New announcements

I'm excited to announce a few things!
First: Our Dungeon Generator has arrived at version 1.0.  We've still got 40 different issues/features we want to work though but for the most part things work as intended and the generator accomplishes it's stated aims.
Second: Celti and Eric B. Smith have graciously hosted our project at the following sites:

• https://dungeon.celti.name/
• http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/#Dungeon

Third: We have a forum thread over at SJGames's forums where you can now provide feedback as well as the Github page, here or by pinging me (Zuljita#7010) over at Mook's Discord Server.

Fourth: We've been working away at testing our dungeons as we go and fixing things as we spot them.  Most recently, we've spotted some issues with wandering monster variability that needed fixing, we've added the option for a random travel time, and we've added biomes for survival during your trip to the dungeon.

Dungeon Generator Update

"Oh, that's interesting."
"Kovath, every time you say that it means something horrible has happened."
"Sure, but it's not horrible for us. Look here, this lot took an extended rest break."
"So... they're finding the Trigers restful, are they?"
"That wizard definitely didn't need that leg for napping. Or all that blood. Or his spleen."
"The wandering monster table is a success, then!"

We've got a bevy of new features now available in the master version of the generator and more to come that I just had to tell you about.  Our code wizards have worked hard to add the following new features:

1. Resolution adjustments.  The latest version lets you change the resolution to fit your VTT needs.  I suggest you generate a dungeon you are happy with, then adjust resolution.
2. Doors.  Our doors can now be trapped, stuck, locked or hidden, or all four.  Check room descriptions for detailed door descriptions as well.  Some doors will be stone, others simple wood, still others ironbound wood.  More to come on this in future updates.
3. Mana level and Sanctity level.  This happens both on a per dungeon and per room basis.  I've got players trudging around glumly in a low mana dungeon as we speak!
4. Wandering Monsters.  The generator now kicks out a table of wandering monsters based on the monsters already present in the dungeon.  It uses a percentile system for now, but we'll be re-jiggering it to do all d6 in the future.
5. Generosity.  I've felt for a while that generated treasure was a bit low, and each campaign can differ, so this is a tool to kick it up (or down) a notch. 
6. Travel time: this is a new feature we're still testing out, but I thought you guys would like to see what we're chewing on.  The assumption is all the dungeons near here have been looted before and that more remote dungeons have richer loot. I'll do a separate blog post discussing assumptions and adjustments soon.

We've still got more features coming up soon like quests, rumors, debris, spell lists and more! Don't remember where to get the latest version?  Check out our tutorial here!  What features would you still like to see that we haven't discussed yet?

Making the dungeon prettier

"Oh look. Another plain, featureless stone wall and plain, featureless stone floor with a plain, featureless stone ceiling. I absolutely love the way these dungeons look, Kovath. The constant sameness isn't at all boring or monotonous."

"I'm glad you lik-- wait, from your tone that was sarcasm. What's your problem now?"

"Well, can't we - I don't know - spruce things up a little? A mosaic here, some rough-hewn stone there, maybe some cave paintings?"

"I am not letting you hang Zarlazz Junior's fingerpainting in our dungeon. This is procedural generation, not arts and crafts with Miss Nuggurath."

"Look, just because you don't have a family doesn't mean you should --"

"Okay, okay. We can make the dungeon 'prettier' if you insist."

 I've started doing a pretty simple thing to up my map game. It allows us to go from plain black and white maps to something a little more visually interesting.

Before

After

1. Generate a dungeon that looks good to you and click the Save as PNG button and save the resulting file somewhere you can find easily;
2. Open the file you created in step one in Gimp;
3. Select the Select by Color tool in the top right of the toolbox inside GIMP;
4. select any white space on the dungeon map;
5. press delete on your keyboard.  The map should now look like this:
   
6. Take the eraser tool and remove all the doors, portcullises and secret doors from the dungeon.  (One day you'll be able to skip this step once we get player maps implemented);
7. Click Filters then select Dungeon Map Maker in the dropdown;
8. In the new window that opens up, you'll have lots of options to play with.  For now, we'll keep it pretty simple.  If you intend to use these in a VTT like Maptool, Fantasy Grounds or Roll20, You'll want to skip adding a grid here, and let that software provide the hex grid;
9. Change the Template Color to Black by clicking on the white color swatch, then clicking and dragging anywhere in the color window up to the top left corner;
10. Change Template Colour Identifies to Walls;
11. Change Fill Floor With to Pattern - Select Below  (we could change the pattern, but the default one is neat for this tutorial);
12. Click OK;
13. After the filter does it's magic, click File then export and save it somewhere.  Isn't she lovely?

The resulting map is way prettier than anything the generator will kick out on it's own.  From there, you can add in a few objects and doors found online for something really awesome.  The techniques are useful even if you want to hand draw a black and white map then spice it up a bit.
Feel free to share map making tips in the comments!

An update on the generator front

"Kovath."
"Zarlazz?"
"What's this."
"What's what?"
"This inscription here above the dungeon entrance. 'cc7cf65'? Is that Elvish?"
"It's the version number."
"For the dungeon?"
"For the SYSTEM, Zarlazz."
"So what's new in this version of the system?"
"I don't know, nobody's writing the documentation."

If you haven't downloaded an updated copy of the dungeon generator in the last month or so, it's long past time to do so.  We've changed the name of the starting web page so I've updated the instructions accordingly.  I've also failed to let you guys know about some major feature upgrades since the first release, so let's take a moment to talk about those:

• We now have what we call "pick and mix" rooms.  There's a 50/50 chance for a room to be labeled as such.  At present, the generator picks a threat level for the room (nuisance, fodder, worthy, boss or epic) then decides if it'll be a mixed room.  When that happens, the generator picks a monster adds some then picks another monster that fits within the budget for the threat level.  If there's still room it'll pick another monster in the budget and so on.
• We've added per room lighting as well as overall dungeon lighting.
• We've improved the way the seeding works.  Going forward, if you use the same name and same options for a dungeon it'll give you the same monsters.  We can't do this for treasure due to the way it's generated.
• Much headway has been made on making the initial code we based this on more readable and usable for others who want to develop with it.
• For boss and epic level encounters, there will always be treasure.
• Monsters are no longer generated in rooms they don't fit in.  This doesn't prevent the dungeon from trying to put 8 monsters where only one fits.
• Added a "Tight" density to dungeon layout.

So what's up and coming for the generator?

• One of our near term goals is to add door descriptions to the room.  Eventually, we'd like to point out which rooms the doors lead to in order to remind GM's about who might be listening to nearby activity.
• Wandering Monster tables.  This is a big deal in terms of encouraging players to keep moving at a decent clip and to keep them from resting all day after every fight.

We have some long term aspirations to give you tips/hints/rumors to drop in town, and quests to accomplish inside the dungeon and other interesting stuff.  This project is still in beta, so if you want to report bugs, give ideas or just basic feedback (positive or negative), communicate in the comments here, on the github page or on the SJ Games forums.  

Dragon Hunting

"Look, Zarlazz, our first customers."
"A human, two dwarves, and three... half-ogres? Half-orcs?"
"Hard to tell, isn't it."
"The dragon's gonna be upset."
"Why?"
"Kovath, Have you ever tasted half... ogre, I'm pretty sure it's ogre..."
"Oh. Good point. Well, a disappointed dragon is hardly the worst possible result of this experiment."

One of the interesting hiccups I ran into with my dungeon generator was when it wanted to populate a room with 3 large dragons to create a "boss" encounter for 6 starting DFRPG characters.

I started doing math on it and discovered pretty quickly that the party we had would die pretty horribly to just one of these dragons.  DR:9 is a show stopper if your Knight goes tanky, your wizard goes controller, your swashbuckler specializes in eye stabbing and you brought a scout instead of a barbarian.  At first, I was convinced this was a bug in CER (and it may still well be one, I'm doing testing on that with my group) but that's beyond the scope of this post.

My group has been sitting down and discussing how a starting party could kill a large dragon with careful planning and a made to suit party.  Looks pretty possible if you focus on big damage numbers from something like a maul and go for the skull, or a great axe to the neck.  Seems like you only *need* one solid damage dealer, some good buffs and a sacrificial blocker/parryer  to make it viable.

What would you do to try to bring down a dragon?

Related: how much treasure do you think such a beastie should have?  Current CER math kicks out $5,000 total which seems very small.