2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary - Day Twenty-Two

Celebrating 2020 - The Year of Blackmoor - 50th Anniversary!

Continuing with Part Five of our look at Running Castle Blackmoor over at The Alexandrian Blog. Today we will look at Part 7 of that series "Restocking the Dungeon."

Part 7: Restocking the Dungeon

He introduces the topic this way:

The creative and evolving process of restocking a megadungeon is something I discuss at length in (Re-)Running the Megadungeon. I’m not going to rehash that material here, and if you’re unfamiliar with that earlier essay you might want to take a few minutes to peruse it.

A large part of the gist of this side article and others is that you should employ standard non-linear dungeon design. I say standard because until I first got online, I did not know anyone did it any other way. The old school dungeon has multiple ways of getting to the various parts of dungeons, multiple entrances and exits, stairways, slides, portals and dozens of other ways (many of them secret or hidden) to enter or exit each level of a dungeon or area of a level. 

Back to restocking the Dungeon. He says that he see restocking a dungeon as a mix of art and science. You want to look at the context of events and the evolution of the dungeon should reflect ongoing events. Then he goes on to say:

With that being said, I often find it rewarding to incorporate random procedural content generation. It can prompt me to pursue unusual creative directions and force me out of my comfort zone. It can also “force” me to put in the work when it can sometimes be easier to default to “nothing happens”.

In restocking the Castle Blackmoor Dungeons he was looking for an alternative to the standard ways he normally does it saying:

As far as I know, however, Arneson never explained his restocking procedures. (If he even had a formal procedure.) So there’s nothing explicit for us to base our restocking techniques on. What we can do, however, is look at how a restocking procedure could be created to capitalize on the tools provided by the Arnesonian procedures we’re using.

He goes into a description of three  approaches that he developed that he calls:

EMPTY ROOM METHOD

GLENDOWER TEMPLATE METHOD

QUADRANT CHECKS

He says in part:

Quadrants, however, give you a simple one-size-fits-all approach that can be quickly slapped down onto any level of the dungeon.

You’ll still want to use common sense, of course: In the map above, for example, you can see how I’ve tweaked the borders of each quadrant on Level 1 to follow natural divisions in the dungeon corridors.

He is referring to a map image posted at the beginning of the post.

He closes by saying that with playtesting you may want to tweak the odds he has listed here and makes a couple of suggestions.

Tomorrow we will look at the Topic of Special Interest Experience.