Delves

A delve is a quick dungeon run with friends. Pick a dungeon and the rules, make a character in a minute, and send a link. Your friends don't need an account. Get what you came for, get back out alive, and the run ends in a tale you can share.

Start one

Open Worlds and the Dungeons tab. There are 34 dungeons, each planted by the world it belongs to: a goblin warren, a drowned library, a pirate's cell to empty before dawn, a dead mage's tower, and more. Press Delve and choose:

• How hard. Easy: stronger heroes, softer foes, three healing draughts each. Normal: an even fight, two draughts. Hard: more foes, and stronger, one draught, and a fall can kill. On Easy and Normal a fall is a defeat, not a death.
• The rules. The world's own, Worldtable's, or a rule system: Classic d20, Forged in the Dark, Moves (PbtA style), Investigative d100, Grim d100 or Duality (Hope and Fear). Characters are made under them and every roll in the delve uses them. Rule systems are in beta.

Opening a delve takes an account. Up to four can play.

Quick characters

No backstory. Pick a name (or roll one from the world), a people and a class, and you're ready.

• Under the world's own rules the classes are a fighter, a skirmisher, a spellcaster and a warden, named in the world's own words, each with gear and three skills that work in a fight.
• Under a rule system you pick one of its classes, and the system's own sheet fills itself in for it: abilities, skills, kit, your people's bonuses and a caster's first spells. Change anything you like.

The lobby

• Send the link. Copy it, or share it from your phone. Anyone with it can join without an account. Their turns come out of your credits, 1 credit a turn, up to a cap for the whole delve. Anyone who signs in pays for their own. You can close the link or make a new one at any time.
• Party chat for planning the way down.
• The way in is a battle map with everyone standing on it. Tap it to set off fire, frost, lightning, shadow, light, thorns, arcane or a blade while you wait.
• The host presses Play now whenever they're ready.

Down there

• One shared run. The leader walks: arrow keys, WASD, or the pad on your phone, and holding keeps you walking. Everyone else can wander the ground the party has already seen, and the lead can be passed or asked for.
• Everyone sees everyone's turn as it plays.
• The doorway shows what's ahead. A walk stops at the threshold of a room with something in it, and a card shows what you can see from there and a few ways in. Pick one, or write your own.
• The roll decides the room. Under a rule system, getting past a trap, a guard or a sleeping beast is rolled by those rules, however carefully you go about it. A made roll goes cleanly, a mixed one costs you, a failed one goes badly.

• Fights happen on the dungeon map, with every hero in them. A doorway the foes don't hold is a way out, and outrunning them ends the fight too. A hero who falls lies where they fell until someone gets them up.
• Change the map. Walls of ice, stone or fire, frost, smoke, darkness and thorns stay on the dungeon map for as long as they last, and hunters have to wait or find another way round.
• Captives follow you once they're freed, and a rescue counts when they're out alive.

How it ends

You win when the goal is done and you're back at the way out. You lose when the goal is lost or nobody is left standing. On Hard a hero who dies reads along as a ghost while the others play on.

Then the bard writes it up: the tale of how you won, or the obituary of how you didn't. The replay is a page anyone can open, with the tale, the party and the whole run played back on its maps, so you can send it round. Table talk stays out of it.

To call off a delve you host, or leave one you joined, use its card on the Dungeons tab.