Building Micro-Dungeons, in 60 minutes or less.
Step 0: The Spark Table
Prepare a Spark Table. Ideally, you should use one you already have for the general setting, but if you don’t have one, making one isn’t at all hard (I have a quick’n’easy procedure for that); it doesn’t have to be big, a d6 table will suffice.
Step 1: The Dice Drop
Grab as many d6s as you want to have rooms in your micro-dungeon (I usually go for 6, to keep the adventure tight and focused) and drop them onto an appropriately sized piece of paper. Draw a room or a small-sized circle around each die, but connect them to form hallways just yet.
Step 2: The Room Type
The roll of each room’s die designates it’s Room Type.
1: Empty
- Can be used by the party to rest after a harsh encounter.
- Contains entryways/exits to the dungeon.
- A place to put environmental storytelling cues.
2: Secret
- Hallways leading to this room are hidden, and accessible only with investigation.
- Provides alternate pathways to skirt around harsh challenges.
- Random encounters here are especially risky.
3: Oddity
- A bizarre magical effect that does something unusual when interacted with.
- Can be exploited by clever players.
- If the players aren’t careful, it might retort against them.
4: Trick
- A trap, environmental hazard, or other presence that can drain resources.
- Its presence is always obvious, even if complete understanding isn’t immediate.
- Requires clever thinking to get past.
5: Lair
- Home of the “main monster(s)” of the dungeon.
- If the players haven’t encountered the “main monster” previously, it is here.
- If multiple lairs are present, the dungeon will present signs of their competition.
6: Treasure
- Contains the “main loot” of the dungeon.
- From here, the challenge becomes bringing the spoils to the surface.
- Monsters that aren’t dead yet are alerted.
Step 3: The Content
For each room, roll on the Spark Table from Step 0, and combine with the Room Type to find out the room’s contents. Here's where you get creative
- Step 3.5 (optional): If you want to add more content to the rooms or feel they are a bit empty, feel free to roll again on the Room Type table and get a “room subtype”, which indicates an extra feature or the room (although the first Room Type remains the “main thing”). Use the same Spark Table results you rolled for the Main Type to flesh out the Subtype. *
Step 4: Hallways
Draw the hallways connecting the rooms in a way that feels satisfying. (Don’t connect treasure rooms straight to the entrance, make looping and forking paths, etc.) *How to make a good dungeon layout is beyond the scope of this article; an excellent resource on the topic is Chapter 4 of the Designing Dungeons course.
Step 5: Encounter Table
Make a Wandering Encounter table. By this point, you probably have already added a few monsters and NPCs to your dungeon’s rooms: grab the ones you have already made and put them into a table of your preferred size - a d4 or d6 table will be more than enough for six rooms. Don’t be afraid to reuse a monster or NPC in multiple entries, as long as the situation is different.
Note: this procedure works best with a random encounter chance of 1-in-6 every time the players move rooms or loiter around.
Afterthoughts
Like anything involving Spark Tables (or any procedure meant to offer prompts and inspiration for content-writing) the raw results of the tables and the dice-drop are meant to be manipulated and twisted into something cohesive - at least, that's how I write adventures. In the sample dungeon written with this system, The Basement of Old Man Hamsy, you can see how the framework, with some authorial intent applied to it, can produce a story.