I've wanted to do a deep dive into the AD&D DMG's Appendix A for a while, but have struggled to get started because this section of the DMG is really difficult to wrap my head around. How could I write effectively about something I did not understand?
Time and again, I broke out my graph paper, my pencil, my dice, and my handy DMG to randomly generate a dungeon using Appendix A. I was always very quickly confounded by the sprawling complex of rooms, chambers, and passages that stretched out in all directions at once, twisting and turning out towards the edges of the page and then unexpectedly back in on itself to bump up against where I had started.
It was nonsensical and confusing. What table am I supposed to roll on, and when? What is the difference between a room and a chamber? Why are there so many diagonal passages? Just when I thought I was done with my dungeon, I'd randomly roll up a set of stairs down one level, then a trap door in a corridor which drops the player characters down two levels. That's two more levels I have to map! Will it ever end?
The short answer is no. It won't. And that's by design, probably. Most likely, Appendix A is meant to generate the kind of tentpole megadungeon capable of sustaining a lengthy campaign with dozens of players. The dungeon is never "finished" because the players need to be able to keep exploring so that they can continue to extract treasure and level up, until their characters are powerful enough to move onto other things. Then, there are always new people joining the campaign, and they will need to exploit the dungeon to advance their characters as well. Appendix C's Dungeon Random Monster Level Determination Matrix (a real mouthful!) goes all the way to level 16!
I've been spending a bit more time attempting to randomly generate dungeons lately (trying to get out of a bit of a creative block). I've had some degree of success, though I am still refining the process. I'm using Appendix A, sort of. I am modifying it as I go. At first I was only using it to stock my rooms with monsters, tricks, traps, and treasure. Then I decided to use it to determine how many exits where in a room based on its size. Then I started using it to add some more zaniness to my passages. Then I saw the tables at the end with lakes and magic pools and I felt I had to use those somehow. I'm slowly but surely becoming Appendix A-pilled.
There's lots of great advice out there for designing dungeons. So much so that I would be surprised if any one individual designed their dungeons using a method derived solely from any one source. There are many methods to generate fantastic, like life, sensible dungeons. By contrast, here is a dungeon level I recently generated using Appendix A (sort of - I simplified the room sizes and used B/X's stocking procedure):
You might look at this and say, "This is crazy! It looks dumb! Who would build this? It makes no sense!" And you're right - it doesn't make a lot of sense. It does look dumb. But Appendix A is also like, really good at reproducing a very particular kind of dungeon - the whacky Gygaxian early TSR era D&D dungeon. The dungeon sicko's labyrinth.
Look at B1's map of Quasqueton (particularly the upper level, at left):
You might say, "Okay, well that is also stupid." And you would be right!
I've written before about how the construction of Quasqueton tells us a lot about the nature of its builders, Rogahn and Zelligar. They were dungeon-ass-dungeon heads. They were powerful adventurers, which means they spent a lot of time in dungeons extracting treasure to gain XP to earn that power. Once they had it, what did they do? They used it to build a dungeon, just like the ones they explored in their youth. It is filled with features specifically designed to confound, frustrate, and murder other adventurers. It's not an ancient, inscrutable mythic underworld. It is a bizarro death trap built by some crazy ex-adventurers just a few decades ago.
I wrote about this too. In AD&D, it is assumed that player characters (and, by extension, character-type NPCs) will build dungeons beneath their strongholds. AD&D's wilderness is littered with deserted strongholds. Those all probably have dungeons beneath them. Presumably, the town and city are inhabited by powerful character-type NPCs who also rule strongholds. The especially high level NPCs are never randomly encountered walking around town. What are they doing? They're going sicko mode, working on their dungeons. They just added a third level, and now they're installing trap doors on the first level that drop you down to the third, where they keep their owlbears. And they're hungry!
There are, of course, other sorts of dungeons than these, and you should include those in your campaign as well, but this is maybe my favorite type. As I've been running Dungeon Module B1, I've come to really enjoy Quasqueton. It has lots of bizarre passages that wind throughout the complex and sort of loop back on themselves to rejoin the area from which they originated. It seems kind of superfluous at first, until you realize that playing in these environments is really fun.
You might wander from the entranceway down the meandering halls, turning this way and that, and just when you think you're lost, you wind up back where you started. You might think the orcs are fleeing, until a few minutes later they appear from the side passage to flank you. Likewise, once you've familiarized yourself with the terrain, it will be you using those same passages to flank the orcs instead. Some of the most blissful moments of our B1 campaign have been those in which the players spend 20 minutes planning an ambush against their enemies, figuring out how to split their massive party into teams of three and which team is taking which passage.
When you think about dungeons as places built by experienced adventurers to confound the novice adventurers who will one day come to steal their stuff, the wackiness of the Appendix A dungeon makes a bit more sense. If you look at it and think to yourself that an insane person must have built it, that's a good thing. The person who built it was probably deeply unwell. I feel a bit unwell just mapping it out!
But enough preamble. I want to get into the weeds and really dissect Appendix A. Let's start at the beginning:
Gygax claims that this system "can be used directly in conjunction with actual play" (by which I assume he means you can use it to generate a dungeon on the fly at the table). I don't buy that for a second, and don't recommend it. I guess if your players understand that this what they're in for, fine, it might actually be fun, but I don't see myself doing that.
The second paragraph suggests, in the event there are ruins above your dungeon, there will always be some monster living in them - this conflicts with Appendix C's castle subtables, which have some castles being "totally deserted" and others being "deserted (monster therein)":
I wouldn't have every dungeon's upper works be inhabited by a monster, but I might roll to determine if a monster's made its lair there, the same as I do any other hex on my map.
The third paragraph tells us to always start the first level of the dungeon with a room in the middle of the sheet of graph paper. We're told to go to Table V and follow that procedure or use one of the "starter" areas (image at the top of this post). We should also keep a "record of all monsters, treasures, tricks/traps, and whatever - a normal dungeon matrix." Sounds reasonable.
This is an important one: "
Discretion must prevail at all times." Reroll results if they don't make sense, or even if you simply don't like them. I had to hammer this into my thick skull when, to my frustration, I continuously generated side passages which doubled back at a 45 degree angle to rejoin the corridor from whence they had just come. As I described earlier, there is sometimes a certain charm to this when exploited for a tactical benefit, but too much of it can strain credulity just a bit.
As instructed above, let's start with Table V:
We use this table to determine the shape and size of chambers and rooms. Wait - what's the difference between a chamber and a room? Well, that is never really explained. Chambers on average are a bit bigger. Is this really necessary?
The main difference, besides size, seems to be whether the exits from the area are passages or doors (see item 4 in this post - which is generally a really useful post on this subject). Exits from chambers are usually passages (that is, doorless openings which lead to corridors), while exits from rooms are usually doors. There is a separate procedure for determining where a passage leads versus where a door leads.
This is an important distinction because doors are obstacles. There are different types of doors (old wood, good wood, iron-banded wood, stone, metal, etc.). They can be stuck, locked, or trapped. You can close a door on a monster and spike it shut or cast hold portal upon it. If you fail to shove open a stuck door and there are monsters on the other side, they can't be surprised. Areas of the dungeon without doors are easier to explore. Areas with lots of doors are potentially more problematic, but you also might eventually be able to use those doors to your advantage if, say, you are fleeing from a monster.
The choice to start the first level of the dungeon with a room (which has doors) is an interesting one. What if all the doors end up being stuck or locked? Is the adventure over before it begins? Personally, I would recommend starting with a chamber instead, since it provides more options immediately.
One last thing before moving on - I hate the 10' x 10' room. I'm mapping at a scale of 10' per square, so the 10' x 10' room is just a single square with a line drawn around it. It's barely big enough to fit a number inside of it for keying purposes. It's so annoying. I would get rid of it entirely and just make the smallest room 20' x 20'.
Let's look at our chambers and rooms of unusual shape and size:
This is interesting, although I find these rather annoying to draw, personally. I'm hesitant to throw them out entirely though, as I like the chance of generating a cave, but even more so the circular chamber or room, which has a chance of containing a pool, well, or shaft. Neat!
Much like the dungeon itself, Appendix A is a bit of a labyrinth. We're told to immediately got to Table V for some reason (why is it not Table I?), which then might send us further down to Table VIII. There is a lot of jumping around involved, and the organization of these tables and how you're meant to follow them is one of my biggest gripes with this section of the book.
Since we're here, let's jump to Table VIII A and C:
Huh, so if you roll a pool in a circular chamber or room (only a 25% chance), you then have a 40% chance of there actually being no pool? That doesn't seem very fun (this will become clearer in a moment - for now I would ignore results 1-8 or roll d12+8 instead). Pools can contain monsters or monsters and treasure, or they can be magical. Awesome! Let's see that magic pool table:
Sweet. Magic pools can be good or bad. They can turn gold into platinum or lead (presumably any quantity, but only once!), increase or decrease a random ability score by 1-3 (one time only, rolled separately for each character!), or teleport you to the surface, elsewhere on the level, down one level, or 100 miles away from the dungeon in the outdoors (
sounds like a great time for a hexcrawl)! They can also talk. Talking pools have an alignment (30% LG, 15% LE, 15% CG, 25% CE, and 15% N) and will either damage you if you're not of the same alignment or grant you a
wish (!) if you are.
Time to break out the alignment language to make sure.
Here is the table of unusual sizes for chambers and rooms:
The largest size on the earlier table is 1,200 sq. ft. (for a room) or 2,400 sq. ft. (for a chamber), so this will often result in much larger areas. I'm not a huge fan of this. I have been deep into randomly generating a dungeon when suddenly one of these areas pops up, I roll multiple 15-20s, and the new area ends up occupying like, all the remaining space on the page. Again, use discretion.
Table V also tells us to roll for exits, contents, treasure, and how the treasure is contained, so let's go in that order, on to Table V C:
After rolling d20, you determine the number of exits from the chamber or room based on its total size. Generally speaking, a high roll plus a large room will result in more exits - which makes sense - unless you roll a 10 or higher, in which case the chamber or room either has a random number of exits (d4) or just one, regardless of size (note that the "chambers have passages, rooms have doors" rule of thumb is inverted here), or it has just one exit if it's large enough in area, or
no (visible) exits if it's too small. In the latter case, we're told to check once per 10' for secret doors.
Before I move on to that, I do think it's interesting that this suggests four general size categories for rooms - up to 600 sq. ft., up to 1200 sq. ft., up to 1600 sq. ft., and over 1600 sq. ft. If mapping with 10' squares, this roughly corresponds to 20' x 20', 30' x 30', 40' x 40', and anything larger than that (let's say 50' x 50'). If you want to standardize your dungeon a bit and get rid of those pesky chambers and rooms of unusual size (but maybe keep the caverns and circular areas with their chance of cool stuff like magic pools), you could simplify it and say there are simply four different sizes of rooms (as I did in my dungeon above).
Table V D tells us how to determine where a door is located and how to check for secret doors, as well as what to do if our doors end up leading to previously mapped areas:
Personally, I just roll a d8 to determine where the exits are located (I have a d8 with cardinal directions instead of numbers). I like when an exit to a chamber or room is in the corner because it creates more diagonal passages, which again recreates that zany character of early TSR dungeons.
So, about that footnote regarding secret doors. First, note that if a passage or door leads to a previously mapped space, that is indicative of a secret door or one way door leading back to that mapped area, which is a neat bit of looping tech.
Table V C tells us, on a roll of 10-12, if the chamber or room is 1200 sq. ft. or less, or on a roll of 13-15, if the chamber or room is 1600 sq. ft. or less, that there are no visible exits, and to check once per 10' for secret doors. I take this to mean that for every 10' section of wall, we are to roll a d20. On a 1-5, there's a secret door (I'm assuming a result of 6-20 is treated as a negative, although a secret door can certainly also be a one-way door, as in the entrance corridor of B1's Quasqueton).
Let's say we roll a 13-15 on Table V C and our chamber or room is exactly 1600 sq. ft. - 40' x 40'. That means there are a total of 16 10' sections of wall. On average, that chamber or room will contain four secret doors, and it could be much more depending on how you roll.
Many times have I ended up with far more secret doors than I would like in a single chamber or room, so here's what I do. If I roll up a chamber or room with no exits, I then roll again on table V C until I get another result that yields a positive number of exits, then I roll again according to the little secret door footnote under Table V D to determine if those are actual secret doors, one way doors, or regular doors. I treat the initial roll as simply an indication that there might be secret doors, but only in an amount that makes sense according to the size of the chamber or room, and it entirely eliminates the possibility of every single section of wall containing such a door. You might want a 40' x 40' chamber or room with 16 secret doors in it, but I don't. I'm letting discretion prevail!
Next, we have to roll to determine the chamber or room's contents on Table V F:
This table is sure to cause some consternation. 60% of rooms are empty? That isn't very fun! But
real empty room-heads know that an "empty" room is not truly
empty. I wrote about this a great deal in
my post about B1's room design (which also contains links to a bunch of great posts about empty rooms).
If you don't like so many empty rooms, consider using B/X's stocking procedure instead:
Using this table, you end up with something like 28% empty, 17% monster, 17% monster with treasure, 17% special, 11% trap, 6% empty with treasure, and 6% trap with treasure. I go back and forth on which I prefer. AD&D's stocking table is sometimes too sparse, and B/X's is sometimes too crowded. Use whichever you prefer. I can assure you they both work!
I won't go into how you determine what monsters are in the dungeon, as that information is found in Appendix C.
One thing I will note which is of interest on this table is that a result of 18 is either a special room or stairs up or down - you will have to decide which is which. If you are trying to keep your dungeon somewhat manageable (i.e., you are not creating an infinite dungeon to support an entire campaign's worth of play on its own), I recommend ignoring results which give you stairs leading down. However, I recommend keeping any results which yield stairs leading up, as they can lead to multiple entrances/exits to/from the dungeon, which every dungeon should have.
A method I've used in randomly generating dungeons to make them less infinite is to treat special chambers and rooms and those with treasure as dead ends - I don't generate any more exits from those areas. Since these areas contain treasure, I think they should lie at the end of a given path as a reward to the players for thoroughly exploring that "branch" of the dungeon. There might still be other ways into the chamber or room via secret or one-way doors, as described above, but overall this makes the dungeon a bit more manageable and less likely to sprawl uncontrollably.
Table V F leads us to Table V G and Table VII. Let's look at V G:
One thing I like about this table is that you roll twice for treasure hoards guarded by monsters and add 10% to each roll. These hoards will be larger and have a better chance of containing particularly valuable treasure like gold, platinum, gems, jewelry, and magic items.
I do not recommend using the coinage amounts as is. Instead, I recommend rolling to determine the total gold piece value of treasure in the room, then use something like Hack & Slash Publishing's excellent Compendium II, which contains lots of tables for generating interesting treasure. You can roll to determine how many "units" of treasure are in the room, then divide the total value by that amount to get a certain number of items worth a certain amount of gold pieces each, then dice to determine what each item is. This is much better than finding a pile of 1,000 silver pieces, and is consistent with Gygax's own thoughts about what a treasure hoard should look like.
Before we get to Table VII, Table V G directs us to Tables V H, I, and J.
Table V H is a list of containers for treasure:
Nothing especially noteworthy here, except I guess that some containers are more convenient than others. The footnote tells us "if desired" to roll on either Table V I or Table V J. Here is Table V I:
This is a variety of ways that treasure can be trapped. This can range from reasonable (poisoned needles in the locking mechanism of a chest) to pretty absurd (a blade scything across the inside of a sack - I remind myself that
discretion must prevail at all times). Of note is that none of these entries indicate how much damage these traps should do, or how deadly the associated poisons are, so you'll have to determine that yourself. Once again,
Hack & Slash Publishing has a much better resource on this subject (which also addresses empty rooms).
I'm not a huge fan of trapping my treasure. I much prefer to trap the means of accessing the treasure (i.e., the door to a vault). Most treasure you find in the dungeon will be guarded by monsters anyway, so I don't see the need to guard it with scything blades as well. I'm much more a fan of hiding my treasure, which is covered by Table V J:
You could roll on this table, but I prefer to just look at the description of items and furnishings in my room and use that as inspiration when determining how the treasure is hidden. Perhaps a bronze statuette in a library is concealed beneath an overturned bookshelf and a pile of books. A jeweled ring in the kitchen might be stashed in the fork drawer. A coffer containing a stash of platinum pieces in a gallery is secured within a wall safe behind a framed painting on the wall. Stuff like that.
Here's Table VII:
This is golden. We've got pits, pits with spikes, and garbage compactor pits, we've got shifting walls, oil and cinders, arrow traps and spear traps, poisonous gases, illusionary walls, chutes, Looney Tunes doors and stone blocks that fall on you and crush you, and
elevator rooms. My only real gripe with this table is that I have no idea how I'm supposed to interpret the 1-5 result. What, in the fiction, is this representing?
I also think it's worth noting that you may want to tailor your traps to your dungeon based on its history. If my dungeon was built by a magic-user, the traps should employ far more magic than this, for example. A dungeon built by dwarves should include more stonework tricks and traps. If you're stuck, though, this is not a bad place to start.
The 1-5 result directs us to Table II, but the 17 result directs us to Table VII A, so let's start there:
We've got gas that blinds you for up to an hour (!), gas that makes you run away, gas that puts you to sleep for up to 2 hours (!!), gas that makes you stronger (?), gas that forces you to return to the surface (??), and gas that immediately kills you (!!!). The most puzzling of these is the gas that makes you sick in a nonspecific way that somehow forces you to leave the dungeon. I don't know what that's about.
35% of gases are benign, and the next most likely result is actually to empower the party's fighters. The players might be lulled into charging headlong into any gases they see, only to have a 5% chance to instantly die unless a saving throw is made. Funny. I'm sure you could have lots of fun coming up with your own gases - a
stinking cloud that causes choking and retching, a
death fog that kills only the party's 0th level hirelings and dogs, a flammable gas that explodes if any open flames are brought into it, etc.
So we know how big our chamber or room is, how many exits there are and where they're located, and what's in the room. Where do we go from here? Table II:
Okay, ignore the "Location of Door" column, because we already know where our doors are. This part is confusing. For now, let's look at "Space Beyond Door Is".
A door can lead to a parallel passage (I think what is meant by this is a "T" intersection, although I suppose it could mean the door opens onto two passages straight ahead which run parallel to each other, though the "30' in both directions" footnote makes me think it is the former) or to one of those pesky 10' x 10' rooms, a passage that goes straight, 45 degrees ahead or behind (the ones that go behind are a bit annoying as they tend to run into previously mapped areas often), or to a room or chamber. Note that doors lead to rooms more often than chambers.
We're also meant to check the width of passages on Table III A. Before we go down that route, let's look at Table I, because the first footnote refers to it, and it makes this table make a bit more sense.
This table is badly named. This should be called, like, "Passages". It is named "Periodic Check" because - I think - you are meant to roll on it periodically as you're mapping a passage. Based on results 6-10, 11-13, and 19, it seems the default length of a section of passage is 30'. Remember that rooms have doors and chambers have passages. Based on result 14-16, it seems that exits from a chamber always lead to 30' passages, at which time you start rolling on this table to determine where those passages lead. You would do the same thing if, when rolling on Table II to determine what's beyond a door, you get one of the passage results.
You can see that result 3-5 yields a door in a passage. This is when you roll on Table II "Location of Door", which makes the first footnote on that table make a lot more sense. If the door in the passage is straight ahead, then the passage simply leads to that door. If it is to the left or right, then you roll again on Table I (placing any other doors that are rolled) until you roll something other than a door (or until a door is determined to be straight ahead, I suppose), in which case you ignore that result, and the passage simply continues for 30'.
Not confusing at all, right?
Back to Table I. In addition to leading to doors, passages can continue straight, side passages can branch off of them, they can turn, or they can lead to chambers, stairs, or dead ends (some of which have secret doors - I assume it is a 25% chance each for left, right, and ahead, based on the Table V D footnote). Passages can also contain tricks, traps, and wandering monsters. I like this a lot because it means you'll have to actually key your passages.
When I'm rolling up a dungeon ahead of time (which again, I recommend you do), I treat the "wandering monster" result instead as a "monster sentry". You can see in the example dungeon I shared near the top of this post that the bottom left corner of the map contains four (!) chambers or rooms with monsters and treasure, connected by several passages, two of which have monsters in the middle of them.
Perhaps this section of the dungeon is controlled by a faction of goblins, and the monsters in the passages are goblin sentries, guarding the passages against incursions. This allows monsters to actually control their territory in the dungeon, not just sit in their chambers or rooms waiting to be killed. I like it a lot.
Table I points us towards Tables III, IV, and VI. Here is Table III:
I love this. The "T"s, the "Y"s, the four-way intersections, and the "X"s...this is true Gygaxian zany dungeon madness. Again, this is very much generating an
infinite dungeon. A side passage is already yielding two passages, but there's also a 20% chance that you end up with three new passages to map, and a 5% chance you end up with four (if you roll a 20 and the existing passage is horizontal or vertical). It's very silly, but I like it.
Table III A determines passage width:
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I've been mapping my dungeons with passages represented by a single, clean line, which for my purposes is a 10' passage. I don't really want to draw out the dungeon in this level of detail. The 5' passage is also annoying to draw for the same reason that a 10' x 10' room is. That being said, I love the "Special Passage" table, Table III B:
A 50' wide passage with columns and an upper gallery, and streams, rivers, and 200' deep chasms that bisect passageways! Streams, rivers, and chasms might be bridged or serve as obstacles. You might be able to leap across the chasm. There might be a boat you can use to cross the river. Perhaps there is some sort of dungeon ferryman? A troll that charges a toll to ferry you across one at a time, only to ambush the lone member of the party on the other side? This is sweet. More galleries, rivers, and chasms in dungeons!
Here is Table IV, of which I don't have much to say:
Note that you have to check the width of the passage again whenever the passage turns, but you do not check the width of side passages, for some reason.
And finally, Table VI:
Stairs can go down one to three levels, and there is a percentage chance that a door will close behind the party, trapping them in the lower level of the dungeon for the day. That's really scary! Stairs can also go up (but only ever one level for some reason). They can lead to dead ends, which sometimes contain chutes which go down. Stairs can instead be chimneys which go up or down, or trap doors to lower levels (I assume that the difference between a chute and a trap door is simply whether the characters are aware of its presence). Stairs can go up one level and then down two. It's very silly, and again you might want to have stairs only go up if you're trying to keep your dungeon a reasonable size.
The footnote to this table mentions solo play, so let's jump to the end of Appendix A:
"For special areas you can have a friend or correspondent send you sealed information." Okay, I kind of want to try this!
Bonus round:
Caves and caverns are large, mammoth even! They can contain pools or lakes. Here the 40% chance of there being no pool on Table VIII A makes a lot more sense - remember when I said it would eventually? Lakes in mammoth caverns are awesome:
Like pools, lakes can contain monsters. Also like pools, they can be enchanted, but enchanted
lakes lead to other dimensions or special temples and are very often guarded by monsters. Man, the lower level of Quasqueton would be so much cooler with an enchanted lake (the huge cavern with all the bats would be a good candidate, and I'm kicking myself now for not adding that in).
That's it for Appendix A. I've really come around on this one. It is horribly presented, and it's taken me years of puzzling to figure it out, but I do think it creates some interesting stuff if you're willing to embrace the wackiness of it. Like many parts of AD&D, such as its domain game, you can take or leave what you like. Use a different stocking table, come up with your own tricks and traps, standardize the size and shapes of rooms, whatever. Remember that discretion must prevail at all times.
