A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting (Have Your Dice Ready) - Roleplaying Tips

A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting (Have Your Dice Ready)

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1222

A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting

An RPT GM asks: Facing the Dungeon23 challenge, I wonder how to come up with different rooms instead of falling into tired tropes or ending up with repetitive floors.

My answer: roll for it!

First, theme your megadungeon and its levels.

Next, make yourself a table of theme-based room types:

d10 Core Room Purpose

If you’re breaking your megadungeon into 5 Room Dungeon sections within levels, then roll a d10:

  1. Entrance
  2. Guardian
  3. Roleplay
  4. Puzzle
  5. Trap or Hazard
  6. Trick
  7. Powerful Foe
  8. Treasure Room
  9. Discovery
  10. Revelation

It doesn’t matter what’s in the table – it’s the mechanism that counts. Rolling lets fate choose for you and you’ll get a variety of prompts.

To further help prevent repetition, create modifier tables to generate different room criteria:

d6 Room Size

Think outside of tiny spaces where no tactics or big scenes can happen:

  1. 500 square feet
  2. 1,000 square feet
  3. 2,000 square feet
  4. 3,000 square feet
  5. 4,000 square feet
  6. 5,000 square feet

d8 Room Shape

To further stretch our creative muscles, roll for room shape:

  1. Circular
  2. Oval
  3. Triangular
  4. Square
  5. Trapezoidal
  6. Hexagonal
  7. Octagonal
  8. Cave

d12 Room Feature

Roll for a distinguishing feature to revolve your design around with 50% chance of it being magical:

  1. Pool
  2. Statue
  3. Altar
  4. Platforms on chains
  5. Cubicles
  6. Stored Stuff
  7. Carpet
  8. Balcony
  9. Cage
  10. Catwalk
  11. Mirror
  12. Art

For even more variety, roll a d4 for quantity.

Example Room: Pantheon Church

Using my fancy new black oak wooden dice tower here, my rolls got me this:

  • Trap or Hazard
  • 2,000 square feet
  • Square
  • Altars x 4

As a little hack, note how each table I created has a different die type. I can put a small dice set together and roll every day, with each die corresponding to its own table for simplicity.

Graphic of section divider

If you decide to take this approach, I’d love to see what tables you come up with! Email [email protected] any time, or better yet, share them here at campaign-community.com