Adapting Luke Gearing's Hex Fill Procedure To Dungeons
A small adaptation on the big red dawg's work
For my money Luke Gearing (of Wolves Upon the Coast/Gradient Descent/Acid Death Fanatsy/Where The River Meets The Sea/The Isle/The Big Squirm fame) is one of the best TTRPG writers in the scene currently. I’m a particularly big fan of his hex fill procedure, by which one can quickly generate inspiration when stumped for a large number of hexes. A 1-3 chance of nothing is, IMO, incredibly important in providing pacing, spacing, and allowing PCs to get into their own kinds of trouble.
Not that this is particularly ground-breaking, but: you can very easily use this same procedure, with little tinkering, for filling dungeon rooms (looking at you, everybody still doing #dungeon23!).
Thusly, per dungeon room, roll a dice-six:
1-3 Nothing
4 Trap
5 Monster
6 Weird
Trap
I like to somewhat randomize the lethality/difficulty of traps. An extraneously-trapped minor treasure is, IMO, exceedingly funny - play with expectations, recall that a good dungeon has elements of slapstick, and that the game, much like life, is not fair.
1-3 Mundane Trap
4 Dangerous Trap
5 Mortal Trap
6 Fiendish Trap
Monster
A monster lairs here. Select/roll from the Encounter table (you wrote those already yes?) and place treasure appropriately.
Recall that “monster” does not specify as “hostile.” You use Reaction rolls, yes?
Weird
Roll a 2d6 to determine how Weird to get.
2 Architecture
3 Magic, controlled
4 Strange merchant
5 Strange ally
6 Strange behavior
7 Clue to nearby room
8 Magic, uncontrolled
9 Untrustworthy ally
10 Incongruous
11 Treasure
12 Roll twice and combine