Thought I’d start using one of the ‘tools’ I have for being a DM.

I have this rather cool deck of cards by Inked Adventures called Map and Dice Playing Cards.

As the name of the deck suggests the deck can be used to simulate a die roll if need be. But it’s main use is for creating random dungeons.

So I’ve shuffled the deck, and drawn eight cards to create a random dungeon.

We enter this random dungeon via the Once Grand Stairs (Queen of Spades, top right).

Considering that we are entering this dungeon from the Once Grand Stairs, I’d have this dungeon beneath a crumbling derelict mansion.

The party of adventures stumble upon this dungeon as they explore the mansion. As they descend the grand stairs a barely alive, malnourished, dirty, heavily bruised man struggles up the stairs towards them.

Rescue the captives from the prison cells (3 of Hearts, top left) before they are sacrificed by parties unknown. Personally I’d have the mystery person departing the mortal world just as they beg the party to save their friends and family from being sacrificed.

Any passages/exits that go nowhere are dead ends.

The nice thing about these cards is that you can generate a dungeon in seconds.

The potential hard part is populating the dungeon with monsters, traps and items. I don’t think that would be too hard either if using the tables from the Lazy DM Workbook.