The Dungeon Crawler is an extensive GM’s helper. Sure you’ve heard that before. It can generate names, traps, encounters, magic items, intelligent magic items, rooms, room features, special rooms, caves, caverns, mazes, crypts, monsters, monsters with templates, NPCs, treasure, treasure containers, treasure hoards, taverns, city shops, you name it. It draws from a wealth of Open Gaming Content, plus a huge amount of unique material never seen anywhere before.

Big deal.

Well, without further ado, here’s the big whopping thing it can do that other programs can’t. I call it DYNAMIC GENERATION. You can generate each thing as part of a kind of narrative flow that allows you to have a varied and challenging dungeon crawl without a gamemaster. No, really.

You don’t have to use the program this way. But you CAN.

And the things you generate are created from huge interlocking tables that are so deep and so vast and so wide that you will see new things all the time.

Let’s say you’ve created a first-level party using the handy character builder, and you want to have a good ol’ fashioned dungeon crawl. Create a new party on the Party screen, and enter some key information. Next, generate a dungeon theme on the Theme screen (this tells whether the dungeon is a ruined laboratory or a cold fortress, etc. It also tells you who is in charge of the dungeon, what sorts of creatures are commonly found there and what the alignment of the area is.) In my example the theme is a HOT RUIN, perhaps an abandoned dwarf mine near a volcano.

Now you’re ready to play. Go to the explore screen and hit the “Explore Ahead” button. Perhaps a room is described. Draw it on your map. Perhaps it says that there are two features in the room. No monsters yet, good! Feature number one is the corpse of a basilisk, apparently bashed to death by something large. Hope you don’t meet what killed it anytime soon. Feature number two is a boiling steam vent that creates an obscuring fog and will cook your flesh if you don’t get out of here quick. Let’s check out the far door. It’s been jammed open by a spike. On the other side is a large SPECIAL room. You generate a special room and discover a flaming font, guarded by a chaos demon. (Chaos demon is a monster template that generates a new and unique monster). If you defeat the demon and if your Cleric can figure out the religious writings on the font, it will grant you a small magical boon – in this case fire resistance that lasts a few hours. That could be useful in this place!

And it goes on. Rooms, doors, traps, traps on doors, monsters, combat, combat events, critical hit special effects, fumbles, parley options, parley results, treasure, treasure containers, containers with traps, etc. You can find a pit that closes and locks with a corpse at the bottom -- a foolish villager who died from the fall – and if you make your search roll you’ll find a map in his pocket that leads to a special room on level two, and he also has a book called 'Golems' by Donyell (maybe a golem killed that basilisk?).

So, yeah, it generates book titles. And check out the ‘Insanity’ generator (it’s on the Explore screen under miscellaneous). Very cool. And believe me, this just scratches the surface.

What doesn’t it do? Well, it doesn’t roll dice for your characters. It doesn’t draw a map on the screen. It’s not a game program per se. It designed for paper-and-pencil gamers, both players and GMs. How a GM might use it is obvious. How do players use it? That’s the beauty of it. My friends and I have a way of using this thing that requires no GM, but it’s not “SOLO” play because we all gather together to do it. We each play our own character. We go into the dungeon the program generates and explore. Is it high-quality thespian role-playing? No way! It’s hack-and-slash and turn your character into the God of Dungeon Crawling. And it’s a lot of fun. (We also do more dramatic role-playing in the traditional fashion, by the way, and the Dungeon Crawler is a big part of that too).