The Dellorfano Protocols Dungeon #1 (Patreon)

About a month ago, Stacy Dellorfano of ConTessa (who also happens to be one of my very generous Patreon supporters) posted a set of random dungeon generation procedures that I went on to dub “The Dellorfano Protocols”.

1. Start somewhere on the page.

2. Roll two dice (d6 & d8 in this case)

3. Whichever die lands above is the vertical line length.

4. Whichever die lands below is the horizontal line length.

(Or figure out your own way of picking which is which).

5. Roll a die for each wall to see if there’s a door.

5a. If there’s no space for a door, don’t roll that wall.

5b. Create connections to other rooms when it makes sense.

5c. Always have a ‘no door on this wall’ option.

In my case for this one, I rolled a d6 & d8, took which ever die landed on the table above the other as the vertical, and the remaining die as the horizontal.

To prevent long, narrow rooms I doubled or rerolled 1s, 2s, and 3s unless it was towards the end of the page or somewhere where that made sense.

Then, I chose each wall of the room and rolled a d6. If the number was a 5 or a 6 there was no door. Any of the other numbers indicated the number of tiles the hallway should be.

I chose the width of the hallways and their placement on the walls on my own whim or if it made sense to connect to another room, I ignored the die roll and did that.

Where rooms overlapped, I made one room be ‘under’ the other and added appropriate stairs down.

For my first run with the Dellorfano ProtocolsI used a d6 and a d10, rerolling 1s and most 2s. 

I’m going to try a few other dice sets, but I think the optimal method would instead be to use a smaller die with a bonus (so a d4+1 instead of a d6), or something similar to prevent having to reroll.

I then went through and redrew the whole thing in pen, changing the shapes of some rooms, adding details, doors, stairs and so on.

Now we have a dungeon that appears to be natural caves and galleries at first that progresses into worked stone structures and then back into natural and flooded) structures down below. I also included a well in one of the upper chambers that reaches down into the flooded cave below.

There has been a great rush of other maps designed using the Dellorfano Protocols since she released them in June – and she’s linked to all of them that I’m aware of in her Swords & Wizardry collection on Google+ ( https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/I-MZW )

You can download high resolution copies of this map with and without grid (and released under a free-use commercial license) at the blog post at https://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/tuesday-map-the-dellorfano-protocols-map-1/