A Novel Dungeon by Jason Kenney is a role playing game published by Serial Prizes. A book is used to generate the dungeon and play through it.
The supplement is available as a 12 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover, two are blank and one the table of contents and front matter.
Build The Dungeon has rules for building the dungeon, using the title and author of the book, with the letters in them being used for the various dungeon pieces in a chart, with 26 pieces.
Create Your Hero has three classes, fighter, mage and thief, and they have Hit Points and Magic Points, with different abilities.
Casting Spells has spells that mages and thieves can cast, with an MP cost, name and effect.
Encounter Monsters has the chosen book opened to a random page with more than 50% text. The first letter of the last full word determines the monster, with a list given; monsters have varying HP.
Combat uses the first full line of text to resolve combat, with another table for results.
Loot again uses the last full word, with the remaining letters getting loot from a loot table; that could be quite a lot of loot, but characters can only carry ten items.
Armor increases protection and will eventually be made useless from damage taken.
Potions recover HP and MP.
Weapons have damage bonuses.
Traps and Treasure have a table for various rooms that have such, though they may be empty.
Example of Combat is what it says.
No Dice No Problem (0D0P) explains that this is the engine behind the game, generating random results from a book.
A Novel Dungeon in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and, though short, has enough sections that these would have been useful. The table of contents covers the major sections. Navigation is okay. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are a number of minor illustrations. Presentation is okay.
This is not an original idea for generating a dungeon from a book, though it is one that is fully developed into an entire system. Perhaps a downside is its length; it would be great if it could all be fitted on a bookmark. Not that this is a long game, per se; it would just be nice to have a game that creates dungeons from a book fit inside one. A Novel Dungeon can be found by clicking here.
Leave a Reply