Alone in the Dungeon

I've been tinkering around with yet another project, and one that is very different from others that I have worked on in recent years, and is one that I don't expect to ever pitch to a publisher, or even try to monetise. This is just something to play with and use as a learning experience. 

But I'll build in to that... First a little background...

As a teenager I played quite a lot of roleplaying games; mostly Middle-earth Role Playing, D&D, or AD&D (yes, at that time, Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were separate products), but a few others here and there, including homebrews. One of the things that really interested me at that time was a few pages in the AD&D (1st edition) Dungeon Masters Guide: the first few appendices were for generating random dungeons, wilderness areas, monster encounters, etc., enabling you to play a D&D-based adventure game as a solo. It was kinda like a pencil-and-paper "Roguelike" game, and it was a fun thing to do when not playing "properly". 

There were also choose-your-own-adventure style books, like the Fighting Fantasy line, for your solo adventuring needs, if that fit your requirements.

Anyway, time passed and my engagement with roleplaying games varied. I've relatively recently been catching up a bit with developments (and playing a little), and one of the things that has been growing in popularity is "journaling RPGs". Whereas my old solo AD&D games involved drawing a map and then rolling dice for fights against monsters, and then rolling for loot acquired, this newer style is more about randomly generating events and writing prompts, which allow you to write a story about your character's exploits and develop their life through a series of journal entries. This was absolutely possible to do with the AD&D rules, but it didn't occur to me at the time, and the system was way more complicated that is necessary to provide the appropriate prompts.

A few solo dungeon delves and journaling RPGs: Notequest, 
Zimo's Getting Up, Apothecaria, 2D6 Dungeon, and Four Against Darkness

I was spurred into looking into this sort of gaming partly by my wife discovering them over the last couple of years or so, and then a bit more by a friend creating one about being a graffiti artist earlier this year, and as a result I developed an urge to try making a dungeon crawl game that leans into the journaling RPG form a bit more. 

I've done a little looking around for comparable games, and posted about the idea on Mastodon (my main is on tabletop.social, if you want to come and say hello) and got a few suggestions for things to look at too. Most of the clearly dungeon crawl games that I have seen (e.g. Notequest and Four Against Darkness) are effectively smoother versions of the solo AD&D: draw maps, battle monsters, acquire loot. There are some others (of those I have seen, Colostle is probably closest) that do something dungeon-crawl-adjacent, while being a proper journaling game. I've seen a few other games that are more or less adjacent to what I want to do, but nothing quite in the same zone - not that that would be a problem anyway. My searching hasn't been exhaustive though, so if you know of something that sounds a bit similar, please do let me know in the comments (or elsewhere).

So what am I planning and what have I done so far?

This is very much a background/side project for me to tinker with when I have any inspiration, and it is currently a document with some section headings and I am starting to fill in text and tables for randomly generating stuff. I've not got enough to actually play with yet, but there are odd bits and pieces that I'll start connecting up soon.

I'm not trying to come up with a flexible game system or a full campaign yet, instead creating a single adventure to play through, albeit one with some variation in how it can play out. The idea is that you, the player, are the companion and chronicler of a great protagonist or hero (think Watson to Holmes, or Ukko to Sláine), and you arrive together in a village and get sent to a nearby dungeon to deal with the evil wizard. You journey to the dungeon, work your way through a few levels of challenges, and eventually confront the wizard to, hopefully, save the day. All this time, you are creating a map to show the path of your adventure, and keeping a journal to record the daring deeds done in the dungeon. If the hero dies, maybe you escape to recount the tale; if you die, maybe the hero finishes the journal on your behalf.

I was originally planning to have a relatively lightweight combat/encounter system that would allow for some detail in how things work out, but on reflection I have decided to abstract out a load more, so that effectively there is a single die roll, applied to the situation, after which the hero and companion can apply special abilities to improve the result. This should effectively result in an outcome that could either simply be written down (if you aren't wanting to do creative writing), or could be used as a writing prompt. So, an example outcome could be: "3 orcs attack in the passageway. The hero uses her great axe to fight them but it looks like she will be seriously injured and have to retreat. The companion uses his stealth to help, and the hero uses her acrobatics skills. As a result, the orcs are slain and the hero only takes a minor wound." It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's a basis to build a journal entry around, detailing how those skills are used to affect the outcome.

Remember how I said that I'm planning some variation in how the game plays out? One aspect of this is that you record certain events and encounters in an area of your character sheet, and some of these things affect the likelihood of other things happening. So, for instance, if you start encountering undead creatures, that increases the chances of meeting more undead, and makes it more likely that the wizard at the end is a necromancer or some sort of undead spellcaster. Again, this isn't crazy clever stuff, but it would be nice if things link together in some sort of a thematic way as it all plays out.

There will be a load of tables to roll dice against. This is a thing I used to love making, so we'll see if I still have the chops to do this sort of thing. In the meantime, I figure that at least writing a bit of this stuff down should solidify some of it in my head. 

Challenge to self: make some more progress and make another post on the subject next month.