Organic Room Stocking

14 Jan, 2025

You've probably got a table to stock the fetid kitchen in your bandit lair, and another for the chieftan's bedroom and one more for the dank fungal cavern past the rusted and barred door at the back of the complex, but as you look at the dungeon dressing you've rolled up, something seems amiss. Sure, there's all this stuff in each room that all belongs there, but no one ever seems to move anything around the place. Where's the plate and fork from the gaoler's last meal? The spear one of the goons left next to stove? The stash of unwholesome mushrooms that one guy that suddenly started jumping at shadows and staring off into the middle distance has hidden under his bed?

The problem is, your rooms need stuff from other rooms. So here's a little procedure to bolt onto your normal stocking procedure. As long as you've got a way to generate thematically appropriate dressing specific to each of your rooms and can abstractly measure a distance between them, you've got all you need.

And don't to get too tied up on the idea of rooms being in dungeons or buildings, rooms could be neighboring regions on the world map or neighborhoods in town - anything people would move their stuff around in.

First, figure out approximately how far away each room is from the others: close, intermediate or far. Some rooms might be too far away from each other for their stuff to end up there, so note that, too.

Now, for each room, stock it however you normally would. But after that, iterate through the list of other rooms that stuff could have migrated into this one from; for each, roll D10 and compare to the table below to see if there's something out of place.

If the roll was a 1, roll again and add another foreign item if the result is in range. Keep rerolling 1s indefinitely (or until fed up).

Finally, with the number of misplaced items and their origins known, do some more stocking, but use the tables for the rooms where all of the new things came from.

Here's a little worked example for a dungeon I've been working on.

The rooms being stocked are listed on rows, while the other room that items might come from are listed in the columns, and the cells have the high end of the range from the table above for the distance between each room. For example, the intersection of row r1 and column r2 has a 5, since the rooms are close to each other, but o2 and w are so far away that the corresponding cell is empty, and we won't be rolling for that pair.

Afterward, I rolled a D10 and compared to the number for each filled cell, clearing it or changing it to the number of items as the dice willed.

Yes, I did roll three consecutive 1s for items from room t showing up in room k

#organic #procedures #stocking