I’m working on a new game.
It’s a set of underground travel rules for dungeon games. Like hexcrawling, but in the dark.
It isn’t a fully independent game. It’s a self-contained add-on to your dungeon-delving game of choice.
It’s for getting lost and finding a path in places forgotten, forsaken, or lost; the empty places, places where silence is thick with age.
It’s for creating dark spaces between your deadly dungeons. It’s for filling those spaces with secrets and mysteries that your players can uncover.
Your players are going to worry a lot about torchlight, time, and food. They’re going to make inscrutable maps of dark places, half-remembered in desperation on their way back.
Index Card Base
Because I am who I am, it’s made of index cards.
Here’s the core procedure:
It’s essentially a form of exploded encounter die for underground travel. It’s a resource management game built on choosing priorities (Player Choice) and a push-your-luck mechanic of Rolling Again.
Each of the five main feature types receives a d66 table of possible outcomes that the GM gets to creatively interpret. My favorite so far is the secrets table, below.
As you can see, it’s a work in progress. Dverdaghar is the sample Undercrawl included with the game: a vast city-state complex, once home to Agradur, the Underking himself.
It’s built on a GM’s simple, quick prep (on index cards, naturally) of evocative locations that can all later be revisited. Perhaps you want to plunk a proper dungeon down in the Great Halls of Aikandar someday, but you’re not ready today?
I’m writing it because I want bigger undergrounds. And I don’t want to run a megadungeon. And I’m sorry, okay? I know it makes me a bad person, but I don’t want to do it!
Inspiration / Similar
Others have done / are doing similar things.
Veins of the Earth, of course, currently getting a major revision.
Veinscrawl, based on VotE.
Downcrawl, which uses really cool cards!
Inkvein, a complete megadungeon with travel rules.
Any number of vast megadungeons.
But I couldn’t find any simple, lightweight, drop-in rules systems for underground travel in dungeon games. So I am writing it!
Probably about 32 pages, when the dust settles, and when the 16 Area undercrawl and one-page dungeon are complete. All the art is going to be my rudimentary marker-drawings of tiny wizards in vast spaces.
Stay tuned.
And because my promise to you, dear reader, is a gameable index card with every post, behold these underground travel hazards:
