Dungeon Flow is a free online tool for building, customizing, and refining random dungeons for your tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, and Tales of the Valiant. You plan your dungeon by creating a flowchart with lines connecting each area, then Dungeon Flow does the rest!
This post was sponsored by Dungeon Flow.
Dungeon Flow in Action
I love a 5-room dungeon. It’s a fantastic format for a bite-sized adventure that hits all of the things you love about a dungeon crawl without overstaying its welcome. Plus, when you’re short on prep time, planning 5 rooms is a lot easier than planning a sprawling dungeon complex. But what if we could make that prep even easier?
Let’s open up Dungeon Flow and see what we can do. I’ll start a new dungeon and customize it for my current party. We’re level 7 and in the middle of a forest, so I’ll set the level and environment accordingly. I’m also turning the difficulty up because my party loves a challenging fight. I only want 5 rooms, so I’ll turn the map size down to small and set the number of areas.
The initial random flowchart is pretty simple, with 4 rooms all interconnected, and room 5 only accessible from 1 room. There are a bunch of ways to arrange a 5-room dungeon, the simplest of which is a straight line, but I’m actually very happy with what we got. Straight line dungeons are boring!
As a recap of the 5-room dungeon structure:
- Entrance And Guardian
- Puzzle Or Roleplaying Challenge
- Trick or Setback
- Climax, Big Battle or Conflict
- Reward, Revelation, Plot Twist
To keep myself on track, I’ll rename each room in the dungeon to match. The rooms are already numbered, so I’ll line up the numbers with the 5-room dungeon room numbers. Room #5 is the one off by itself, which seems perfect to me.
Now let’s look a the rooms’ contents. Dungeon Flow gave me a random encounter, a one-line description for the room
Room 1 is perfect as-is. The random encounter is 8 bugbears of a few different flavors plus a random gnoll. Perfectly fine monsters that might guard the entrance to a dungeon. The room’s description is “The walls bear angular runes whose lines seem to shift in the light.” That feels nice and dungeon-y, so we’ll leave room 1 exactly as it is.
Room 2 is where I struggle as a DM because I’m not good at designing puzzles. We didn’t get a random encounter here, but the room’s description gives me some ideas: “The floor is treacherous with an oily residue.” I’ll make a simple movement puzzle! I’ll drop a little bit of treasure around the room, but make all of the surfaces slippery so that players will need to push themselves around and slide across the floor to reach the treasure. Players could definitely bypass this with flight or telekinesis, but they’ll miss out on the slip-and-slide puzzle game.
Room 3 is a great place for a trap, a misdirect of some kind, or an ambush. The room’s description is “The room echoes with sounds that seem to come from everywhere.” That gives me a very cool idea: the state of the room “echoes” what happens in room 4, which is the “big battle,” so the players will need to defeat the enemies in room 4 to open the secret door to room 5. If the players spend time investigating, I’ll drop hints that the echoing sounds come from the opposite site of the dungeon and let them make an Ability Check to figure it out.
Room 4 is the big battle. Dungeon Flow places the “boss fight” in room 5 (which makes sense; it is the final room, after all), so we can grab the random encounter from room 5 and transplant it here. Dungeon Flow gave me a Spy Master as the single boss monster, which I don’t think will work, so I decided to generate a fresh encounter.
The left panel has a “Generate Encounter” button which gives us a popup dialog to configure the encounter. I want High difficulty, Forest habitat, and “Single Boss” type encounter. I do want a treasure horde, but we’ll relocate that to room 5 after generating it.
The new encounter gave me a single Stone Golem, which seems perfect for a boss fight!
That just leaves room 5, which is the “pay off” at the end of the dungeon: treasure, plot, surprises, whatever. I’ll move our treasure horde from the Stone Golem fight into room 5, which is plenty, but I’m an absolute menace, so that’s not enough. Room 4 originally had a pit trap in it, so I’m going to put that into room 5 and put the treasure on top of it. But it’s going to hit the players right before a Long Rest, so there won’t be any lasting consequences unless someone dies, so I’ll drop the damage significantly.
And that’s it! Genering the dungeon was nearly instantaneous, a little bit ot customization to make things fit what I want, and I have a full session worth of adventure ready to go. The slowest part was writing all of this down.
You can see my 5-room dungeon live on Dungeon Flow! You could use it as-is, or copy and modify your own version.
Bringing it to the Table
With my dungeon planned, it’s time to turn it into an actual map. Switch to the “Map Preview” tab, then click the big blue “Generate Map” button. The first layout it generated didn’t quite fit what I wanted, but no problem! In the left panel, click “Regenerate Map” and you get a brand new layout.
I absolutely love that the slip-and-slide room ended up being mostly a circle.
My dungeon now mapped, it’s time to bring it to the game. Click “Export” in the header bar, and we get four options: PNG, PDF, Foundry VTT (currently free, but will soon be Pro only), and a DM Reference PDF.
The PNG export is sized for virtual tabletops like Roll20, which is perfect for virtual play. If you have a pro subscription, you can increase the DPI for print resolution. The PDF export is designed for you to print it, cut it into pieces, and stick them together to reassemble your map at the standard 1-inch grid size. The Foundry VTT version gives you a zip file that you import into Foundry, and it has dynamic lighting and walls all preconfigured for you.
The DM Reference PDF includes a small version of the map and text with the content of each room and corridor, which is perfect for running the game in person if you don’t want to keep Dungeon Flow open on a laptop.
Ready to Play!
Dungeon in hand, I’m now ready to play. Next time my GM needs a night off from our regular game, I’ll pull this out, and we have a game!
