
I recently discovered that Inspiration Pad Pro can incorporate images into its output. This would be an ideal way to simplify one aspect which had proved one of the clunkier sides of generdaating solo dungeon crawling – corridor and room layouts.
Running the Ruins of the Undercity’s spatial directions through IPP had worked well enough to put together usable maps, but I still found myself spending a bit longer than I’d like interpreting the text for mapping purposes.
I’ve enjoyed working my way through some dungeons using 4 Against Darkness‘ rules, but it always felt a tad too board game-y for my liking, and its dungeon layout generation – rolling a d66 and finding the relevant map segment – resulted in quite a lot of flipping backwards and forwards through the same pages.
With IPP such strenuous trials are over – I used Gridmapper to reproduce 4AD’s map segments and added a few of my own.

The dungeon depth can be adjusted which some treasure hauls and what creatures an adventuring party might encounter – using the encounter tables from Old School Essentials – and there’s another drop down menu to determine what the party finds when they open a door or press on down a corridor with random chances for there to be additional contents, creatures, treasure, traps or any combination of the four. Search the room for the chance to find hidden treasure or a secret door, at the risk of bumping into some wandering inhabitants.
I’ve kept the room and corridor descriptions from the Ruins of the Undercity which provides decent flavour for each area, and factional interplay and interesting encounters come from activity tables currently being put out at a remarkable rate on d4 Caltrops‘ blog – these are the creative prompts which make the exercise more than just rolling dice for a hack and slash.

I’ve been running through a couple of sessions with Off-White Cube which is relatively forgiving as far as games based off the older D&D versions go, but it only takes one ambitious step too far into a room for the party disappear under of swarm of gribblies (usually undead).
This is the furthest I’ve been able to get with a starting party of six characters:

They’d found a decent amount of gold, but that’s a very inefficient treasure with a limited carrying capacity, and they met their end trying to find more easily-carried valuables.
I have come across Disciples of Bone & Shadow which provides a good framework for a wilderness hexcrawl with crawlable dungeons dotted around it, so now there’s scope for turning these occasional forays with some expendable characters into a longer running campaign. More incentive to keep characters safe if there’s somewhere to which they can retreat.
I am reminded of efforts to add mini dungeons to Hex Describe using Text Mapper generates maps and a ton of tables.
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2019-10-09_Ten_random_dungeons_generated
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I have a whole load of those generators bookmarked for online sessions – absolute treasure troves!
Alas, I do not have the self-discipline to not glance ahead and see what’s coming – I need my consequences sprung upon me when it’s too late to avoid them!
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Thanks for reminding me of IPP! I might just use it to automate 4AT and 4AR (although I have already started rebuilding them in JavaScript from scratch as a learning exercise).
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As a non-coder, I love IPP for its apparent ease of use. It feels approachable.
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I’d love to know how you included images!
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It can use images you’ve got on your computer – you just need the file location:
It took a bit of playing around. I think the double slashes are key.
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That makes sense. Thank you for the follow up!
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No problem!
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Hi there, I really like this post!
How do I get hold of other folks tables or even is there a tutorial on how to programme this software to make my own up.
Thank you in adavnce!
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Folks post a lot of tables up on the IPP forums – https://forum.nbos.com/index.php?p=/categories/inspiration-pad-pro-general – for shared use, and it’s a handy place for asking questions too.
I don’t know of any Youtube tutorials which run through but the software itself comes with a very decent manual with a good search function. I’m not a great reader of instruction books, and it still worked for me! I’d be happy to help if you find yourself struggling with it.
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I will try the forums. I have never coded for a long time [15 years ago] and that was only html [4]
So it could be easy or hard.
If I am able to edit someone elses tables and insert my own stuff that will probably provide me my first few tutorials.
Regardless thank you for the fast response.
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If you’ve got HTML under your belt, this should be fine. The simplest generator is merely
Table: [whatever name you want to use to label the table]
Result 1
Result 2
Result 3
Result 4
With a 25% chance of any result.
You can then weight the results
Table: [whatever name you want to use to label the table]
Result 1
5:Result 2
2:Result 3
2:Result 4
Which gives a 1-in-10 chance of result 1, 5-in-10 chance of result 2, and a 2-in-10 chance for each of results 3 and 4.
That would sort you for the majority of the random tables you’d probably use.
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aha that really is very generous of you to have taken this extra step. Thank you
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