Tome and A Novel Dungeon

 Tome

In February of 2021 I entered my second game jam.  The theme was to make something RPG related that fit on a bookmark.  To help justify the bookmark theme, I decided to incorporate the book mechanically.  Instead of rolling dice, you would flip to a random page and count how many letters are in the first word.  I go more into my thought process in this devlog.

Embarrassingly it's been over a year and a half and I still haven't run my own game.  I was expecting to see my friends a lot once we all got vaccinated for COVID, but it's been a struggle to organize anything IRL.  People used work from home as an opportunity to move cities and everyone else got into new routines.  I've run one session of Cairn and a handful of The Black Hack, once I get around to actually play-testing Tome I will report back.

A Novel Dungeon 

If you right-click and “Open Image in New Tab” it should be higher resolution and a bit more readable:

Yesterday I came across A Novel Dungeon by Serial Prizes in my itch.io feed.  It uses a book title to generate a dungeon map. Tome and A Novel Dungeon are not affiliated but I thought I’d give it a shout-out since they are of a similar vein.

I’m not sure how conducive Tome is to a dungeon-crawl, but I wanted to try out the process and made this map from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Instead of just the title I included the author’s name in the room generation.

Here’s the first draft as I followed the process: