A Dungeon Master’s Toy: How to Host a Dungeon

Caspule Review

How to Host a Dungeon is a very clever, dungeon building solo game where you follow the progression of a dungeon and its denizen through a series of ages.  Its more of a Sim than a game, but it is a very entertaining concept that leaves you with a side-view dungeon map and a full history ready for your next fantasy RPG campaign.

Well worth the 5$ it costs.

Full Review

Shortly after posting my last article  and reading through the comments (thank you all!), I remembered reading about a Dungeon creation game somewhere on the net.  I remembered it had the strange name of ‘How to Host a Dungeon’ so I looked it up, and found that it’s was indeed named ‘thus‘ and was authored by Tony Dowler.

Tony loves dungeons, he really does.  You can see it in his little self-published PDF “For the Love of the Dungeon‘” and in his list of links he posted at the end of the webpage for “How to…”

Nethack FTW Tony!  The greatest most misleadingly named Solo dungeon crawling game ever!

Anyway, after finding the website, I read on it  that you could use the game to help you prepare a complete side-view dungeon in the style of those found in the Mentzer edition of Basic D&D.  I thought that this could be a cool way of creating a side-view map for my Primal/Within campaign.

I downloaded the free rules of “How to Host a Dungeon” (and bought the full version for 5$) and I started to play with them.

It was last Friday in the morning.  Then, a few minutes later, my wife told me it was time to get the kids from school… it was 3h30 PM already!

Yup… I got caught in a nerd trap all right!

How to host a Dungeon is not a really a game.  There’s no key decisions to make and you can’t directly influence what happens.  It is more of a Dungeon Sim or even a toy than anything else.  Yet, I was sucked right in.

A rapid read through the rules shows you that you start with a single sheet of paper (the rules suggest using a pad of tracing paper, but it’s not obligatory) and you play out the life of the dungeon from the dawn of its creation to the end of what’s called ‘The Age of Tyranny’ when the dungeon’s last tyrant is vanquished (or conquers the world).

Primordial Age

This is one of the shortest part of the game.  You roll a few times off a primary table (with some side tables for caverns and rivers) and you build the premises of you dungeon.  Gold Veins, Primordial Beasts, Caverns filled with plague and Mithral lodes are a good sampling of what you can find in your dungeon.

The very clever mechanic of placing those elements on your side-view map of your future dungeon resides in placing the element you rolled exactly where your dice falls on your map (you reroll when the dice falls outside your dungeon).

Once this is done, you are ready to have your first civilization move in.

The Age of Civilization

If you play the basic free game, you get access to either the Dwarven or Dark Elf civilizations.  The full game also  features a Demon civilization.You place a certain number of colored tokens near the precious resources on your map  (you roll some if you have none) and these tokens represent your population and its loot.

Now the second clever concept of the game is that each token you add to your dungeon must have a room to fit it.  So you build such rooms (big enough to fit the tokens) whenever you are awarded more tokens.

This is where you have an influence on the game as the rules for drawing room are open to interpretation.  Once you know how the scripts work, you can influence the game’s progress by making specific decisions as to where to build the next barrack or Slave pit.

Each ‘turn’ of the age is divided in seasons.  Each seasons, the civilization goes through a script that explains how it grows, mines and build new dungeon structures.

The age reaches an end when some civilization-specific conditions occur or when a civilization discovers some of the Primordial elements of the dungeon that cause it to expire.

The Great Disaster

Something then occurs that affects the topology of your dungeon.  An Earthquake opens up various new tunnels or a Lava pushes a plume thought your dungeon and erupts as a Volcano on the surface.  Once again this is rolled on a chart.  Once this is done you go to the next phase.

This is the shortest part of the game.

The Age of Monsters

This is where the game becomes more complex and slows down noticeably.  At this point, you have a dungeon made out of the remnants of your vanished civilization with possible loot and descendants.

You start the age by establishing a surface kingdom (a castle and some farms in the part you left ‘above ground’ on your map).

Then you roll for a certain number of monsters to appear randomly in your dungeon.  You’ve got 5 categories of monsters (Delvers, Breeders, Alpha Predators and Wandering monsters).  Each represented by numerous iconic monsters of D&D and lend a lot of flavour to the game.

Once the monsters are placed, you go through turns (years) in which each element present in the dungeon  (Surface and each monsters group rolled) follow a script.  Monsters move out of their lair and extend their Zone of Control, grabbing long-lost loot and battling nearby monster groups.  The Surface kingdoms trains knights and send forays into the dungeon.  All combat is resolved with a single die-roll (with simple modifiers) and checking the results in a chart.

Things can get quite complex and your map may start looking like a Go-board.  While the rules are very well written, you can get easily confused.  Still the game seems robust enough and getting something wrong hardly ever breaks your dungeon. Still, things can get to a point where you lose enjoyment of the game to the bookeeping needed to maintain it.  The game actually says to move to the next age if things become to heavy to play out.

The age continues until a monster group accumulate a certain amount of loot.

This can be further complicated by rolling an adventuring party that moves in and cleans the whole dungeon of loot and monsters. When that happens, you are invited to start a new age of monsters.

When you do get the the point where a group of monsters accumulates a certain level of wealth, the Age of Monsters ends and the Age of Villany begins.

The Age of Villany

Please note that I have not yet made it to that point.

In this age, a single entity comes into the dungeon and tries to establishes a kingdom/base of operation for itself by taking over all the monsters and bringing new ones with itself.

The full game offers 4 villains:

• The Dungeon Master (builds an underground army to conquer the surface world)
• The Thought Lords (you know, those humanoids with squid-heads we’re not supposed to name in a commercial product not owned by Hasbro)
• The Liche King (spelled like that, Undead lord)
• The Alpha Villain (Big, Nasty and hungry.  Think Giant, Dragon or that thing with the eye rays)

Once again, turns are divided in phases where your villain builds up (adding new structures to your dungeon), fights the dungeon inhabitants and tries to establish a form of dominion.

During that time, the existing monsters continue to follow the rules of the Age of Monsters and Adventuring parties arrive every turn to try to loot the whole place and live to tell the tale.  The game ends when the villain accomplishes his goal, or when they get killed by adventurers.

Once you are done playing with the game, which usually lasts a few hours, you have a roughly drawn side-view of your dungeon.  If you want, you can clean it up and make it into the base of your new Megadungeon.  Tony even gives advice to turn your dungeon into a surface map and use it in your own RPGs.

As I said earlier, this is a simulator more than a game.  The influence you have on the game is to ignore dice rolls you dislike, pick items on tables instead of rolling them, and choosing how and where to draw each new elements of your dungeon.

Also the rules aren’t all that detailed.  This means that you’ll sometime have to decide how to go at it.  For example, I once had a Dark Elf colony grow large enough to come in contact with the Great City is spawned from.  I decided to fuse them together… (Causing an instant end of the age as the population reached the limit level set by the rules).

All in all, How to Host a Dungeon is a fascinating game/sim that really hooked me in.  It immersed me in the story of a dungeon and how it evolves in time.  I’m not sure how long it would maintain my interest as the elements are very similar from game to game.  Yet, I can definitively see how I could use it (or inspire myself from it) to create a high-level map and history of my current dungeon-based campaign.

For 5$, its a steal!