Last month, I wrote an article about Mapping as You Go showing off one technique I use for maps in my game.

This time, I’ll present another map I made last week for their next adventure. I had a situation where the characters encountered a misbehaving magical artifact. It was a small cube that could be used to summon a wizard’s laboratory that one could enter. Unfortunately, the thing started spawning random monsters instead, and now the characters have to enter it to shut it down.

To me, that meant that the Random Dungeon generator was a perfect fit. It gives a perfect starting point for a dungeon inside a magical artifact. I could focus more on the content of the dungeon, and not spending too much time deliberating the layout.

Personally, I am the kind of mapper who prefer to map out my dungeons based on their original design and purpose, and then I “move in” whomever have taken over the old structure (or maybe the creators still control it), so I don’t use the random dungeon all that much. But now, for a dungeon inside a flawed magical artifact, the random dungeon is a perfect fit, and can save quite a bit of initial work.

Note that for the random dungeon commands below, if things appear do be missing, or simply doesn’t look right, download and install the latest version of the Random Dungeon command from your registered user pages. It is in the downloads section, in the CC3+ group.

To start off a random dungeon, we should start of using the “Annual John Roberts” dungeon style, as this style is both available for all CC3+ users even if you only own the base product (Make sure your version of CC3+ is up to date, v 3.98 as of this writing) and it is correctly set up for the use with the random dungeon command. I wanted a somewhat large dungeon, about 30 rooms), so I went with a map size of 500 by 500 feet. Be aware that while the random dungeon generator generates the dungeon itself, you still need to decorate the rooms, and 30 rooms takes quite a while to decorate, especially if you want to do them in a high detail level. Just figuring out what to put in each room can be a hard, so unless you have a specific plan in mind that requires this large a dungeon, you probably want something smaller. Big dungeons quickly gets boring to play if you don’t have a good plan for them.

To start creating your random dungeon, just pick Random Dungeon from the Dungeon menu, and you should see the settings dialog. Most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but there is one setting that is worth paying special attention to, and that is the grid spacing setting. This setting controls the “units” of your dungeon. If this is set to 10, it means that every corridor will be 10 feet wide (3 meters), and the room sizes above are specified in multiples of 10. However, while 10 feet wide corridors may make combat more open on a battle map, I find that it feels quite unrealistic for most dungeons. 10′ is after all quite wide, wide enough to drive a SUV down the corridor, and still have space for a human to get past it on the side; who builds underground corridors this large? Maybe it could have been ok for my random dungeon, given its obvious magical nature, it will turn out pretty crazy after all, but still, I did go for 5′ here. I did want the rooms to be able to be somewhat large, and keeping in mind that the room sizes are now set in 5′ blocks, I ended up with this setting. If you don’t like the exact layout, just try hitting the random button next to the seed until you are happy (the preview updates automatically when you randomize the seed, but use the Preview button to update the preview if you changed any of the other values.), then hit OK to add the dungeon to the map.

Once you have added the layout to the map, you should turn on effects to see it properly. The image to the right shows a small cutout section of the dungeon to see what to expect. It comes ready with rooms and connecting corridors and doors, but it is now time for you to put your personal touch on it and furnish it as needed for your campaign.

For my dungeon, I decided to go for an approach where very room is a challenge. The room needs to be figured out or defeated before the characters can move on to the next room. This gave me the ability to add quite a lot of weird, but fun elements to the dungeon.  The reason I made the rooms quite large is to give the inevitable combat that will happen in many of the rooms some space to flow, instead of a locked in tight space.

No, furnishing all those big rooms in high detail would have been a pain, so I decided to keep the map itself relatively simple, and convey a lot of the flavor of the room with descriptions instead, and focus on the furnishing that is important for the functionality of the room. For example, the room shown here is the entry room, a room designed to give the visitor a calm start and a false sense of security.

Now, filling out the rest of the rooms is simple enough, but there is one more issue I quickly faced with this approach. No drawing style will ever be complete, in that it will contain every single symbol you can ever imagine needing. But, we also have a lot of specialized styles, like the ancient tombs style that handle Egyptian style tombs, and Winter Trail had handles snow-covered scenes and Creepy Crypts that focuses on graves and crypts and all that fun stuff, so let us see how we can draw on these resources from all the other styles you may have at your disposal.

Now, because these are different styles by different artists, symbols doesn’t always fit neatly together, but I quickly realized that in this particular dungeon, each room could be treated almost like it’s won map. Some styles work perfectly fine with others, but other combinations look a bit off. But as long as an entire room is made from a single style, then everything in the room is nice and coherent, and players will mostly focus on one room at a time.

Now, this means I had to get the resources from those styles into my current map, but that is rather simple. To import the background fills of another style into your current map, simply go to Tools -> Import bitmap fill styles. Browse to the right folder, most styles will have a subfolder under @bitmaps\tiles\dungeon for this, for example, the Creepy Crypts style keep it’s files in @Bitmaps\Tiles\Dungeon\2022 Creepy Crypts. (Remember that @ refers to your CC3+ data directory, by default C:\ProgramData\Profantasy\CC3Plus unless you changed it during the install, but CC3+ is completely happy with you keeping that @-sign in the box). Ensure that the make path is set to relative to cc3 path, that create other resolutions is NOT checked (If you at a later point import your own files that you have made yourself or downloaded you may want to check this box, but it should never be checked when importing existing ProFantasy artwork from another style into your map). Also check Scaled and set it to 40.

Once you hit ok, all fills from that folder will be added to your map as fill options. You can find them by clicking the Fill Style (FS) indicator on the status bar, and pick one of the newly imported fills from the list. Now, if you wish to use this fill as a floor in one of your rooms, simply change the current sheet to FLOORS, and use the Box command to simply draw a new floor over the existing one.

The symbols from the style is usually easily accessible by clicking the Open Symbol Catalog button at the top of the symbol catalog. Using this technique, I could easily make rooms like these

Hopefully this helps with some ideas on how to utilize the random dungeon feature in CC3+.

If you have questions regarding the content of this article, please use the ProFantasy forums. It can take a long time before comments on the blog gets noticed, especially for older articles. The forums on the other hand, I frequent daily.