Later this year we’re Kickstarting a new hardcover book: Dungeon Delver’s Guide. This sourcebook, which is compatible with both Fifth Edition and Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition, is a comprehensive toolkit for running (and exploring!) dungeons and—for those who wish to venture even farther below—the vast subterranean world of Underland.

With hundreds of new tricks, traps, treasures, and monsters, this book provides a comprehensive toolkit for designing dungeon adventures. But a collection of cool goodies and baddies doesn’t really amount to anything unless it’s animated by an equally engaging story. Dungeon Delver’s Guide provides a new framework (the NODES system) for weaving together adventure ingredients into a coherent, tightly-themed story.

If you’re a player, Dungeon Delver’s Guide offers new origins, class archetypes, spells, and cultural equipment that let you be a part of the story. Whether you’re a ratling decomposer druid or a grimlock sound sculptor, a dungeon adventure can be not an exploration of the unknown, but a return home. While they’re dungeon-themed, our new character options are useful anywhere. Your shadow elf arachnid guardian might have been born in Underland but will feel perfectly comfortable webslinging around a surface-world metropolis.

Why Dungeons?

The first fantasy RPGs took place in dungeons. Eventually people left the depths behind and emerged blinking into the sunlight to see what the rest of the world had to offer. Cities and towns! The wilderness! The planes! Space! Fantasy roleplaying offers limitless avenues of exploration. Why do we want to return to the cramped and dark confines of the dungeon?

Well the fact is we never really left the dungeon. Every year countless TTRPG dungeon adventures are published. It’s hard to find a fantasy video game that doesn’t include a dungeon delve or two. Over the years dungeon adventures have evolved to become opportunities for focused storytelling and heightened adventure—this book is all about providing a modern approach to underground exploration.

Telling a Story

A dungeon is the perfect environment to tell a specific story. While it’s quite possible to run a dungeon without a coherent narrative—and it’s been done many times—a delve can give adventurers the opportunity to discover a mystery, try out solutions, and emerge triumphant with new lore learned and evils defeated. Where the campaign is a novel, a dungeon is a short story.

Every element of a dungeon can be enlisted to help tell that story. Architecture, room contents, journals and other writings, and even intelligent inhabitants can all have their say, allowing the environment’s history to unfold as adventurers explore it. Lore earned by adventuring can be more satisfying than information gained all at once through a handout or a knowledge check.

To encourage this kind of environmental storytelling Dungeon Delver’s Guide offers 8 unique random dungeon generators for any level of play each of which provides tightly-themed enigmas, discoveries, obstacles, and revelations. For even more curated stories, we also provide 8 complete, fully-mapped minidungeons, each with its own mysteries to explore over a game session or two.

Making Choices

There is nothing more central to roleplaying than making choices. The clearer the stakes and the more significant the choices, the more engaging the game.

One reason for the dungeon’s enduring success as an adventure environment is the fact that it offers a great mix of clear and meaningful decisions. Go through this charred door or follow the sound of footsteps down that corridor? As the journey through the dungeon progresses more choices accumulate (take one of the paths ahead, go back to the map room and try to mess with that big stone globe, or find a place to rest and recover?) until finally the choices narrow back down to a few—is it time to tackle the lich in the throne room yet?

Dungeon Delver’s Guide offers advice and options for making every choice meaningful, as well as a new improv technique (Fractal Description) which keeps the game focused on player choice even when these choices lead in an unexpected direction. 

The Three Pillars

Unified in time and space, a dungeon is fantasy exploration distilled and focused. In a dungeon, each of the pillars of play—combat, exploration, and social interaction—coexist in the same neighborhood and sometimes in the same encounter.

Exploration isn’t limited to blazing a trail through the wilderness. It also refers to investigating the unknown and the mysterious—in other words it’s the central activity while navigating a dungeon, where each step forward is a step into unknown perils. 

Dungeon Delver’s Guide offers tons of exploration inspiration. In our huge dungeon generation section you’ll find hundreds of wonders to discover: marvelous sights, fiendish puzzles, and strange mysteries. For those who want to venture into a truly wondrous landscape the book also includes a gazetteer of Underland, an underground realm of vast caverns, haunted cities, and silent seas.

And of course no dungeon would be complete without traps! We’ve got a completely new approach to traps that uses Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition’s exploration challenge format. Our traps aren’t arbitrary hit point taxes and won’t slow the game to a crawl as adventurers search every 10-foot span of floor. Finding them is the easy part! The trick is what to do next. With multiple ways to bypass or disable every trap, each provides a challenge for any party—or a puzzle for clever players. And we’re not stingy with examples either. We’ve got more than 100 traps in the book!

When it comes to creating combat encounters, a dungeon is a bit different from a wilderness environment. While the party explores a desert it makes sense to look through the rulebooks for desert-dwelling monsters. It doesn’t make as much sense however to populate a dungeon with “dungeon-dwelling monsters” and call it a day. Each dungeon is its own ecosystem. More than in any other environment, there’s a sense that a dungeon’s opponents will be tied to its story—and that it may very well contain unique monsters that don’t appear anywhere else in the world. Dungeon Delver’s Guide random encounter tables work for various types of dungeons ranging from forgotten tombs to wizardly towers. Furthermore, the book contains several dozen new monsters to act as centerpieces for your combat encounters.

The importance of the social pillar of play should not be overlooked in a dungeon. In adventures full of novelty and mystery where creatures’ motives are unknown, nearly every potential combat encounter is also a potential social encounter, and vice versa. Roleplaying thrives on choice, and “everything is hostile” doesn’t give the adventurers many choices beyond the order in which to wipe out all the enemies. No dungeon is complete without potential allies, factions with different goals, creatures in need of help, and other opportunities for play to transform the environment. The encounter tables of Dungeon Delver’s Guide include not just encounter groups, but motives and social opportunities as well.

Deadly Lairs

Finally, the conquest of a dungeon can be the logical conclusion to a fantasy story. Once you’ve defended a town from invasion at the hands of an evil archvillain and defeated their nefarious plans on a windswept clifftop, you know that this isn’t over until you face them in their lair and defeat them once and for all. A well-defended lair is the natural climax of many an adventure, and the Dungeon Delver’s Guide provides a framework for designing tactically rich set piece battles.

What’s Next?

Over the next few weeks we’ll be offering more looks into Dungeon Delver’s Guide. I’d like to highlight some of our character options, the NODES dungeon-designing system, our new trap format, and other goodies—but let us know what else you’d like to see!