Click here to download the current rules for How to Host a Dungeon
| This is a free game. If you like it, drop something in the tip jar. If I get enough tips, I'll pay for some art and layout and turn this into a nice book. |
This is the homepage of How to Host a Dungeon, an experimental game and toolkit I use to cook up dungeon environments for my own enjoyment.
The game uses a mix of random tables, mechanic interactions, and player choices to drive the evolution of the dungeon environment. Dungeon history is divided into epochs. In the Dwarven epoch, for example, a large Dwarven city dominates the dungeon. in the Age of Monsters, the city is abandoned and small monster bands vie for supremacy and resrouces. The game produces two artifacts, a dungeon map, and a history log.
The dungeon map is created on successive sheets of tracing paper. Each layer corresponds to a historical epoch. During each epoch, monsters and civilizations move in and repurpose the artifacts of previous eras for their use. In a paritcular era the dungeon map will typically show groups of creatures, relations between them, regions under their control, major treasrues, tunnels, and landmarks.
The chronology is a record of all the events occuring during the game, like so:
139: New Grandash attempts to raid Red Iron Colony, but are driven off.
New Grandash is abandoned, with Red Iron Dwarves looting its treasures
(such as they are).
140: Stendec the Minotaur attempts to set up a lair in Red Iron territory,
but is driven off with some loss of life.
141: Tupelo’s Goblins found a camp in the old Dwarven workshops. They
quickly expand their territory, discovered a cache of Dwarven gold.
Stendec raids the goblins for food in the winter. Red Iron Dwarves
send a raiding party after the Minotaur, but only succeed in driving
him out of his lair to another location.
142: Drawn by rumors of monsters and gold, a party of five brave
adventurers enters the underground.
Click here to download the current rules for How to Host a Dungeon
Past Games
Click an image to see it bigger
Playtest 1: Demise of the Liche Lord
The first test was entertaining, featuring feuding dwarves and a very wealthy minotaur. This game had a very balanced economy with several Dwarf colonies, large predators, and goblin tribes vying for territory.
Image 1 | Image 2 | Image 3 | Image 4 | Image 5 | Image 6 | Image 7First playtest converted into classic level map style
Selentic's Dungeon: The Dragon Pit
Selentic was awesome enough to try this game out right after I posted it. Here are the results:
Link to Selentic's Dragon Pit Post
Playtest 2: Slime and Circumstance
This was the first playtest with the advanced rules. A huge green slime devoured the bulk of the monsters, including an ogre, an adventuring party, and an entire goblin tribe. The slimes are weak at first, but if they get lucky, they can become dominant. In this game the Mind Flayers took control of the dungeon and went on to conquor the world. The game went on very long, but the central goblin tribe managed to survive the entire monster phase.
Slime and Circumstance Dungeon Map | Second playtest drawn up as a regular dungeon mapPlaytest 3: The Haunted Mountain
For this playtest I played around with the rules a bit and put the map into a mountain, which turned out to be quite easy. A huge tribe of Kobolds survived being surrounded by predators in this game. No Dwarves or other lawful creatures made an appearance, and several large treasures were never uncovered.
Haunted Mountain Dungeon MapThe Dungeon Master's Lair
In this game I tried out the new Dungeon Master arch villain, with pleasant results. I ended up with a nice dungeon containing several varied areas. The hilight of the duneon was a large, successful Dwarven colony that built an alliance with the surface kingdoms, only to be enslaved by the Dungeon Master and put to work mining ore to pay for his huge Orc armies. In the end, the Dungeon Master triumphed, conquoring the kingdom with his irresistable armies.
The Drow civilization disappares after a war with the primitive humans.The Dwarves link up with the surface kingdoms.
The final map. Note the extensive caverns created for the Dungeon Master's orc armies.
Braindump Game
Chris Chalafant of Braindump ran a game using a big chalkboard instead of paper. The results were pretty cool. Here's his blog post on the game, and some photos of the dungeon.Chris' Dungeon Map
Kalman Farago Dungeon
Kalman Farago ran a game using Photoshop instead of paper, with cool results. You can read more about his game on the Dragonsfoot forums. Also read the logs here (MS Word doc).Kalman's Dungeon
How to Host a Dungeon on Photoshop
Wydraz made this very cool template for hosting a dungeon electronically. You should be able to combine this with Photoshop layers, or just use some other image editing program. Thanks Wydraz!
Also, check out the Dungeon of Akudun that Wydraz created using his template.
Solo Dungeoneering
Nethack: the greatest ever solo dungeon game (IMHO)Dwarf Fortress a rogue-like Dwarf sim and procedural world
The Temple of Roguelike
Deathmaze at Board Game Geek
Dungeon Bash at Board Game Geek
Mage Knigh: Pyramid Solataire
Fighting Fantasy Books
Tunnels and Trolls
Madcentral's Dungeonworld PBEM
Pages of Wizardry Maps and Resources
Greg Costikyan's game Deathmaze is available as a free download from Board Game Geek
Raiders of the Ruins of Kanthe a roguelike pen and paper game by John Laviolette, as well as Depths of Kanthe
Dungeon Generators
Jamis Buck Dungeon GeneratorDemonweb Dungeon Generator
Irony Games Dungeon Generator
Myth Weavers Dungeon Generator
Abulafia: all manner of random generators for games
Dungeon Mapping
Free Online Graph Paper PDF GeneratorFantasy Mapmaker: a fantasy map blog
Strange Maps: a blog about the nooks, crannies, and limits of cartography
The World's Largest Dungeon with PDF download
RPG Map a Week Archive at Wizards of the Coast
Classic Maps, including Keep on the Borderlands
A beautiful hand-drawn map of Zork I
Megadungeon mapping, an article on the theory of dungeon design.
An awesome dungeon designed by a five year old
My Flickr Portfolio (because I draw maps)
Classic Dungeon Cross Sections on Jeff's Gameblog
Dungeon Crawling RPGs
Dungeons and DragonsThe Tom Moldvay edition Basic D&D: in my opinion the best edition of D&D for quick simple dungeon crawling (with lots of character death), a major inspiration for How to Host a Dungeon. It still shows up on Ebay from time to time. See my actual play report Ziggurat of the Dwarf Lords
Tunnels and Trolls
Labyrinth Lords: an open source re-make of basic edition D&D, ideal for dungeon crawling RPG play.
Donjon, the indie RPG of dungeon crawling goodness.
Dragonsfoot Forums
Contact Me
Email me your dungeon and I'll post itOr just send me any cool dungeon map you've made.
I also draw maps for games and books on contract. Contact me if you're interested.
