Recursive D&D dungeon is a procedural dungeon-generation system

Tavis sez, "A mind-blowingly recursive poster that represents the AD&D rules for procedural dungeon generation as a flowchart which is drawn as a dungeon. From the The Mule Abides blog at NYC's intersection between role-playing games, the gallery art scene, and how Kickstarter can jam 'em together. Cory's linked the Mule before as HOWTO have a D&D party for 8-year-olds; also featured in this post is a nifty Kickstarter for the first publication from the Play-Generated Map and Documents Archive, similarly linked for Homemade D&D module, 1981."

Everything is Flowcharts (Thanks, Travis!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: d&d • happy mutants • poster • recursion • rpgs

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http://plagmada.org Tim H

A tiny correction: The link for “…also featured in this post is a nifty Kickstarter for the first publication from the Play-Generated Map and Documents Archive…” is incorrect. The first publication for PlaGMaDA is Everything is Dolphins which was already listed on Boing Boing a few weeks ago.

http://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/everything-is-dolphins-old-ho.html

The Kickstarter for that has about a day and a half left.

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And on the procedural poster, the designer might be donating his work materials to PlaGMaDA.org if and when the Kickstarter comes off…
http://www.facebook.com/tavis.allison Tavis Allison

Tim, sorry for losing track of how often you’ve been Boinged! All the cool kids are donating artifacts from the process of playing and making games to PlaGMaDA these days, I have some awesome pencils and roughs from Jeff Dee’s and Mark Allen’s work on the Dwimmermount project to get to you.
noggin

In the summer of ’82 and my friend Dwight and I were in college, taking our first programming class, FORTRAN ’77, and wrote a program based on the AD&D DM manual’s random dungeon generator. After creating a nearly two foot stack of punch cards, we submitted the deck using the remote card reader for the UNIVAC to crunch on. We were too embarrassed and scared to submit the cards directly to the computer operator, knowing this was going to cost a bit of money against the class CPU budget.

We corrected all our typos and finally got our huge printout on the super-wide green and white dot matrix paper, took the printout back to the punch card room, sat at a table, pulled out our dice and graph paper and began reading.

“You are in an empty 30 foot hallway”. We mapped this on our graph paper. ”The hallway turns left. You are in a 20 foot hallway.” More mapping. ”The hallway turns left. You are in a 10 foot hallway.” More mapping. ”The hallway turns left. You are in a 30 foot hallway.” Uh-oh. Argh! The original hallway did not show this intersection when we started! Despair! We went home and Dwight put the stack of cards in shoe boxes, storing it in his closet, still too vested just to throw it in the trash.

Some lessons you learn the hard way.