The why of temples

Temples feature in a lot of adventures, but it's often the temple of mumble which was built by the priests of mumblecough to serve the function of hey look over there.

Here's a set of tables that can randomly generate a temple, including its background, physical features, reasons a party of adventurers might be interested in it and reasons why no-one has looted it before them.

This temple is set:

1. On a hill
2. In a valley
3. Overlooking a bay
4. In a mountain pass
5. In a cave
6. On an island

It's a:

1. Single-room chapel
2. Small church with priest quarters
3. Small chapel complex with priest and guest quarters
4. Multi-building grounds with workshops and a staff
5. Temple complex with cloisters, schools and dedicated farms
6. Holy city with a permanent population of citizens and businesses

It was built to:

1. House the bones of a saint
2. Provide accommodation for pilgrims
3. Seal an evil portal/hostile entity
4. Prepare for the return of a living god
5. Act as a base for a religious crusade
6. Train clerics and war priests

Its distinctive feature was:

1. A sacrificial altar
2. A library and scriptorium
3. A treasure vault
4. An armoury
5. Extensive catacombs
6. A reliquary housing an ancient artefact

Its distinctive architecture is:

1. A bell tower 
2. A cloister
3. A necropolis
4. Statues
5. Stained glass windows
6. A labyrinth mosaic

Its state is:

1. Abandoned and empty
2. Used as a headquarters by bandits
3. Used as a den by wild animals
4. Inhabited by monsters
5. Operational but barred to outsiders
6. Re-occupied by a cult or opposing religion

Its walls are:

1. Overgrown and half-buried
2. In ruins
3. Pristine
4. Soot-stained
5. Rebuilt
6. Carved with ominous bas-reliefs

An unexpected threat here is:

1. Angry spirits
2. Wandering undead
3. Animated statues
4. Cursed objects
5. Weakened floor/roof supports
6. Disease

I want to run D20 but all I have are a couple of D6s

We've all been there. It's Christmas and you're gathered at Auntie Doreen's place where your siblings and cousins want you to run one of your 'Dumbledores and Dragons' games for the kids to keep them occupied. You didn't bring your gaming dice and Doreen is on dial-up because wifi causes autism and fibre is a plot by animal rights activists to get their propaganda into people's homes. All you've got to work with are a couple of D6s from an old copy of Monopoly that has POO BUM scrawled across the board in crayon. You can do this.

You can use D6s for a fair simulation of other dice. The methods are neither elegant nor straightforward, but they do what they need to do. In the list of operations below I'm going to call the first die DA and the second DB.

D4

The easiest of them all: just chuck DA and re-roll if you get a result higher than 4. You'll probably have to roll three times for every two results you need, but there's no maths involved.

D8

Roll both dice. DA is a D4. If DB shows an odd side, add 4 to DA's number to get your D8 result.

D10

Roll both dice. This time you're rolling DA as a D5 (re-roll on a 6 result). DB is even/odd again. If it shows an odd side, add 5 to DA's number for your D10 result.

D12

Do not roll both dice and add them together. The first issue is that it's impossible to get a 1 result that way. The second is that rolling two dice and adding them gives you a weak bell-shaped probability curve instead of the flat result you want. The odds of rolling a 6 this way are 5/36 (14%) but the odds of rolling a 12 are 1/36 (0.28%).

Instead, roll DA as a D6 and DB as an odd/even to determine if you add 6 or 0 to DA.

D20

Now it's getting kind of awkward. Roll DA as a D5. Roll DB as a D4. You want a result of 0 to 3. For simplicity's sake I like to treat 6 as a 0, take 1 to 3 as rolled and re-roll on a 4 or 5. Add DB x 5 to DA to get a D20 result.

D100

Use the D10 method twice, once for the tens and again for the ones. Subtract 1 from each result. This will give you final result of 00 - 99. You can treat 00 as 100. If you leave out the subtractions, the lowest result you can roll is 11.

Doreen won't mind you using her toby mug collection as giant figurines, will she?

Void adventure

This is a half-baked idea for a zero-prep procedurally generated adventure, but I think it might have some legs to it.

First, the characters successfully navigate a suspiciously short dungeon belonging to a wizard, eventually finding themselves in his library. The treasure is inches away. Then the door and windows slam shut, there's a light show and a dizzying sense of transition. If the characters pry open the doors or window covers, they find themselves looking out into true nothingness - the void. The room was a trap, and it caught them. They've been dumped out of the world entirely.

Presumably the wizard will eventually call the room back, if only to reset the trap. But there's a dead and mummified adventurer here, which suggests that it could be a good long time. They need to rescue themselves, not wait.

The dead adventurer had an escape plan, which he laid out in a journal he had with him. The room could be shifted back into the world by tracing the path of a specific rune on foot and chanting a magical phrase to undo the trap magic. The biggest problem was that a single room isn't large enough to trace the rune.  It needs to be many squares long. However, it was possible to call additional rooms into the void, from structures similar to this room in concept (IE. dungeons). Then the issue would be digging through walls for access, defeating whatever threats came across with the architecture and building a walkable path through them.

The final journal entry states that a terrible void storm had begun and he was returning to the library for the little protection the bookshelves offered. Whatever rooms he managed to add are gone. If the PCs want to follow his plan, they'll need to start from scratch.

Obviously the characters have specific wants in the rooms they summon: food, building tools and supplies, construction that allows them to create openings where they need them. They'd also prefer those rooms to be unoccupied. Each additional criterion adds 1d3 to the difficulty of the magic roll for the summoning. If I was running I'd keep the players in the dark over whether they pass or fail until the room arrives, and remove one of the criteria for every point they fail by. They get a room regardless, but maybe not the one they hoped for.

I like the idea of using the random dungeon generator from Donjon. Hit random each time to get a different dungeon style, but set Details to basic to get a list of monsters and traps. Roll a die to pick which room they get. If the encounter die hits while they're in that room, it's something from the wandering monsters list, arriving some time after the room they occupied.

The characters have to work fast, because another possibility on the encounter die is a void storm. Storms last 1d6 turns, and while they're in progress, areas of the map simply pop out of existence. Erased by the void. Generating those randomly seem like too much effort, so I'd get the players to map out the dungeon they're constructing and drop d4s on their map to determine where the lacunae occur and how many squares in diameter they are. (D4s are indisputably the most evil of dice. Bastard pointy things.)