Many of us old school D&D enthusiasts are likely to have come across the Random Dungeon Generator in the back of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide. I imagine slightly less will recall the Solo Dungeon Adventures article in The Strategic Review. If you've read my Solo D&D articles on this very blog then you might be familar with it. Might even have tried out the Random Dungeon Generator in your own Solo D&D games. It's a great system for both designing dungeons before hand for a group campaign or dungeon delving by yourself with pencil and graph paper. However, it can be a little confusing. Especially when rolling on Table II to determine the space beyond a door or Table III for determining side passages. One of my readers (Odin) was wanting some help with this. So in this article I will attempt to clear up any confusion.

Getting your Angles Right! - Gary Gygax's Random Dungeon Generator - An Old School D&D Tutorial

The basic problem is that two of the entries in Table II are very difficult to grasp:

• Passage 45 degrees ahead/behind
• Passage 45 degrees behind/ahead

Additionally, there are further confusing entries in Table III:

• Left 45 degrees ahead
• Right 45 degrees ahead
• Left 45 degrees behind
• Right 45 degrees behind

So how do we represent these entries on graph paper?

A helpful clue is to always turn you graph paper in the direction the character or party is facing. Left and right is then determined from this perspective, and if you imagine a 45 degree angle you might simply imagine a line drawn diagonally (either left or right). On graph paper you would just draw a diagonal line through the middle of a square from the either the bottom left corner to the top right or the bottom right to the top left to represent the 45 degree angle. This is only the first piece of the puzzle solved though.

The second piece of the puzzle regards the ahead/behind conundrum. A clue is given in the random dungeon generator in the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, which is essentially an expanded version of the one in Strategic Review. It states that "The direction will be appropriate to the existing circumstances, but use the direction before the slash in preference to the other." This basically means you try it one way and if it doesn't fit then you try it the other way.

But how do you represent a 45 degree angle that's ahead or behind on graph paper?

This is definitely the most confusing part, but a further clue is also given in AD&D DMG Table IV, which says "left 45 degrees behind (left 135 degrees) and right 45 degrees behind (right 135 degrees). So we can see there is a clear differentiation between a 45 degree angle and a 135 degree angle. If you look at a protractor they are represented at the same point on the left and right side, which is even more confusing! and for extra confusion, if you look at images on Google, 45 degree angles are usually represented on the right hand side and 135 degree's on the left. If you perform a Google image search you'll see exactly what I mean! So you might conclude that 135 degrees is a line diagonally left and 45 degrees is a line diagonally right. Nope! This is what I thought at first. It's handy to remember that 45 degrees is an acute angle and 135 degrees is an obtuse angle. If this doesn't mean anything to you think in terms of 45 degrees is narrower and 135 degrees wider. Bear with me!

In an attempt to solve this puzzle I tried to imagine representing the angles from the perspective of the character or party. I just couldn't seem to grasp the concept, I stewed on it for a while, but then it clicked! If you imagine you are standing up and somebody gives you an instruction to turn 45 degrees to the right, or 135 degrees to the right, suddenly it becomes obvious! Here is a diagram to show you what I mean:

One further complication with this is that sometimes you generate these 45 degree passages when determining what lies beyond a door. Quite often it feels as though it just doesn't work, but you can easily adapt the passage to compensate for doors and you can also move the doors so they are more to the right or left of the wall depending on where the passage is going to go.

I've done some examples on graph paper below to show you how it works in practice for both passages and rooms with doors.

The key things to remember are:

• Turn your graph paper so the character or party is facing towards the top of the page
• Ahead means the passage continues in front of the character or party
• Behind means the passage continues behind the character or party
• If left or right is not specified then this is entirely up to you, or simply work with what fits the map best

And that's pretty much it. Let me know in the comments what you think!

Be sure to check for more content. In the meantime:

• Follow me on Twitter @crawlersolo
• Check out my YouTube content at youtube.com/c/SoloDungeonCrawler

See you next session...

Support Me with a Donation

If you enjoy my content and find value in it and would like to send a small donation over to show your appreciation and help support this blog so it can continue to grow then please follow the link below to make a donation via PayPal.

https://paypal.me/tomdnd