Solo Dungeon Delving - part 2

Game materials

Part 2.

Durik comes to a ramp leading down. At the bottom of the ramp he comes upon the goblin leader and 6 of his minions. The space is restricted, so only 2 goblins can attack at any given time. The leader stays in the back and tries to direct the minions (give them +1 to hit).

Durik attacks and strikes down 2 of the minions. Two others close in and one gets a hit on Durik. Durik strikes back and kills another. The remaining 3 minions turn and run. The goblin leader steps up and attacks Durik, causing 2 hits. Durik gets one hit on the leader. The leader hits back for one more hit, bringing Durik to zero hit points. Durik manages to kill the leader and then passes out.

Sometime later...

Durik revives enough to bind his wounds. After a brief rest he searches the bodies and the chamber and finds a healing potion, 20 gold pieces, 2 anklets worth about 150 gold pieces all told, and a toe ring worth 500 gold pieces! He drinks the healing potion and heals 1 more hit point, bringing his total hit points up to 4 (maximum is 5).

Feeling much better he continues on, but soon encounters a collapsed passage. So he turns around and searches the chamber where he defeated the goblin leader. Does he find a side passage or other exit? No.

He backtracks further to the chamber where he encountered the goblin shaman. Are there other exits here? Yes, north and south. He tries the north passage, but it's not long before he finds a very deep pit blocking any further progress. Turning around once more Durik heads back through the chamber and on to the southern exit. As he enters the last chamber it rapidly becomes extremely cold. He reckons, by the speed at which the cold comes on that it's some sort of magic at work. Not seeing anything in the chamber from his vantage point at the entrance and not finding any other passageways, chambers or other parts to the cave system he decides it's time to depart. So he heads back to his base to count up his treasure, deliver recovered items, and rest up for his next adventure.

Durik's sketch map

Map as drawn out later

Dungeon Geomorphs

One of the RPG rulessets I've been looking at is "Old School Hack". I love the simplicity of these rules, and the great graphic design of them. You can find a free download for them at http://www.oldschoolhack.net/ or another version at http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/old-school-hack-the-fictive-way
At first glance I thought they might not be suitable for solo play, but the more I look at them I think they can still work. The "awesome point" economy might need some judgement calls, and may be possible to make a little more objective assuming I get going on playing the game. I've been collecting a bunch of the monsters from the few available sources into my own sort of monster folio, for my own use. I will likely do some tweaking and hopefully add more as I go.

I have also been working on a set of cards to randomize encounters and treasures, for dungeon crawls to start with. I admit I am enamored of cards, because they are easy to customize from game to game, add new stuff, drop stuff, etc. as the game evolves. For encounters I have the main encounter cards, which include monsters, some traps, cards with minor stuff or nothing of consequence, etc. In addition, I have a set of cards to modify or add to Encounters. These are cards that do things like add or subtract from the monsters, have one time events, reinforcements for the monsters, and other sort of temporary or timely things happening. Again, some of the cards do nothing or only add color, without affecting game play. I also have a set of treasure cards, with the usual stuff, from a few coins to jewels and minor magic items, as well as nothing at all or mundane items (some, like a bag of marbles - could be useful, but isn't going to bring in much money; others are really not likely to be of much use, but who knows.).

I have also been working on some dungeon geomorphs. The pictures below show some of the ones I've drawn so far. I also have some larger rooms of various shapes. I will find a way to randomize these (more cards?), as well as where doors are, what type (open doorway, open door, closed door, jammed open or closed, locked, etc.), and "arena" types for the parts of the rooms and hallways, based on the OSH arena types.

Here are some of the elements, all based on 5 by 5 squares so they can fit together well. The inside walls are all squared off, but they could be drawn as rough irregular cavern walls as well. That's just aesthetics and doesn't really have any effect in OSH.

And here is an example map. This shows how pieces can be linked together, with openings closed off as needed. Everything that is gray is solid, impassible.

Using the same 5 by 5 basic building block you could also include special pre-designed rooms/halls/areas. Probably as "one offs". I think that could be a way to include rooms from published adventures/dungeons as additional special random places.

In practice, other than the entry room, I only used rooms with openings on all of the exposed centers of each 5 by 5 square and closed some off as I went. You can see where I covered the ones that aren't open. I just need to work out how to randomize which are open and which aren't. As I type this I realize, that could be as simple as rolling for each opening that doesn't match up with an existing opening in any adjacent rooms or hallways, with something like 50/50 chance of it being open or not.

Test Map

Following on from my previous post I tried out the random mapping just to see what I might come up with. I've tried both having the rivers follow the hex edges and flow through the middle. This example is one with them following the edges. I'll post an example of the other type once I get it cleaned up. Since I didn't have any paper with large hexes handy when I did the tests I just drew some really rough "hexes" (and a few pentagons and other shapes) on paper with pencil, scanned the result later when I had access to my scanner, and then cleaned it all up in a drawing program.