There is a lot of art in this book but there are no artist credits. That's because all of the art is AI slop. Not only is the art obviously machine generated with all the weirdly flawed soullessness that is typical of such, but it feels selected at random. None of the art is evocative of the mood or themes of the book or connects to any of the content either. It's really quite tragic. Castle Oldskull was once one of my favorite OSR publishers and I used to purchase every release, but since he's gone all in on the AI stuff I can no longer support him.

update... I now have the hardback versions.... ABSOLUETLY AWSOME !!!! The books turned out to be extremely nice and i highly recomend !

Hi great job on this!! I love the old school feel to this product and I only found one typo. I love the random tables from the book! I think I will pick up the other books from ur works great job wish more of ur stuff was in print. Great product for old school dungeon creation.

This isn't a bad book, it's just not the book I was expecting. I was hoping for more discussion about how dungeon features create fun - how to vary narrow hallways and wide open spaces, when secrets (doors, traps) should be included and how to maximize player delight in the unexpected, how to design dungeons for particular types of enemies (undead, dragons, evil cults, etc.) - a guide for taking a dungeon concept and making it concrete against a set of goals. I was looking for advice on how to keep my dungeons short but impactful - how to select the right dungeon elements so that characters can get to the meat without having to chew through endless layers of fat.

Instead, there are many lists of randomized elements, with the apparent goal of creating a framework a DM can use to piece these randomized elements into a danger-filled megadungeon for the players to explore room-by-room over countless hours. The author admits towards the end of the book that, although "storytelling is in vogue", he wants to help folks run dungeon crawls instead. Perhaps I should have been able to intuit that from the book's title, but I wish the "thesis" of the book that is so clearly stated at the end had been included in the introduction instead.

That being said - the book was only $3, so it's hard to argue it's not worth the price. The book is filled with ideas that can be drawn from piecemeal to introduce flavor into a hand-crafted dungeon, or could provide ample on-the-fly inspiration for someone running a wide-open campaign focused solely on exploration and conquest.

I've been a gamer since the late 1970s, and a "table geek" for most of that time. As a result, I've developed a real appreciation for good, logical, well-written sets of tables for detailing anything and everything in the classic-style dungeons that I love. And if I had to pick my top three books of tables and game enhancements, this would unquestionably be one of them. Like most of the Wonderland Imprints products, even if you don't have a specific use for the exact things it's set up to create, you'll get endless inspiration from reading through them.

And if you read this while it's still on sale, grab it! I paid a lot more than 99 cents for my copy, and I don't regret if for a moment. For that matter, grab everything they sell. You'll thank yourself later. This is just plain good stuff.

This book brings every dungeon building technique together to show you how to make a mega dungeon down to room to room detail. You just have to get through all the random tables to get to the real techniques and theory of dungeon building.

I already had random room generators. I already knew how to create themes for my different dungeon zones. But this book showed me how to put it all together.

And it only costs a dollar!

Dungeon design guides are fairly common, but most of them dwell on minutae already covered in Dungeon Master's Guides. This product is especially useful because it ignores most of that stuff in favor of things that haven't been adequately covered. It also presents some easy organization techniques to manage information overload and streamline the dungeon creation process. Some highlights of the product are:

-Advice on making semi-realistic caves, tombs, castles, and manor houses. "Semi-realistic" is explicitly stated as the goal here, as opposed to completely abstract or restrictively realistic designs.

-Random inspiration and idea tables that are both evocative and flexible. Most random tables don't work well for me because they either assume a very specific setting, contain a bunch of really bland concepts, or both. But this book has long tables with lots of genuinely creative ideas.

-A streamlined method for figuring out the dungeon's history and construction. I usually minimize or avoid this issue because most products make dungeon histories sound dreary and irrelevant, but this book's method is faster and more interesting and changed my mind on the subject.

-A streamlined sector-based method for laying out dungeon levels. The writer suggests going back and doing the typical intricate graph paper designs afterwards, and gives a little advice on that, but the book doesn't really dwell on that and works well for those of us who prefer simpler flowchart dungeons.

-Overall, almost everything in the book seems designed to make dungeon creation more efficient and less intimidating, rather than simply introducing more complications than I'd have if I did it by hand.

The art is mostly classic public domain stuff, but it looks pretty good in this context. The layout is decent enough and works especially well on a tablet, since it's single-column and uses a large font. The only downside is that the index is located 11 pages in and takes up several pages, and there's no bookmarks. Furthermore, as of this writing, the PDF is locked down so that new bookmarks can't be added, though that might be changed in a later version.

As an aside, this is an OSR product, but doesn't have two of the more infuriating traits that some OSR products import from the worst products of the old days.

One, it doesn't have a bunch of stupid puns and "hur hur this game is so silly isn't it" stuff a la Mystara or some Greyhawk products; it takes the subject matter reasonably seriously. If you're looking for a more serious OSR product, this is a great one.

Two, it doesn't have big issues with sexism or racism. There's only two problems that I found; one is that it mentions "African" under "primitive themes" on one table, and another is that it occasionally uses "gypsies" as a concept, though it's generally much better than most products on that subject. Fair warning there, but it's pretty solid and comfortable on the subject. It's overall better than the average TSR or Wizards of the Coast product when it comes to the subject.

In conclusion, I've found this product very inspiring and useful, so I'm giving it 5 out of 5.