CAV
Caverns
Stone and Dark
Natural rock formations, tight passages, and the creatures that make their home in places sunlight has never reached.
Every room in the dungeon holds five cards: a center location that defines the space, and four side cards arranged to the north, south, east, and west. The location is what the room is — a ruined corridor, a flooded chamber, a moss-covered crypt. The side cards are what the room contains.
A side card can be almost anything the dungeon has prepared: an enemy, an item, a weapon, a piece of armour, a scroll, a container, a trap, a key, an event, or the stairwell down to a deeper level. When you enter a room for the first time, you see the location and the four possibilities arrayed around it. What any one of them is, you will only know when you move toward it.
Movement costs Action Points. Each adjacent slot is one step. Before you can strike a melee target, you must close the distance to it — the dungeon tracks how far you are from each card in the room, and that distance matters to both combat and spell range.
Doors can sometimes be forced. Some openings require a key before they will yield. Some containers set off a trap the moment you try to see what is inside. The dungeon's hostility is often passive, built into the structure rather than expressed through an active guard.
Each dungeon is born with a theme. The theme biases which enemies appear, which locations fill the rooms, how large the map tends to grow, and what the dungeon feels like to walk through. No two themes produce the same kind of danger.
Natural rock formations, tight passages, and the creatures that make their home in places sunlight has never reached.
Flooded rooms, soft earth, and the slow rot of things half-submerged. Movement is harder and the risk of cold is real.
Stone tombs, burial alcoves, and the long-dead who did not rest easily. Undead are common and the architecture is deliberate.
Long connecting passages between other spaces. Enemies that roam corridors can cross distances quickly and catch the unwary.
Larger spaces built for specific use — audiences, storage, ritual. The contents reflect their original purpose in corrupted form.
Shored tunnels, ore deposits, and the remnants of an industry that ended badly. A sub-dungeon accessed from within another dungeon.
Scrolls, stacked shelves, and the scholars or constructs left to guard them long after the scholars' masters ceased to exist.
Grander than the crypt — built for rulers, not servants. The defences are proportional to the honour once paid here.
Vertical architecture with tight landings and old magical experiments still running on the upper floors.
Vaults, strong-rooms, and the considerable hazards placed between the entrance and anything of value. The loot tends to justify the danger.
No dungeon is drawn by hand. A blind process carves the map, populates its rooms, and only then allows a final author's touch to impose structure on what chance produced.
Generation begins at the centre of an empty grid. A marker steps outward in random directions, carving a room wherever it lands, never revisiting a room it has already carved. It keeps walking until the dungeon reaches its target size. Higher dungeon levels push that target larger. The result is always connected — every carved room can be reached — but the shape is never predictable.
Every card that can appear in a dungeon belongs to one or more decks: main dungeon, regional area, alternate variant, mine or chasm, laboratory. A card drawn from the wrong deck will not appear in the wrong environment. The theme further narrows the draw — a crypt biases toward certain location types and certain enemies, and those filters apply to both sides of the room.
Once the random walk has carried the map far enough from the entrance, hand-authored sections can be laid over the procedural result. A preset can force specific rooms into specific positions — a boss chamber, a particular puzzle, a lore location — grafting intentional design onto a procedurally shaped foundation. The dungeon remains surprising; the designer merely ensures certain things are possible within it.
After the dungeon map is carved, a second pass places locks and their matching keys. Locks come in four tiers of difficulty. The most demanding locks guard the deepest or most valuable rooms; the simplest lock might secure only a minor side chamber.
Each lock's matching skeleton key is placed earlier in the dungeon — never behind the lock it opens. The result is that deeper progress always requires decisions made in shallower ground. A seeker who clears every room before descending will have collected whatever keys exist. A seeker who rushes may find a locked door and no recollection of where the key might have been left behind.
Main dungeons place their exit in a carved room — a stairwell or similar passage that leads to the next level. The exit is always reachable; it is the point the dungeon is built around, however buried it becomes in the procedural map.
Sub-dungeons — mines, chasms, and laboratories — operate differently. They are smaller, branching spaces accessed from within a main dungeon. They have no exit of their own. To leave, a seeker must find their way back to the entrance they came through. Sub-dungeons tend toward specific resources (ore from mines, arcane discoveries from laboratories) at the price of a more disorienting, exit-less structure.
After generation and population, the dungeon undergoes a final transformation pass. This is where the environment gains texture — flooding, the spread of ruin, the stains of whatever lived here before the seeker arrived.
Rivers and swamps have a chance to flood during this pass. Flood severity determines how many rooms are affected and how deeply. A mildly flooded room is cold and uncomfortable; a heavily flooded one may be dangerous to stand in. Flood water can spill from a flooded room into its neighbours, spreading the hazard outward from the source.
Enemies that were placed in rooms that became submerged during flooding do not simply survive in water. The process that drowned them transforms them — they emerge as something undead. The dungeon's population is therefore not fixed at generation; the post-processing pass can change the nature of what waits in certain rooms.
Dirt is applied to rooms and items as part of post-processing. A dungeon that has been sealed for generations will show it — walls streaked, items coated, the floors bearing evidence of whatever inhabited the space. This is aesthetic and mechanical: stained rooms affect comfort, and certain enemies that track by scent may be drawn toward heavily contaminated areas.