Dungeons, Dungeon Generation

General ACKS Forums General Discussion
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So, as a retroclone, ACKS is built with the assumption that the PCs will do a lot of dungeon delving. Do you guys generally actually follow through on that assumption? I ask because prior to ACKS, running dungeon crawls was actually something I only very rarely did.

As such, I have a few direct questions for the forums, but I’d also really appreciate your general insights and philosophies with regard to dungeon design, just to help me get a better feel for the general sphere within which DMs fall.

Also, as usual, when I say “Questions” I actually mean “Guesses at how the rules are meant to be”

So, as I understand it:

  1. Treasure is added to the map one of two ways: Empty/Trap rooms have a chance of simply possessing treasure, and Lair rooms have treasure per the monster type.

  2. Lairs can happen one of two ways:

A. Each time a monster room is rolled, there’s a chance it’s a lair room
B. If many monsters of one type are present, then they can reach critical mass and form a lair.

Questions: Some monsters have Lairs that consist of multiple Encounters. For example, A Gnoll Lair is occupied by a Gnoll Warband, which is 1d6 Gnoll Gangs, which are each 1d6 Gnolls. If I’m stocking my dungeon, and I roll a monster room that’s a Gnoll Lair, should I then roll 1d6 to see how many gangs occupy the lair, or should I just gather all the Gnoll Rooms previously rolled in the dungeon around the lair?

If I should roll to see how many gangs there are around the lair, are these gangs all in the lair, (Meaning the party potentially opens the door onto a single huge room with 36 gnolls) or should I distribute them around the lair?

If I should distribute them around the lair, do I create new rooms, or just plop them into the empty rooms previously generated?

Also, while I’m on the subject of humanoid monster encounters, they all seem to come with champions. Are those part of the number rolled, or in addition to? (That is, if I roll my 1d6 for a Gnoll Gang, and I roll a 1, is that a single gnoll champion, or is it one normal gnoll and his champion friend?)

Also, what kinds of things fall under “Unique Rooms?” I mean, I get that it’s meant to be a bit of a wild card, but are your uniques generally good? Bad? High treasure high danger? Tricky puzzle blocking access to the next level of the dungeon?

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So, as a retroclone, ACKS is built with the assumption that the PCs will do a lot of dungeon delving. Do you guys generally actually follow through on that assumption? I ask because prior to ACKS, running dungeon crawls was actually something I only very rarely did.

APM: Dungeon crawling has always been a part of my ACKS campaigns, personally. The campaigns have tended to be 75% dungeon-crawling in the early levels, 50% dungeon in the mid-levels, and probably still 33% dungeon in the late levels.

So, as I understand it:

  1. Treasure is added to the map one of two ways: Empty/Trap rooms have a chance of simply possessing treasure, and Lair rooms have treasure per the monster type.

APM: Yes.

  1. Lairs can happen one of two ways:
    A. Each time a monster room is rolled, there’s a chance it’s a lair room
    B. If many monsters of one type are present, then they can reach critical mass and form a lair.

APM: Yes.

Questions: Some monsters have Lairs that consist of multiple Encounters. For example, A Gnoll Lair is occupied by a Gnoll Warband, which is 1d6 Gnoll Gangs, which are each 1d6 Gnolls. If I’m stocking my dungeon, and I roll a monster room that’s a Gnoll Lair, should I then roll 1d6 to see how many gangs occupy the lair, or should I just gather all the Gnoll Rooms previously rolled in the dungeon around the lair?

APM: You should roll 1d6 to see how many gangs occupy the lair.

If I should roll to see how many gangs there are around the lair, are these gangs all in the lair, (Meaning the party potentially opens the door onto a single huge room with 36 gnolls) or should I distribute them around the lair?

APM: You should distribute them around the dungeon. It is ok to have more than one gang in a room, but you would not normally have all of the gangs in one room, unless there is some special reason for it. Refer to, for example, B2 Keep on the Borderlands for an example of a reasonable beastman lair distribution. Refer to G1, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, for an example of having virtually all the monsters in one room for a particular reason (a feast). (Those are both classic AD&D modules).

If I should distribute them around the lair, do I create new rooms, or just plop them into the empty rooms previously generated?

APM: You would distribute them into (a) rooms that you haven’t yet stocked; (b) empty rooms that you’ve previously generated which are nearby; or (c) rooms you’ve already stocked with monsters or traps. You would use your prudent judgment to decide which makes the most sense. This part is more art than algorithm.

Also, while I’m on the subject of humanoid monster encounters, they all seem to come with champions. Are those part of the number rolled, or in addition to? (That is, if I roll my 1d6 for a Gnoll Gang, and I roll a 1, is that a single gnoll champion, or is it one normal gnoll and his champion friend?)

APM: Champions are always in addition to the number encountered.

Also, what kinds of things fall under “Unique Rooms?” I mean, I get that it’s meant to be a bit of a wild card, but are your uniques generally good? Bad? High treasure high danger? Tricky puzzle blocking access to the next level of the dungeon?

APM: What I typically do is use the Unique Rooms to balance out the dungeon I’ve generated. For instance, if the dungeon is low on treasure, I might make the unique rooms be rich with loot. If the dungeon has turned out to be very deadly, I might add a place of sanctuary or healing. On the other hand, if the dungeon has too much treasure, it can be a money-sink of some sort, or hideous trap, or special monster-closet. This, again, is where algorithm leaves the equation and artistry enters it, though.

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Looks correct to me, for the most part. When I roll empty/monster/trap/unique, I count the number of rooms and then roll a giant pile of dice, then roll a monster for each monster room rolled, then assign everything sensibly. So in the case of ‘critical mass’ lair formation, I do usually place separate gangs in separate rooms (to a degree - you might have 2-3 in the main room and then another couple out foraging or on post or whatever), but it isn’t a ‘filling’ of empty rooms - the rooms they’re in were never empty to begin with.

I haven’t been counting champions / subchieftains / chieftains in the rolled counts, no. So a 1 would be a champion gnoll and his sidekick / lackey / minion / henchgnoll :stuck_out_tongue: (I like to interpret the humanoid structures on the henchman rules - normals are the henchmen of champions, champions are the henchmen of subchieftains, and subchieftains, witch doctors, shamans, and bodyguards are the henchmen of chieftains)

Uniques I have used include the Hall of Deadly and Malicious Artifacts, teleporter traps (because it is a trap, but it’s also not like a normal trap), well full of water elemental, imprisoned genie, imprisoned invisible stalker…

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APM: What I typically do is use the Unique Rooms to balance out the dungeon I’ve generated. For instance, if the dungeon is low on treasure, I might make the unique rooms be rich with loot. If the dungeon has turned out to be very deadly, I might add a place of sanctuary or healing. On the other hand, if the dungeon has too much treasure, it can be a money-sink of some sort, or hideous trap, or special monster-closet. This, again, is where algorithm leaves the equation and artistry enters it, though.

Ooh, that’s a very elegant way of handling it. Gives me lots of ideas already.

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The book makes references to mega-dungeons. What defines one relative to a normal dungeon? How many rooms/floors is a “normal dungeon?”

Hmm, I wonder if I can figure out just from the book-

The book describes a small dungeon of 1-3 encounters as a “half session.” If we assume that 30% of rooms have monster encounters, then we can assume a maximum of roughly 3x as many rooms as encounters, meaning lairs have between 1-9 rooms.

So if 1-3 encounters is a half session, then 2-6 (We’ll say 4) is a full session. So a “Normal” dungeon is 12 to 24 rooms. A Large dungeon is 6-10 sessions, which means between 72 and 120 rooms.

My gut says between 10 and 20 rooms is appropriate for each floor, and the dungeon previews in the back of the book bear this out; there’s a picture of a 10 room castle, and an absurd 60 room Dwimmermount preview (but Dwimmermount is being released as its own book, which means it’s probably more than a bit larger than your standard one.)

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“Finally, place one low-level mega-dungeon close to the border, one mid-level mega-dungeon a moderate distance away, and one murderously hard mega-dungeon on the far side of the map.”

“Of the 30 dungeons, we recommend 3 large dungeons each designed for about 6-10 sessions of play; 10 dungeons designed for 1-2 sessions of play; and 17 small “lair” dungeons designed for a half-session of play, i.e. 1-3 encounters. Each point of interest in the regional map should initially receive one paragraph of description.”

In the example above, The “3 large dungeons” and “one low-level mega-dungeon, one mid-level mega-dungeon, and one hard mega-dungeon” are synonymous.

Math:
30% of rooms are encounters
A typical dungeon has 10 to 30 rooms per dungeon level, averaging 20.

6-10 sessions = 12 to 60 encounters = 40 to 200 rooms = 2 to 20 levels
1-2 sessions = 2 to 12 encounters = 7 to 40 rooms = 1 to 2 levels
1 session = 2 to 6 encounters = 7 to 20 rooms = 1 level
1 half-session = 1 to 3 encounters = 3 to 10 rooms = 1/2 level

Dwimmermount has 13 levels 45 to 60 rooms per level, and 13 levels, for around 650 rooms total. It’s equal to the size of all three mega-dungeons I recommend putting on your campaign map.

By the standards of the ACKS rules, Dwimmermount is a mega-mega dungeon. It covers low, mid, and high-level all in one.

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“The book makes references to mega-dungeons. What defines one relative to a normal dungeon?”

The OSR blogs talk about megadungeons a fair bit and a lot of them were trying to define the term a while back. Some said a megadungeon is one that’s deeper than 10 levels. Others like to say that it’s one with over 100 rooms per level. But there are a few characteristics that showed up on almost all of the attempts I saw at defining it:

  1. A megadungeon is too large to ever clear completely. Partly because it would be tedious to clear that many rooms (especially in areas you’ve out-leveled) and partly because, by the time you finish a section, new monsters will have started moving in to the areas you’d previously cleared.

  2. A megadungeon has enough space and enough available XP to support multiple parties of adventurers. When the first party to pass through moves on to the next level, it should still be leaving enough monsters and loot behind to allow another fresh party to go through the same area and level up to the point that the second party is also ready for the next level. And the third, the fourth, etc.

  3. Multiple entrances, leading into the dungeon at different depths. And, more broadly, a high degree of interconnection, allowing adventuring parties to choose what areas they want to visit and in what order rather than providing a linear start-to-finish layout.

For my own megadungeon, I started out by playing a game of How to Host a Dungeon, then decided that each room on the HtHaD map would be a dungeon level. Assuming I ever complete it, this means that I will have ninety-some levels. I’ve mapped about a half-dozen of them so far and they’re averaging around 45-50 rooms per level. So call it somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 rooms total…