Dungeon rooms

Three tables beat one long list

A single table of a hundred rooms runs out of surprises quickly, because every entry has to be complete and complete entries are long. Three shorter tables combined give thirty-four rooms, thirty-four features and thirty-four occupants, which is nearly forty thousand combinations, and the combinations are where the interest is. A flooded cellar with a locked chest and nobody in it is a different room from a flooded cellar with a locked chest and something asleep beside it.

It also makes the tables easy to rewrite. Swap the occupants for creatures from your own setting and keep the rooms, or keep everything and rewrite the features to be about a specific dungeon. Each table is independent, so a change to one does not make the others wrong.

Running a crawl for one person

This is genuinely useful played alone. Draw a room, decide what your character does, draw the next. The exits give the crawl a shape, the list gives you something to draw a map from, and the combination of three tables produces enough oddity to write around. Solo play with random tables is one of the oldest ways to use dice, and it needs almost nothing else.

With a group, it is a tool for the person running the game rather than for the table. Draw one room ahead, read the line, and turn it into something. The value is not that the generator writes the dungeon, it is that it stops you writing the same corridor four times in a row.

Beside the other tabletop tools

For dice of every size with keeps, modifiers and exploding sixes, the dice pool is the page, and it is the one to open beside this for anything the crawl actually asks you to roll. For a plain two-dice roll with a proper tumble, the dice roller is quicker.

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