Dungeons

Under some landmarks there is now a way down. A dungeon is a real place you walk on a map with the character you already have: your health, your pack, your powers and your companions. The fog lifts as you go, and when something is in the way you say what you do, in your own words.

Everything about the place is decided before you arrive and kept by the game: every room, door, key and secret, who is down there and what they carry. The storyteller judges what you try and tells it well. It can't talk a locked door open, and neither can you, unless you do what opens it.

Finding one

• Look for the steps. A landmark with a dungeon under it has a small "steps down" badge on the world map, and its card says There is a way down here, with how many levels deep. Go there and head down.
• Or follow the story underground. In worlds that allow it, a sinkhole or a cellar under a ruin you found can open into a dungeon of its own. It only happens under wild places the story made, never in a town or under a builder's landmark, and not often.
• The first visit draws it. A dungeon nobody has seen yet takes about two minutes to draw. If you get there first, the stage says The way down is still being drawn while it works. After that it never changes.
• Inside, it's just the dungeon. Quests, the world's threads and anything on its way to find you wait outside until you climb back out.

Walking

• Click and walk. Click anywhere on the map and your character walks there with no turn and no waiting. Empty passages and rooms you've dealt with cost nothing.
• The walk stops when the story is needed: at the doorway of a new room with people, a trap or something to take, at a locked or sealed door, wherever a patrol is, and at every new doorway once the level is roused. A note on the map says why.
• A card shows what's ahead. It says what you can see from the doorway, and the buttons are ways in, each a whole turn in your own voice. Two of them are written for your character from your sheet, powers and companions. Something else hands you the action box.

Try anything

Every room knows how it works: what the people in it notice and what they don't, what they want and fear, what burns, what's rotten, what's loose. You never see these notes. The storyteller does, and judges your idea against them, whatever your idea is.

• Clean: your idea really gets around what matters (unseen by things that look, silent past things that listen, fire on what burns). You get through, even if nobody wrote that option down.
• Costly: it only partly does. You get through, but you're hurt, or it's heard.
• Botched: it ignores how the room works. Expect a fight, a fall, or an alarm.
• What each outcome costs was set when the room was made, and the game applies it, not the prose. Wounds are a share of your health, so they scale with you.
• A power does only what your sheet backs. Something you learned upstairs, like the words that open a seal, counts.

What the place keeps on you

• Noticed: three marks. Costly or botched outcomes, fights, traps and loud ways of doing things fill it. At two the level is stirring. When it fills, hunters set out for you.
• Time: minutes on this level. Every half hour the level stirs on its own. It takes longer for a quiet character to be noticed, and less for a loud one.
• Your health and your pack are the usual ones. A companion can be the one who takes the hurt, and torches, rope and potions you use up leave your pack.

Nobody stands still

• Idle life: guards pace, beasts shift and settle, bystanders drift.
• The story can move people. Throw something burning into the kindling and a hound that hunts by sight may bolt for it. A guard goes to check the noise next door. Someone who leaves a room no longer blocks it.
• Hunters come from the dungeon's own hostile people and close in along the real route. You hear them before you see them: a ripple in the dark, then a red glimmer in rooms you know. When they reach you, it's a fight.
• Patrols walk a fixed round through nearby rooms. Deal with them cleanly and they walk on.
• What fools or frightens someone depends on how they sense the world. A mastiff chases a thrown torch. An undead hound that feels warmth through stone doesn't.

Locks, seals and a goal

• Keys are things people carry. If the warden has the key, robbing the warden gets you the key.
• Seals have answers written or learned somewhere before them, kept under What you've learned.
• Levers, winches and sluices open ways elsewhere, sometimes on another level.
• Also: guarded passes, hazards to cross, secret doors with a tell, drops you can't climb back up, and shortcuts that open from the far side.
• Every dungeon can be finished. A checker proves it before anyone plays: every lock has a way through and nothing strands you.
• Every dungeon has one goal, shown on the panel and marked Done when it is: beat what's below, pull a heist, rescue someone, stop a rite, escape, find someone, or pick a side.

When the place changes

Take the idol and the level wakes. Free the captive and the warden stirs. Pull the lever and the flood drains. Some dungeons have clocks of their own: water rising, a search party, a rite with three bells. When something happens out of view, the map's camera goes to look.

Fights, treasure and the rest

• Fights are ordinary battle-map fights, drawn from the dungeon level itself, with the room's real occupants and any hunters who found you. Winning clears the room for good.
• Treasure is named. No loot tables: what's in a room or in someone's pack was decided when the dungeon was made.
• Some rooms let you rest, while time passes for the things that live there. Shrines offer bargains and name the price before you agree.
• Companions come with you. They walk beside you, get a word in at doorways, can scout ahead and can take a cost for you.
• Your run is kept. Walk out and come back later, and it's as you left it. Cleared rooms stay cleared. Undo is off inside a dungeon for now.

For world builders

• Dig a dungeon under any landmark in the Studio's Map tab. You can say what's down there, what it's for and how deep it goes (one to four levels), or leave it to the Studio. It's designed from your own world: the place, its region and history, your peoples and your cast.
• Open it to see every level in GM view and edit it in words: the story, who's down there and how they sense the world, every room and how it works, every way through, the triggers and clocks. The checker runs as you type, and Save waits until the dungeon can be finished.
• Ask Hob: "add a drowned chapel off the beacon ring, with a priest who keeps the store key". Hob refuses an edit that would make the dungeon impossible to finish, and tells you why.
• Let the story find its own. The Rules tab has The story finds dungeons of its own: never, rarely, now and then, or often.
• Write how each room works. It's the field that matters most: "sleeps through noise but wakes to light" makes a different room from "feels warmth through stone".

The full guide, for playing and for building, is the Dungeons page in Docs.