Magazine vol. 1

- Assorted articles

Of special note is the section in Empire of the Petal Throne relating to "Saturday Night Specials," pg. 100:

"Here too, the role of the "Saturday Night Special" cannot be overemphasized. Aside from the deliberately or randomly determined "normal" contents of Underworld areas, it is interesting to develop large complexes inhabited by special beings. These should have special histories, and players should hear legends of their existence on the surface. Their abilities and treasures should be individually devised, since these add interest and spice to the game..."

Not only is this rock-solid advice for classic megadungeon construction, but I particularly an enamored by the usage of technical dungeon design term of "Saturday Night Special."

I Don't Know How to Even Pronounce It But It Looks Amazing...

I stumbled across this at The Grand Tapestry. I love the lurid, nuclear yellow of the cover stock. I love the line-art and find it much more "believable" than 90% of the fantasy art I see. I love the binding method...so raw & d.i.y.!

Lester, the newest player in my campaign and a very talented artist, took it upon himself to design a Planet Algol character sheet, below is the first draft of the front:

...Deep-One Lysorcersy...

The Power of Unknown Monsters

Ssu picture from Tekumel.com

I've been using Arduin and Empire of the Petal Throne monsters in my gam: Mnor, N'grutha, Phraint, Hlus, Shunned Ones and Ssu, and I've noticed that the players are terrified of these "alien" monsters, they have no idea what they are dealing with and it puts the fear into them! I imagine the earliest D&D players having a similar reactions to Umber Hulks, Beholders, Mind Flayers, etc.

Being "unknown," without any concrete references to what you are dealing with makes these things far more intimidating, and also has a nice "genre simulationism" effect, as many situations in the source literature deals with similar circumstances. As well, by keeping monsters alien and unknown you are keeping them fresh, avoiding the "re-run" effect.

In my game there may be a brief exposition and a name provided when the creature is initially encountered or heard about, but it generally isn't enough for the player to get a firm handle on what to expect. This of course can scale according to how much of the monster's nature you want to be an unknown factor. Common animals versus a cosmic horror emerging into the universe for the first time providing examples form each extreme of the scale.

The Tekumel creatures in the underworld beneath Pi, the Hluss, Shunned Ones and Ssu, were characterized as terrifying, mysterious subterranean bogeymen. The miners that hired the characters were characterized as not having a firm idea of what they would be dealing with, only providing guesses. Guesses that did prove to be accurate, however.

Paper Monsters From Tekumel

Image taken from The Genie's Lamp.

Last Planet Algol game involved many creatures (and some eyes...) from Empire Of The Petal Throne. While doing some follow-up research, I was gratified to come across this page at the Genie's Lamp website, which has PDFs of color paper minatures of Tekumel creatures. I certainly could have used these last game; they would have been great for:

• when a N'grutha was sucking out the soft insides of Dude Earthman
• the incredibly anticlimactic battle with a band of Hluss
• when the party fled in terror after Euphorbus the Cactus Man fell to the swords of the Ssu

However, although this is a great free resource, I am disappointed the N'grutha doesn't have the creepy man-like face of the original DCS illustration (one of my favorite "Adventurers dying horribly" works by the artist).