Free tables Dungeon rooms by kind
Random Crypt Rooms — d20 Dungeon Room Tables
Free d20 tables for crypt rooms in 5e: what the room was, what's in it, what it smells and sounds like, and what lives there.
The party opened a door in the crypt you hadn't planned past. Roll d20 twice on the table below: once for what the room was, and once on the second column for something in it. Then d10 each for a smell and a sound, from the lists underneath.
For what's in the room now, roll d6: on 1–2 nothing, on 3–4 a creature, on 5 a trap, on 6 a stash. A third of rooms being empty is deliberate. A dungeon where every door hides a fight teaches the players to stop opening doors.
Smells, d10: (1) It smells of dry dust and old lamp oil. (2) Myrrh and old incense, and something sweeter under it. (3) Cold stone and wet earth. (4) Rot, faint and old, like a cellar of forgotten apples. (5) Burnt tallow, as if candles were snuffed a moment ago. (6) Nothing at all, which is somehow worse. (7) Mould, thick enough to taste. (8) Vinegar and salt, from the embalmers. (9) Crushed lilies. (10) Iron, like old blood.
Sounds, d10: (1) Somewhere, a slow drip. (2) A soft scraping from inside a wall. (3) Silence so complete that footsteps echo. (4) Wind moaning through a crack in the ceiling. (5) A distant chant, too faint to make out. (6) Something small scurrying in the dark. (7) A creak, like a lid being lifted. (8) A bell far away, tolling once. (9) Breathing that stops when the party stops. (10) Sand trickling from the ceiling.
Creatures that fit a crypt, from the SRD with their challenge ratings: Skeleton (CR 1/4); Zombie (CR 1/4); Shadow (CR 1/2); Ghoul (CR 1); Specter (CR 1); Ghast (CR 2); Wight (CR 3); Mummy (CR 3); Ghost (CR 4); Wraith (CR 5); Vampire Spawn (CR 5); Vampire, Vampire Form (CR 13); Mummy Lord (CR 15); Lich (CR 21). Pick one whose numbers suit your party, or let the app do the sums.
The table
20 results. Roll d20.
| d20 | The room | Something in it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A burial gallery: shelves cut into both walls, each holding a shrouded body. | Candle stubs in every niche. One of them is still warm. |
| 2 | An embalming room with a stone slab, drains in the floor and a rack of hooks. | Scratch marks on the inside of a coffin lid. |
| 3 | A family tomb, its sarcophagi arranged by rank, the largest at the back. | A fresh bouquet of flowers on one grave. |
| 4 | An ossuary. The walls are built from skulls, sorted by size. | Footprints in the dust, leading in and not out. |
| 5 | A mourners' chapel, pews facing a statue whose face has been chiselled off. | A name carved into the wall over and over, the same hand each time. |
| 6 | A robing room for priests, the vestments rotted to lace on their pegs. | A shovel leaning against the wall, the blade still damp with earth. |
| 7 | A charnel pit behind a low wall, filled to the brim with loose bones. | Every skull in the room faces the door. |
| 8 | A hall of urns, hundreds of them on stepped shelves, each with a name. | A lid pushed half off its sarcophagus. The inside is empty. |
| 9 | A guardroom for the dead, with a bench, a brazier and a door that bars from outside. | Coins placed on the eyes of a statue. |
| 10 | A sealed vault, its door covered in warnings in a language nobody speaks now. | A broken holy symbol, snapped cleanly in half. |
| 11 | A grave-goods store: crates of offerings that were never placed. | Cobwebs thick enough to hide a doorway behind them. |
| 12 | A children's crypt, the tiny coffins painted with animals. | An epitaph that is a warning rather than a memorial. |
| 13 | A processional corridor lined with life-size statues of the dead. | A lantern hanging from a hook, its oil fresh. |
| 14 | A washing room with a stone basin, a well and a pile of linen wrappings. | Rows of small clay figures, each with a pin through it. |
| 15 | A priest's cell: a cot, a shelf, a book of names half filled in. | A body that hasn't rotted at all, though its clothes have. |
| 16 | A collapsed chamber where the ceiling came down on the sarcophagi. | Chains on the wall at the height of a lying body. |
| 17 | A mass grave from a plague year, bodies laid in rows under lime. | An open book of the dead with the last page torn out. |
| 18 | An heir's tomb, empty, the lid leaning against the wall and waiting. | Ash on the floor in the shape of a person. |
| 19 | A shrine to a death god, with an offering bowl still full of old coins. | A mosaic of a funeral procession, one mourner's face scratched out. |
| 20 | A catacomb junction where four passages meet under a domed ceiling. | A low archway that someone has bricked up in a hurry. |
Questions
How many rooms in a dungeon should be empty?
More than feels natural: around a third. Empty rooms are where the players breathe, search, and argue about which way to go, and they make the next door tense again.
How do I make a random room feel like it belongs?
Tie one detail to the dungeon's story. If the crypt belongs to a family of embalmers, the fresh flowers on one grave were left by the last of them.