AD&D DMG Random Wilderness Terrain

[isomage]

Appendix B of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (first edition) Dungeon Master's Guide details a method of generating random wilderness terrain.

Starting from an area of known terrain type and moving into a new area, the new area's terrain is determined by rolling a d20 against a table corresponding to the first area's terrain. Thus there are tables for each of plains, scrub, forest, rough, desert, hills, mountains, and swamp; e.g., moving from a hex containing forest, the new hex would be plains on a 1, scrub on 2-4, more forest on 5-14, etc.

I wanted to see if the method would produce any decent results, so I wrote a little program to seed a single hex with a random type and then grow the terrain outward by rolling on the tables. Consistency was enforced, so that terrain type A couldn't be placed next to type B if A and B couldn't be rolled on each other's tables.

Below is a typical example (32x32 hexes, rendered with AKS Hex Mapper tiles). I'm not really impressed by the results; the terrain seems too randomly mixed up. I think I'll stick with my fractal/noise-based generator for now