The Random Dungeons
“The Wizard of Yendor transferred all his magical energies into various shrines he hid in his dungeons. With the Wizard no longer around, I take care of these dungeons.”
Somewhere beneath the world sits a bored Apprentice, the last servant of the Wizard of Yendor. On request he will conjure a brand-new maze out of nothing — walls, monsters, traps and treasure — tuned to whatever difficulty you name. Half an hour later it collapses back into dust and he builds the next one for whoever asks.
These are the random dungeons: 90 difficulty levels (10–99), a fresh randomly-generated maze every time, and hidden in each one a pair of shrines — the Wizard's stored magic. Some shrines are gifts. Some are jokes. One of them simply kills you.
- Nothing is permanent. A dungeon exists for 30 minutes, then it collapses and everything left inside it is destroyed.
- You pick the difficulty. Ask for a level-10 maze or a level-99 maze. The monsters, traps and rewards all scale to that number, not to your character.
- The shrines are the point. Each shrine works once per character, ever — not once per dungeon. There are only 54 level shrines in the entire game, and each one is a single decision you never get to take back.
Finding the Apprentice
The dungeon halls are their own area, reached through a torch-lit stairway out in the wilds north-west of Aston. There are also portals into the halls from the teleport chamber and from the Warped Land, so ask around — most veterans know a short way in.
You arrive right beside the Apprentice. He is immortal, unattackable and refuses gifts;
all he does is talk. Say any of these words to him and he will answer:
wizard, yendor, shrines, dungeons,
help, list.
Everything past this point happens through ordinary speech. Stand near him and just type the command in the chat bar — there is no menu.
Commanding the Apprentice
- create <10–99>
- Builds a new dungeon of that dungeon level and teleports you straight into it. You may only own one dungeon at a time.
- list
- Shows every dungeon currently standing: its number, its level, the level band allowed to enter it, and the minutes it has left.
- enter <nr>
- Walks you into an existing dungeon — including one somebody else built, which is how you run these in a group.
- destroy <nr>
- Collapses a dungeon you created, so you can immediately build another one.
The house rules
- Sixteen at a time. The Apprentice can keep 16 dungeons standing. If they are all busy he will tell you how many minutes until the oldest one falls.
- Thirty minutes. Every dungeon collapses 30 minutes after it was made. You get a warning in the dungeon every five minutes, and you cannot enter a dungeon with under a minute left.
- Level band, not dungeon level. To enter a dungeon somebody else built, your character level must be within ±3 of the builder's level at the moment it was created. Group up with people near your own level, or have the right person do the building.
- One dungeon per person. Build a second one only after your first has
collapsed — or
destroyit yourself.
Nothing stops a low-level character from asking for a level-99 dungeon. The Apprentice will happily build it. Whether you survive the first corridor is your problem.
Inside the Maze
Every dungeon is a fresh 15×15 cell maze — genuinely random, never the same layout twice. You start in the near corner; both shrines are always placed in the far half, so there is no way to grab them without walking the maze.
| Feature | Count | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Dark Skeletons | 50 | Undead built to the dungeon's level, with gear bonuses that scale with it. Above level 35 they fight with Rage. Each one carries a Jewel of Yendor. |
| Junk piles | 15 | Old bones and shattered weapons. Searching one usually turns up a steel bar, sometimes a handful of coins, sometimes nothing. The pile crumbles once searched. |
| Gas traps | 10 | Invisible until you're standing on one. Damage scales with the dungeon level, so a level-90 trap hurts far more than a level-20 one. |
| Trapdoors | 5 | Opens under your feet — you jump clear, but the hole blocks the passage for about six seconds. Wedge one permanently shut by dropping a steel bar on it. |
| Shrine of Continuity | 1 | The same shrine in every dungeon, at every level. See below. |
| Level shrine | 0–1 | The shrine unique to that dungeon level — 54 of the 90 levels have one. The full list is further down this page. |
The Jewel of Yendor
Shrines do not answer to just anyone. To use any shrine you must be carrying a Jewel of Yendor of that dungeon's level — a level-42 jewel opens a level-42 shrine and nothing else. Without one, “nothing happens.”
Every Dark Skeleton in the dungeon carries one. So the price of every shrine is the same: kill something, take its jewel, walk the maze.
How Shrines Work
- Once per character, forever. Each individual shrine is tracked on your character permanently. Use the level-15 Shrine of Bribes and that shrine is spent for that character for good, no matter how many level-15 dungeons you build afterwards. The magic “will only work once.”
- Look before you touch. A shrine tells you its name when you look at it. The Apprentice's warning is not a joke: “some of his shrines do strange things to those who use them.”
- Deeper is richer. Experience rewards are based on the dungeon level, using the exp it takes a character of that level to gain their next level. A shrine at level 80 pays far more than the same shrine at level 20.
- No free rides. Rewards are capped as if the dungeon were only your level + 5, so dragging a level-15 character into a level-99 shrine pays out at level 20, not 99.
The Eleven Shrines
| Shrine | Found on | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Continuity | every level | The chain shrine. Must be used in strict order, starting at level 10 and climbing one level at a time to 99. Each link grants experience. Finishing the chain at level 99 opens a gate — see below. |
| Security | 8 levels | Grants +1 save (Ishtar's protection from death). Refuses you if you already hold more than five saves, and hardcore characters “shall never be secure.” |
| Vitality | level 30 only | Raises Hit Points +5 (warriors and Seyan'du) or Mana +5 (mages and priests) and pays the experience cost for you. The single best shrine in the game, and there is exactly one of it. |
| Kindness | 2 levels | Wipes the player-killer mark from your name. “Thou art not a killer henceforth.” Useless if you were never a killer. |
| Braveness | level 51 only | Pays a full level's worth of experience plus gold — but only to someone who has already used the Shrine of Death. Everyone else is told they are a coward. |
| Bribes | 9 levels | A hand reaches into your purse and empties it, leaving you experience worth a quarter of the coins taken. It takes up to about 1⅓ levels' worth of exp in coin, and sneers at you if you're too poor to bother with. |
| Living on the Edge | 9 levels | Trades all of your saves for experience — a third of a level, plus a tenth of a level for every save you gave up. You walk out with no saves left. |
| Indecisiveness | 9 levels | A respec: lowers every skill you have raised by 3 points and refunds the experience, so you can spend it somewhere else. Skills already past your cap are left alone. |
| Welding | 9 levels | Takes one random modifier off one of your equipped items and welds it onto another. The donor becomes an item “of Unwelding”, the receiver an item “of Welding”. Blind — you don't choose either item. Refuses characters well below the dungeon's level. |
| The Jobless | 5 levels | “Thou shalt be jobless.” Erases every profession you have learned. Useful exactly once, if you want to re-choose — a disaster otherwise. |
| Death | level 37 only | “You hear a maniacal laugh.” It burns all your saves and then kills you. Its only purpose is to unlock the Shrine of Braveness on level 51. |
| Note: the Shrine of Welding was originally reserved for paid accounts in Astonia. Pen Islandia has no paid accounts, so this shrine currently turns everyone away — it's on our list. | ||
Shrine by Dungeon Level
Every dungeon level from 10 to 99 also holds a Shrine of Continuity. The shrine listed here is the second shrine, unique to that level. 36 levels hold nothing but the Continuity shrine.
| Shrine | How many | Dungeon levels |
|---|---|---|
| Security | 8 | 10, 29, 41, 58, 69, 75, 85, 94 |
| Indecisiveness | 9 | 11, 24, 38, 43, 57, 64, 76, 83, 96 |
| Living on the Edge | 9 | 13, 26, 36, 42, 59, 66, 74, 88, 91 |
| Bribes | 9 | 15, 22, 34, 48, 54, 67, 78, 86, 93 |
| Welding | 9 | 18, 27, 32, 46, 52, 62, 72, 81, 98 |
| The Jobless | 5 | 20, 45, 61, 82, 97 |
| Kindness | 2 | 21, 55 |
| Vitality | 1 | 30 |
| Death | 1 | 37 |
| Braveness | 1 | 51 |
| Continuity | 90 | every level, 10 through 99 |
The Chain of Continuity
The Shrine of Continuity stands in every single dungeon, and it is the one shrine you are meant to use over and over — but only in order.
Your chain starts at level 10. Use that dungeon's Continuity shrine and your chain advances to 11. Approach a shrine too early and a steady voice tells you “thou must visit mine younger brother first”; approach one you have already passed and it simply says “thou hast visited me already.”
Every link pays experience scaled to the dungeon level, so the chain becomes a serious source of experience as it climbs. And it is a genuine 90-dungeon commitment: the levels you skipped are the levels you must go back and build.
“Continuity is power.”
What waits at the end
Complete the chain at dungeon level 99 and your continuity opens a gate — you are pulled out of the maze and into a sealed crypt that nobody else can walk into, where the reanimated corpse of the Wizard of Yendor stands guard over his own treasure chests.
Once your chain is finished, the level-99 Continuity shrine will take you back there any time you like. It is the only way in.
Beware: your character's shrine record is permanent. There is no second chain, and no shrine will ever work twice.
Running Them Well
- Take a party. Have the highest-level member
createthe dungeon, then everyone elseenterits number — as long as they're within three levels. Shared kills pay everybody in full; see the Party System. - Loot a jewel early. The first skeleton you kill hands you the key to both shrines. Don't reach the shrine and discover you're empty-handed.
- Carry a steel bar. Junk piles hand them out freely, and a bar jams a trapdoor shut for good — worth doing on any corridor you plan to run back through.
- Mind the clock. Thirty minutes, with a warning every five. When it collapses, anything still lying on the floor is gone.
- Build deep for exp, shallow for safety. Rewards follow the dungeon level, but only up to your own level plus five — so the sweet spot is a dungeon about five levels above you.
- Save level 30 for later. The Shrine of Vitality is the only one of its kind in the game, and there's no rush — a level-30 dungeon is easy to build at any point in your career.
Want a different kind of dungeon? The Descent is Pen Islandia's own 150-floor party endurance crawl, entered from Cameron. The random dungeons are the classic Astonia article: short, disposable, and built around a handful of irreversible choices.