1E DMG: The Ultimate Dungeon Creator

What started out as a potential Act III for the module I'm working on has... expanded.

9 nearly full pages of old-school mega-mega-mega-dungeon. 

All created using the random tables on pages 170-172 of the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Masters Guide by Gary Gygax, published in 1979.

Why? Because drawing dungeons from just the scratch of my imagination has become kinda boring. 

I marked my entry point in the center of a page and simply went with whatever happened. It was linear at first, but it soon expanded; side passages upon side passages, straight, diagonal, parallel, intersections -- 4-ways, Xs, Ys, Ts, all leading to chambers and rooms of all shapes and sizes (it's implied but never explicitly stated that rooms have doors and chambers do not). These tables are designed to go on and on and on; there are occasional dead-ends, but if you don't consciously stop it, it probably will not stop (25% of periodic-checks introduce side passages and 50% of side passages introduce multiple side passages).

I wanted every passage to take you deeper down the rabbit-hole, so no looping was allowed until deeply forward for every path. Every new corridor goes underneath any room or passage it crosses, but eventually loops do occur, plenty of them. At times, it's like solving a puzzle; decisions have to made, to connect or not connect? Sometimes I beg for a dead-end and sometimes I have no choice but to place one and sometimes a loop is allowed. This place is wild. I get lost just looking at it. If players were mapping it, they'd fuck up quickly, just as they would if it were a real place.

This process also reinforces the notion of space; not every room will be occupied (could/should still be interesting though) and there are many long, twisting corridors. Noise wouldn't travel here very well, not clearly. Certainly you might hear echoes and clangs and screams, but they would haunt like distant nightmares. It's easy to see adventurers snooping about, even fighting, without disturbing much of anything at all. What about the goblins in the next room? With Gygax's system, chances are, there are no goblins in the next room. 

Eventually I came to the edge of the first page, all four edges, and thought, what the hell, let's keep going, and before long, it became clear that it would bleed over onto at least 9 pages. I configured entry points to align with Act III if I insanely go in that direction. Who am I kidding... 

Some thoughts...

Wandering Monsters are built in. That's right, on the main d20 "Periodic Check Table" a roll of 20 results in a wandering monster, not a check, an actual random monster right then and there. So, I put an X on the map, always in a corridor. Sometimes they occur in bunches. So, what if wandering monsters were always handled this way, and, is that a repeated occurrence or just a one time thing? Just thinking out loud; one time occurrence is obvious to me, unless something (a glyph?) is spawning creatures.

Stairs... come up plenty of times, but there's no way I'm doing levels below this monstrosity. So, I simply put stairs in the corridor -- almost always going down. Combined with the fact that new passages go under already drawn ones, the farther out you go, the deeper underground you are. It's shaped like an underground hill. This could be how danger (dungeon levels) is measured. Center page -- dungeon levels 1 and 2; 8 pages surrounding the center page -- dungeon levels 3 and 4; 16 pages surrounding that -- dungeon levels 5 and 6, etc. So danger equals distance from the center as opposed to levels straight down. 

Tricks/Traps come up as often as stairs and such; all in corridors. I've never been a fan of hallway traps because they're punitive and make the game an unfun slog. The players have no defense other than to check every 10' of the place. So whatever these turn out to be, there must be clues.

Special passageways... Rivers, caverns, chasms, streams, all come up periodically, but I've avoided all so far. I have a certain look in mind -- the cellar of Castle Dracula, complete with arched columns, vaulted ceilings, and at times, unfinished floors. I may add subterranean canals at some point, but I'll be damned if I taint this place with caverns.

After a few weeks, all 9 pages are nearly complete (much more complete than the pic I posted above) and it has a shit-ton of passages bleeding off in every possible direction. This implies a larger ring of 16 new pages for a total of 25. I would love to keep going until all natural dead-ends are met, but this could become comically large. So, is it now just a work of art? A curiosity? The odds of it stopping on its own are astronomically low. I wonder, what is the largest dungeon ever made using these tables? This is probably unknowable.

And then you must stock it!

Your mind would never imagine what these tables create.

Gary Gygax was a genius.