Click here to download the current rules for How to Host a Dungeon
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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
Click an image to see it bigger
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 7Selentic was awesome enough to try this game out right after I posted it. Here are the results:
Link to Selentic's Dragon Pit Post
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 mapFor 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 MapIn 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.