I’ve heard a lot of rumblings about how cool the recently released DungeonMorph Dice are, but how many don’t know what to do with them exactly. Now, not having ever role-played before, let alone DM’d, I can’t speak to the versatility of them per se. However, I did have a thought for a dungeon I’d like to share that could be made with the dice.
The Den of the Living Statues
This dungeon can be placed anywhere you see fit and entered into any way you see fit. The basic concept behind it is:
- Random rooms with limited map persistence.
- A kill limit before exiting.
Map Generation
After entering the initial room, every time the group exits through one of the pathways on any empty side of a die, take an unused die and roll and place it there to continue the map. If no dice are left, take the die furthest away from the exit off the table and re-roll it to place at the new location.
Another idea, especially if you have the posters with the die faces printed on them, is to keep track of visited rooms and allow objects and descriptions to be persistent within them, should they be rolled again.
Monster Generation
Every room with an even number on the face contains living statues. They can be active or stationary depending on how tricky you want to be. (Or you can have various states depending on whether a 2, 4, or 6 is on the die face.) You may also decide a preset number of statues or roll to determine the amount on the fly.
Every room with an odd number on the face contains regular statues, and items of some sort. The items could be better/worse depending on the number on the die face.
If three or more consecutive rooms feature only items, the DM could add 1d6 living statues anyway in order to speed up gameplay.
Beating the Dungeon
I had two possible scenarios in mind:
- Beat 100 living statues. Simple enough – just stop randomizing the map and place an exit once 100 statues are defeated.
- Clear all living statue rooms. This can be trickier to do. It would likely involve the persistent room descriptions and objects mentioned above, and if the dice hate you and you’re missing a room, you could always throw in an item or device that would allow players to shift to a room of their choosing.
Using the Mapper
If you don’t have DungeonMorph Dice and want to try something similar with the mapper, you could do a similar plot and structure simply by printing out a map and cutting it into tiles to use in that manner, or even just generate a map on your laptop or tablet while playing and double-click to replace tiles as you change the map. The tiles aren’t numbered, but you can easily do a die roll or coin flip to detemine statues vs living statues, or even select two drastically different art styles to distinguish between the two (e.g. Brutus Motor and Dyson Logos (Who is back online! Yay!)).
I’m sure this method of play could be adapted to other stories and themes, so feel free to spin it into something your own.
