Illustrator and game designer Rollin Kunz recently launched their first Kickstarter adventure for a product that GM and players alike may find rather useful. The product is The Dungenerator, “a deck of cards that randomly generates organic dungeons,” and thanks to it having already blasted past its $1,500 funding goal, is expected to begin shipping out by the end of this year or in early 2021.
The Dungenerator deck features “52 double-sided, poker-sized room cards with over 60 pieces of full-color, hand-inked art” all personally crafted by Rollinkunz. The deck also comes in a full-color digital version as a downloadable PDF. Five support tiers remain open as of this writing, ranging from $5 to $96, and all 13 stretch goals have been unlocked, including an option for nicer cardstock, 1” battle maps, digital token pack, and much more.
As Rollinkunz explains it in the Kickstarter description, The Dungenerator works in a couple of ways. One is by allowing GMs to lay down a random selection of cards to create an instant dungeon map on the fly. The other way is to use The Dungenerator’s “simple Dungeneration Algorithm." It works like this:
Find and place an Entrance Room card and shuffle the rest of the deck.
- Select a Room and attach Room cards to each open passage on it.
- Repeat step 2.
- If a Room card ever overlaps another, discard it and flip over the previous Room to its Dead End side.
- Use Secret Passages to add connections between different parts of the dungeon, if desired.
Both methods will net you “randomly-generated dungeons with a twistier, more organic feel” as opposed to blocky dungeon tiles. Rollinkunz has also committed to creating The Dungenerator Series Two, a whole new deck of dungeon-generation cards that they’ll get to work on immediately after this Kickstarter. And if that isn’t enough for you, your support can also earn you the Goblinfinite Goblin Generator, “capable of generating trillions of system-agnostic goblins!”
In case this is your first time hearing of and seeing Rollinkunz’s excellent art, and you’d like to see more, click over to their Instagram channel and feast your eyes. You can also follow their Twitter and Facebook channels, and join the Rollinkunz mailing list for quick updates on all their future products.
Source: The Dungenerator