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It's difficult to come up with a generation system that will accurately duplicate or replace a Dungeon Master's creativity. For one, if that were the case everyone would be playing computer games instead, and for another, creating a dungeon in itself is fun -- it's part of why you would want to be a Dungeon Master in the first place.

This puts book of this nature (The Dungeon Builder's Guide and Central Casting: Dungeons) in a peculiar quandry. Any game company publishing a tool that actually replaces an integral part of the game is putting tacit approval on NOT being creative and churning out a bunch of random nonsense. The DBG struggles with this issue and settles it by only providing hints on how to create adventures instead of going into great detail. And of course, anyone buying the book wants as much detail as possible, that's why they BOUGHT a GUIDE (thus the name, Dungeon Builder's GUIDE).

The Dungeon Builder's Guide consists of twelve sections which cover how to build a dungeon, a dungeon "approach," dungeon permutations, traps, the aforementioned Autodungeon Engine, and a bunch of dungeon examples.

The DBG starts out broad and struggles throughout the rest of the book to narrow its focus. Dungeons, by the DBG's defintion, a "dungeon" means any bounded setting within which PCs interact with each other, non-player characters (NPCs), traps, puzzles, monsters and/or other challenging situations. Thus, this term applies to everything from subterranean mines and burial chambers to castles, cities, and extraplanar abodes." This is the DBG's greatest weakness. It's basically attempting to tackle not just a dungeon generator but an ADVENTURE generator, which could not possibly fit into 64 pages.

The Autodungeon generator is lifted directly from the First Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide -- and you get the feeling that the reason the DBG exists is because of those tables and Appendices G & H from that same volume. Not a bad idea. But then, the DMG was a massive volume and it barely fleshed those concepts out.

Because of its broad scope, places which by their very nature do not lend themselves to being automatic or easily generated (aerial dwellings, extradimensional places) have lots of pages wasted on them. The random generation tables suffer as a result -- the aerial generation tables are skewed towards "anything that can fly," ignoring such things as nationalities and boundaries (aarkocra, a Western concept, and Kenku, an Eastern concept, both hang out together) and the extradimensional planes are heavily skewed towards the wicked and ugly and nasty and strange. Why not a mechanical dungeon on Mechanus which would surely drive adventurer's insane? Who says only nutty chaotic guys build dungeons?

Each type of dungeon has another table for room descriptions, with a paragraph devoted to each room type. In some cases this gets suspciously specific. There's a Library of the Winds for aerial dungeons that seems skewed towards a specific idea rather than a general concept.

Then there are the Permutations, which cover things like the influence that drives the dungeon itself, who owns it, where it is, and *cough* its orientation.

Most noteworthy is the trap section, which includes some goodies that would make even Grimtooth wince, such as "imbues victim's skeleton with desire to 'get out'", "replaces random internal organ with fire ants", and my personal favorite, "lops off victim's head then animates head to attack friends."

After page 37 the DBG falls flat. Now we have chapter after chapter of examples, none of which indicate how the DBG was used to create them (indeed, it's highly unlikely it was used at all). Worse, they're not really complete modules, a heavy-handed attempt to force the Dungeon Master to use the DBG to complete each section. Or maybe that's just poor writing. The castle example has everyone BUT the king in it, and there IS a throne room! The interdimensional dungeon is particularly inspired, with the River of Worms guaranteed to make anyone's skin crawl. Still, it's not enough to justify five examples when one carefully fleshed out one would have done nicely.

The artwork is decidedly uninspired. I say this because after the seventh time I saw the same sidebar picture (sometimes they would switch it from the left side to the right side just to trick you) I was feeling pretty uninspired.

In the end, the Dungeon Builder's Guide is a good first chapter to dungeon building. But it is hardly by any means a Guide worthy of the title, and ultimately the DBG throws up its hands and simply GIVES you most of the adventure, as if the writers realized in the middle of writing it that it wasn't worth the effort.

But ya have to admit...the traps are pretty cool.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Dungeon Builder's Guidebook<
Author: Bruce R. Cordell Category: game Company/Publisher: TSR Cost: $19.95 Page count: 64 ISBN: 0-7869-1207-3 Capsule Review by Michael Tresca on 06/30/98. Genre tags: none	It's difficult to come up with a generation system that will accurately duplicate or replace a Dungeon Master's creativity. For one, if that were the case everyone would be playing computer games instead, and for another, creating a dungeon in itself is fun -- it's part of why you would want to be a Dungeon Master in the first place. This puts book of this nature (The Dungeon Builder's Guide and Central Casting: Dungeons) in a peculiar quandry. Any game company publishing a tool that actually replaces an integral part of the game is putting tacit approval on NOT being creative and churning out a bunch of random nonsense. The DBG struggles with this issue and settles it by only providing hints on how to create adventures instead of going into great detail. And of course, anyone buying the book wants as much detail as possible, that's why they BOUGHT a GUIDE (thus the name, Dungeon Builder's GUIDE). The Dungeon Builder's Guide consists of twelve sections which cover how to build a dungeon, a dungeon "approach," dungeon permutations, traps, the aforementioned Autodungeon Engine, and a bunch of dungeon examples. The DBG starts out broad and struggles throughout the rest of the book to narrow its focus. Dungeons, by the DBG's defintion, a "dungeon" means any bounded setting within which PCs interact with each other, non-player characters (NPCs), traps, puzzles, monsters and/or other challenging situations. Thus, this term applies to everything from subterranean mines and burial chambers to castles, cities, and extraplanar abodes." This is the DBG's greatest weakness. It's basically attempting to tackle not just a dungeon generator but an ADVENTURE generator, which could not possibly fit into 64 pages. The Autodungeon generator is lifted directly from the First Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide -- and you get the feeling that the reason the DBG exists is because of those tables and Appendices G & H from that same volume. Not a bad idea. But then, the DMG was a massive volume and it barely fleshed those concepts out. Because of its broad scope, places which by their very nature do not lend themselves to being automatic or easily generated (aerial dwellings, extradimensional places) have lots of pages wasted on them. The random generation tables suffer as a result -- the aerial generation tables are skewed towards "anything that can fly," ignoring such things as nationalities and boundaries (aarkocra, a Western concept, and Kenku, an Eastern concept, both hang out together) and the extradimensional planes are heavily skewed towards the wicked and ugly and nasty and strange. Why not a mechanical dungeon on Mechanus which would surely drive adventurer's insane? Who says only nutty chaotic guys build dungeons? Each type of dungeon has another table for room descriptions, with a paragraph devoted to each room type. In some cases this gets suspciously specific. There's a Library of the Winds for aerial dungeons that seems skewed towards a specific idea rather than a general concept. Then there are the Permutations, which cover things like the influence that drives the dungeon itself, who owns it, where it is, and cough its orientation. Most noteworthy is the trap section, which includes some goodies that would make even Grimtooth wince, such as "imbues victim's skeleton with desire to 'get out'", "replaces random internal organ with fire ants", and my personal favorite, "lops off victim's head then animates head to attack friends." After page 37 the DBG falls flat. Now we have chapter after chapter of examples, none of which indicate how the DBG was used to create them (indeed, it's highly unlikely it was used at all). Worse, they're not really complete modules, a heavy-handed attempt to force the Dungeon Master to use the DBG to complete each section. Or maybe that's just poor writing. The castle example has everyone BUT the king in it, and there IS a throne room! The interdimensional dungeon is particularly inspired, with the River of Worms guaranteed to make anyone's skin crawl. Still, it's not enough to justify five examples when one carefully fleshed out one would have done nicely. The artwork is decidedly uninspired. I say this because after the seventh time I saw the same sidebar picture (sometimes they would switch it from the left side to the right side just to trick you) I was feeling pretty uninspired. In the end, the Dungeon Builder's Guide is a good first chapter to dungeon building. But it is hardly by any means a Guide worthy of the title, and ultimately the DBG throws up its hands and simply GIVES you most of the adventure, as if the writers realized in the middle of writing it that it wasn't worth the effort. But ya have to admit...the traps are pretty cool. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Dungeon Builder's Guidebook<