Stock that Dungeon!

The first two levels of Kandahal will be filled with Shoggoths, Mi-Go, various undead and a couple of Elder Things (their level being 3rd). Mr. Moldvay suggests using this table to stock the dungeon:

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It is interesting to see how this table works. Around 33% of the rooms will have monsters, 50% of these will also have treasure. Around 16% of the rooms will have traps, 33% of these will also have treasure. Empty rooms (33%, like monster rooms) will contain treasure only 16% of the time, while special rooms are left completely to the DM to stock. Let's make some calculations:

Empty - around 28%
Monster & Treasure - around 16%
Monster Only - around 16%
Trap & Treasure - 5%
Trap Only - around 11%
Treasure Only - around 5%
Special - around 16%

With an error of 3%. Redistributing things a bit to make the table a bit easier to read we find something like this:

Empty - 30%
Monster & Treasure - 15%
Monster Only - 15%
Trap & Treasure - 5%
Trap Only - 10%
Treasure only - 5%
Special - 20%

Labyrinth Lord's table is very similar to this one, except for the fact that Daniel has apparently arranged things a bit differently, coming up with about a 25% chance of unique encounters (around 10% more than the original table):

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In any case, that's a lot of special rooms! I'd say you have about the same probability of entering an empty room as the room with the Radiant Pool of Horrible Mutations. I don't really like having so much free space in my dungeons (you know, players are all paranoid when I DM, and they can spend an hour in a room where is nothing but some dried blood), and I much prefer just a few empty but relatively safe spots, where the party can rest and lick their wounds. I mean, an empty room is not generally interesting to explore, and if it's difficult to defend it is pretty useless. On the other hand, I want special rooms to be way more special (thus less frequent), and a lot more monsters, because advancement in pre-3e D&D is pretty slow and I don't want to make things too easy by granting hundreds of XPs per session. So, I think my stocking table will look better like this:

Roll d% - Content
01-20: Empty (from 30% to 20%)
21-40: Monster & Treasure (from 15% to 20%)
41-55: Monster Only (15% fixed)
56-65: Trap & Treasure (from 5% to 10%)
66-75: Trap Only (10% fixed)
76-86: Treasure Only (from 5% to 10%)
87-00: Special (from 20% to 15%)

So less empty space, less special encounters, more monsters with treasure, more traps with treasure and more empty but with treasure. Why so much more treasure? Because the Isle is lacking a city to spend money in, and I plan to feed my players with equipment and with much more treasure. Also, consider Pavlovian Conditioning.