I got an early access copy of this grace of the author and I liked what I saw. At time of writing it is now live for itchfunding during Zine Month '25.
Art by Roque Romero
This is a really neat toolkit for creating dungeons rapidly - I have always been a fan of dice drop methods but giving that and an alternative? *chefs kiss* I had no idea what to expect cracking the pdf but then as I scrolled through each section it was 'oh, thats a good idea', 'oh I like that' and each new section was a further 'ah-ha!' As soon as I finished my quick skim, I was keen to carve out time, chew through it and give the methods within it a shot.So what is all this stuff you get in the zine?
Six pages of dungeon generation methods
Six pages of Terrestrial Dungeon Themes
Six pages of Planar Dungeon Themes
Ten pages on The Campaign Dungeon
So what is in here chunk by chunk?
The first section on dungeon generation methods lays out two methods to create dungeons - small 5 or large 12 room dungeons - using a dice array or dice drop method - all with d6s.
Graphic by Tony Jaguar
The pips and where they are in the grid provide location, size, stocking, type and treasure. Those results, along with the handy Roguelike Megadungeon worksheet in the back cover, let you block out and then populate your dungeon.Both methods share the Monster Flavour workflow which gives you Behavior, Character, Abilities and Drives. I feel abilities is a little the odd one out because everything else is a universal qualifier that can work with any monster, NPC of whatever, so I might skip that one to keep it a universal socket into which I can drop whatever opposition I wish.
For larger dungeons - whether you need a few more rooms or a megadungeon, repeat as many times as required and combine.
The second section has six terrestrial themes for your dungeons, to be used with the "type" result on the dice while generating dungeons. Each of these theme pages gives you contents for empty rooms, monsters, traps, random "specials" and treasures all matched to the theme. Themes include Haunted Ruins, Goblin Warrens and Decomposition Kingdom with its myconids which would be easily dropped into any campaign and three more that are more high-magic and unusual - great fodder for wizards towers.
The third secton on planar dungeon themes has another six themes, these more outlandish although I could see the cloud giants Sky Fortress coming into play in a standard campaign. The other themes include astral, infernal and abyssal. Solid stuff - the Astral Plane being a particular favorite for me.
The last section is the campaign dungeon which is a bit of an odd name for 'all the stuff around' - your dungeons world, I guess? You use a similar dice-drop method to do a region map, factions for settlements, relationships and streets and buildings. All of these tend to help you create the fixed points - the sites, the people - and leave the connections between them to you.
I had a go bashing out a dungeon and it worked really well - you've got a little game of battleship posting in the rooms, then mini-tetris to expand them to the mandated sizes, then picking a theme and finding out what you've got to work with. Picking Uncanny Valley I ended up with something much bigger than I was expecting but with a lot of interesting bits and pieces to work with.
To wrap up - I like this a lot - it is just the right level of immediately understandable ready-to-use and creativity enhancing prompts. Instantly useful and inspiring in the sense of it made me want to get to dungeon creation immediately on opening the pdf.
This is a neat little toolbox - you can get yours here.
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