[Update] Instant Dungeons 1.3.3 is here: lights, building layouts, rooms, and more. (Patreon)

This is a pretty big update to the procedural generators. The short version is that Instant Dungeons can now create more kinds of maps, with more useful details already in place: lighting, columns, room types, building layouts, more objects, and even an early experimental settlement generator.

The main thing I wanted with this update was to make the module better for those moments when your players go somewhere you did not prepare. A dungeon, a house, a tavern, a library, a crypt, some weird little side-location they suddenly care about... now you have more ways to make something playable quickly and keep the session moving.

One of the biggest additions is the new Building Layout generator. This is meant for places like houses, taverns, libraries, and other interiors that should feel a bit more believable than a normal dungeon layout.

This also meant I had to draw a lot of new objects to fill these rooms. I am very much not an artist, but I had a lot of fun making them, and I think they are getting better. The goal is not to replace beautiful hand-made battle maps, of course, but to give you something useful right inside Foundry when you suddenly need a place for your players to explore.

I also added procedural lighting and column placement. Dungeons can now spawn with torches and braziers, and the lights can start on or off depending on how you want to use the scene.

I really like what this does for the maps. The shadows, the darker corners, and the contrast around lit areas make the generated scenes feel much less flat than before. You can also shift-click the light sources created by the module to toggle them on and off, and when you place a torch with the mapper tool, it places the light source with it.

There is also a new dungeon layout style called Classic Halls. It creates more complex dungeons with more paths connecting rooms, so the result feels less symmetrical and less regular than the older generator.

Another important addition is the new Room Mix control. You can now specify what kinds of rooms should appear in your dungeon or building.

So if you are making an ancient crypt, you do not need bedrooms and dining rooms showing up unless you really want them. If you are making a building, you can ask for bedrooms, libraries, storage rooms, temples, crypts, empty rooms, and so on. For building floor plans, the values are more direct room counts. For dungeon layouts, they work more like weights, so the generator knows what kinds of spaces to favor.

And of course, all of this still works with the dungeon mapper. After generating a map, you can keep editing it directly in Foundry: expand rooms, add new rooms, place furniture, move objects, add doors, change floors, adjust terrain, and bring in your own asset packs if you want.

That workflow is still the heart of Instant Dungeons for me. Generate something fast, then shape it into what you actually need for the table.

Thank you so much for supporting my work and for using my modules. I hope this update makes your games easier to run, and I am very excited to keep improving these generators.