Stocking Level 1 of a Dungeon in 0.053 Seconds

February 22, 2024

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Though it's not open to the public (yet?) and just for friends, here's the campaign pitch:

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There is an island at Urth's north pole. It is the last truly wet place. The future was once buried here, in the form of millions and millions of seeds for posterity. But now they have sprouted. They have grown together, genes splicing, mixing, and blending. They have grown, both up and down and into other beings as well, creating a bizarre ecosystem. The old vault now lies open, its depths waiting to be explored.

This is hope. Urth may be restored from its xeric state. This is wealth. Some of these plants hold water very efficiently. This is danger. The proliferation risks overrunning every other living thing on the planet. This is history. Many of these plants have not flowered for epochs. This is the Orelian Gardens, an open table megadungeon set in Vaarn.

Inspiration:
- Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer)
- Dune (Herbert)
- Chimera Ants (of Hunter x Hunter)
- Nausicaa (Miyazaki)
- Svalbard global seed vault
- childhood reading of plant and animal guidebooks

Things to pique or drain interest:
- obstacle/dilemma i.e. "traps"
- faction play!
- many (hopefully) interesting items
- strange plants and creatures!

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I'm running this in the system Vaults of Vaarn, which is a Dune/Book of the New Sun inspired Knave hack. I had the dungeon idea on a flight recently, and decided to follow through with it.

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But then the problem arose: I must draw and stock rooms. I drew the map by hand, which was fun and produced a good result, I think. (Not posting in case my players look here). But then the stocking.

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The whole shtick of this dungeon is mutation. So I figured a good way to stock monsters and NPCs is to create a bestiary of plant-animal hybrids that would be roaming. I also wanted to have an inspiration point for each room. The culmination of this line of thought was to roll a couple random tables for each room, and fill in more specific details later on. I decided to rely heavily on Maze Rats tables, and use any that might fit.

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So here's my stocking procedure. Roll the outer 1 and 2, and when rolling 2, use one of the options. (x#) refers to relative probabilities (e.g. four times as likely). MR refers to a maze rats table.

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Roll for room basic description (e.g. office room, research lab, etc.) and two plants for general inspiration
Roll for room contents
1. Stairs down
2. Seed Capsule (a level up for one player)
3. trap (x4)
4. 1. Roll for MR Trap effect, which could be a monster
5. monster (x4)
6. 1. Roll for terrestrial animal (MR) and plant (my own table), to be combined
  2. Roll for monster ability (MR)
  3. Roll for monster level (HD and bonuses in the system)
7. trap and monster (x2)
8. empty (x6)
9. treasure (x2)

Then I have a lot to work with for inspiration. Enough, I think that I could create some interesting rooms. I also made a random encounter table, but I did this entirely from my own head, and put my factions here. I may even just not worry about doing any further elaboration and playing with the basic descriptions.

I recently listened to a Marc Miller (creator of Traveller) interview where he talked about the Universal Planetary Profile in Traveller, which is random tables for planet generation. He said you don't need anything more explained than the table results to play, but you do need imagination. That's what I imagine for my own usage of these results.

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So how did I get 40 rooms stocked in 1/20th of a second? I wrote a python script to do the rolling, of course. So yes, this clickbaity title is quite the gotcha.

PS script available here