What I put out last week was perfectly playable. In fact, I've gotten some good reviews and a lot of great feedback from people on it. But, it is far from something I'm satisfied with. Since it's initial release I've created an alphabetical index and a table of contents.
Dungeon Alchemist by Briganti SV is a tool I have been watching since I first saw a Kickstarter for it a little over a year ago. It is a map drawing tool designed specifically for TTRPG mapping.
When I saw it was in early access on Steam, I put it on my wish list. My younger brother, Level 0 Luke, pulled through for me, and it is a lot of fun to use.
Here is a map I have designed with my son's as a larger-scale example of what can be done with it:
Much of this map is animated with sparkling water, crackling electricity, and turning water wheels when actively I. The program works a lot like Dungeon Scrawl: You choose an overall room style, such as castle, village, desert settlement, or ruin, and a terrain type.
Random encounter and wandering monster tables are underused; not only from a mechanical standpoint, as thy have fallen out of favor in modern play and so their power to build tension has been lost, but from a world-building angle as well. A good encounter table is capable of providing hooks and lore by showing, not telling.
I want to provide an example from my daily blog for the Dungeon23 challenge: Into the Devouring Wilderness. This is a area that runs down the center of the hex crawl I am building,
I have started my Hex23 content a little ahead of 2023 to give myself some wiggle room later, and get the biggest, most complicated entries out of the way before the holidays.
You can catch all this cool new Deathtrap Lite content on my new secondary blog Into the Devouring Wilderness.
