When I refer to alternatives it's probably important to establish what I consider the baseline and formal norm of this mechanic.

Mainly it's presentation in BECMI and 1991s rules cyclopedia. 10 minute dungeon turns, rolling for events, encounters, traps, torches, marching order, 120' movement rate, etc etc.

But I was wondering how many variants from this baseline existed and work well?

I know of only two: The first and the one I like a lot is the Depth-Crawl, which is what was used in Gardens of Ynn and the Stygian Library. this mechanic works well if you are traveling or moving through a hypothetically endless or functionally endless dungeon.

The Other is the hexflower, which I've seen used a couple times in zines. it never really clicked for me as a method of travel in a dungeon, at least compared to the standard.

Ok, after finding and reading about depth crawl technique, heres my thoughts.

Depthcrawl and Hexflower are mechanically similar, to similar ends.  Just managed differently.
Both are basically random generators.  Hexflowers have 'paths' or 'circuits' built in(see below).

I did not find any depthcrawl tables to work from, but it looks to me like locations in DC can become disjointed, whereas a created hexflower can make locations that logically fit together.

e.g random table for DC:  in DC you can get to anyroom from anyroom, as its a simple random 1d6
1 living room
2 kitchen
3 dining room
4 bathroom
5 garage
6 bedroom

whereas a hexflower can bake in the relationships, you can only get to the kitchen, garage and bedroom from the living room.  and you can only get to the bathroom from the bedroom.  that kind of thing.  this is what hexflowers were designed for.

in hindthought, one could build DC tables to do the same thing, but I wonder about how well it keeps going over several layers of complexity.


Interesting question.

Why would you go total random dungeon, over say simply creating a 5-9 room/location one shot?  then string the one shots together into a cohesive narrative over several sessions ?  This leads the players to help you plan out the overall story (i.e you get ideas from what your players do and say)

Quote from: orbitalair on July 05, 2024, 02:44:46 PMInteresting question.

Why would you go total random dungeon, over say simply creating a 5-9 room/location one shot?  then string the one shots together into a cohesive narrative over several sessions ?  This leads the players to help you plan out the overall story (i.e you get ideas from what your players do and say)

Not that you asked me, but I could see going totally random for the first session, then from there let things flow from gameplay.

Heart: The City Beneath has a living dungeon/mythic underworld that always changes when you go into it.

"Tier 1" is suppose to be pretty stable but things are meant to get weirder and less predictable the deeper you go. I'm not certain I have my head wrapped around how it is meant to be run at the table yet.

It seems a bit more like hexcrawling with some shuffling of that exploration to me.