The Architect’s Dungeon

In March of this year I backed a Kickstarter for “Dungeon Architect Cards” because I was in the consideration phase for the Dyson’s Deck of Delves project. The cards arrived in the mail in the beginning of July and sat in the console of the truck for a few months before I finally brought them inside and started messing around with them.

Each card is two sided and each side has a discrete dungeon section (a room or corridor) linked by doors to other sections, and a list of 12 “trappings” for the section. Like any other random dungeon generator, it requires a bit of twisting, bending and personal adjudication (and just removing a number of the exits from many of the sections) to transition from a set of cards to a final dungeon. It does provide a fairly quick system to put together a dungeon on the fly when lacking for inspiration, and the fact that you can customize your deck ahead of time (flipping cards in the deck so specific room shapes are up, removing others completely, etc) means you have some control over the final design…

Anyways, here’s how the first dungeon drawn using these cards came out:

The end result is a very solid, grid-based dungeon full of little loops and interconnections and only a single actual chokepoint where you could cut the dungeon in half by securing a single door.

I’ll be honest, it FEELS like what I expect from a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon.

On the other hand, it is a little big for a random dungeon. Generally speaking when I want a big dungeon, I’ll pull out one of my collection of big dungeons (I have a folder full of them… which should come as no surprise to anyone). So my next attempt with the Dungeon Architect Cards will be a smaller structure to see how it turns out with less room for all these interconnections to manifest.

You can download the dungeon map at 300 dpi with and without grid from the blog at https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/tuesday-map-the-architects-dungeon-working-with-the-dungeon-architect-cards/