Here are some ideas for when you need a dungeon for your players to explore—
- Maps – Sometimes you just want a map, and you’ll flesh out what’s in the different locations that it shows. Dyson’s Dodecahedron has a rich collection of free maps, many of which are also free for commercial purposes.
- Five-Room Dungeons – Maybe you’re more interested in the content than the map. Five-room dungeons share a basic structure: Entrance/Guardian, Puzzle/Challenge, Trick/Setback, Climax/Boss, Reward/Revelation. Here’s a collection of 87 five-room dungeons from Roleplaying Tips.
- One Page Dungeon Contest – These contest entries pull it all together: maps with keyed locations, where you can see the entire dungeon and its contents at a glance on a single page. (My own attempt for the Dungeon Contest was thematic but probably unoriginal, though it did lead to three great sessions in my Melvaunt campaign and the rise of a new Big Bad: you can download Catacombs of the Lich Queen here.)
- Perilous Wilds – This is the most popular Dungeon World 1 supplement of all (used by 53% of DW1 players) and is now used for many different PbtA and OSR systems. A 2022 revised edition updates its methods of randomly generating dungeons.
- Improv Almanac – My ebook has lots of different types of locations for your adventurers to explore, including catacombs, caverns, crypts, mines, pits, sewers, and towers (where better to put a dungeon than underneath a tower?). The locations are meant as sparks for improv, and include questions to ask players to co-create a location, impressions to describe the location, terrain, discovers, dangers, and—for fantasy PbtA games—custom moves.
- Hex Describe – This hexcrawl generator will generate hexcrawls with hexes containing one-page dungeons. Or you can use it just to randomly generate dungeons, without a hexmap. Dungeons vary in size from 5 to 14 rooms.
Each of these will reward further digging.
Photo credit: Dyson Logos.
You can download this and other essays in my free ebook, The Best-Delayed Plans.
