#dungeon crawling

[tofurevolution]

This September was a month of the worm. I’m currently participating in the Wormjam, a TTRPG game jam, all themed around His Majesty The Worm. I'm going to be posting quite a bit of art from my project in the coming days, so keep your eyes open!

Find His Majesty The Worm here: https://www.hismajestytheworm.games/ Find the Worm Jam here: https://itch.io/jam/worm-jam

[oldschoolfrp]

Battling in dungeon corridors is not for the claustrophobic. There is an art to stacking front line fighters and rear ranks with polearms, missile weapons, and ranged spells. Fighting with your back to a wall should prevent being encircled, but may leave you with no escape options. (Terry Dykstra, D&D Rules Cyclopedia by Aaron Allston, TSR, 1991)

[voidface-entity]

[theresattrpgforthat]

I love the idea of mega dungeons but I don't have a consistent group. Are there any games for doing mega dungeons in a zoomed out way? I'm thinking that you might deal with a room in as little as a single dice roll, and get through multiple trips into the dungeon in a single session of play.

The interesting thing about a mega dungeon to me is how it changes and evolves over repeated delves.

I could probably build a PBTA system but hopefully someone already has.

THEME: Sped-Up Mega Dungeons

Hello friend, I have a few different things that you might find helpful in speeding through dungeons and getting as much game as you can packed into just a few hours! I focused mostly on games that did dungeon-ing quick, less so on actual mega-dungeons. Also, sadly nothing here is PbtA.

WanderSquares: The Underwood Tunnels, by Dreamjar.

WanderSquares is a fantasy table-top roleplaying game for adventurers 9 and up. It features an ever-changing map, a choose-your-path adventure guide and 16 inspiring characters to choose from.

The WanderSquares map is made up of 32 interlocking Adventure Squares. Each square is a tiny story; with monsters, puzzles and treasure. The map grows in endless combinations with each new direction the players choose. Three Special Squares contain major magic items (and mini-bosses). Recover the treasure and you'll unlock the final challenge.

I don’t know exactly how long it takes to explore each square in Wandersquares, but I think it has two big strengths. The first is that it is designed to be simple, because it has kids in mind, so learning the game should be easy and quick. The second is that the adventure locations come in tiles that you can place out as you explore, with a choose-your-own adventure guide you can use to narrate each option quickly. Even if you don’t like the base system, having these location tools can be a big help in streamlining the dungeon, because all of the information is already there, including some imagery on the tiles that can be very evocative for the players.

Dungeoneering, by Grinning Rat.

DUNGEONEERING is a quick-and-dirty tabletop role-playing game where players explore dungeons, gather treasure, and fight monsters. Game Masters are encouraged to use the sample dungeon within, or generate their own with the creation tools, to facilitate these dangerous delves.

Dungeoneering sells itself as a quick-play game, slimming dungeon crawls into something called dungeon turns. You can explore one room of the dungeon in each dungeon turn, with checkpoints every 2, 12 and 24 turns to replenish torches, eat & drink, and rest.

I do think that Dungeoneering could be a more slowed-down game if you paused to roleplay more often, but rules-as-written, you’re rolling for simple pass or fail, and hit points are fairly low, reminiscent of what I see in gritty OSR-style dungeon games. The game comes with a starter dungeon, but it also has tables to help the GM build a dungeon on their own - whichever way you decide to go, I think that if you’re going to try and speed-run the dungeon, you definitely need to have the dungeon mapped out ahead of time, or you’ll slow the game down simply because generating rooms takes time.

Dungeon Dash, by Cosmic Sorcery Society.

Dive into the Dungeon Gig Economy!

Tired of boring office jobs? Ditch the cubicle and dive into the heart-pumping, monster-slaying chaos of the DungeonDash app!

In Mythica, dungeons are no longer treasure troves for heroes. They're monster-infested labyrinths, a constant threat to the cities and a source of risky, yet potentially lucrative, gigs for the daring.

Become a DungeonDasher! Team up with fellow adventurers and delve into the depths, slaying slimes, dodging traps, and cashing in with DungeonCoin (Ɖ), the hot new crypto that's making waves.

Described as “fast and furious”, DungeonDash sounds like it can be played in very short bursts. If you decide to use it to play a longer game, I’d reason that you can then go through quite a few dungeon rooms in just an hour, perfect for one-shots. Because it’s meant to be played in short bursts, I don’t know how much of the game focuses on how the dungeon changes over time - that might have to be an aspect that you as the GM bring to your table from somewhere else.

Out of the Dungeon by @toyourstations.

You have arrived at a dungeon rumoured to contain the secrets of a civilisation of wizards thought to be long perished. Your party has reason to believe that they are not – in fact you have reason to believe they are behind everything wrong with your world.

Your world is illogical. You didn’t know it as you grew up but the older you got and the more you travelled, the more you began to see the oddities. Monsters spring from nowhere to attack villages. Bandits haunt every road but don’t seem to live anywhere, or steal anything to eat. Rangers insist there simply isn’t the ecosystem to support the dragon in the mountains. And then there’s the occasional odd flicker of the sky, a mosaic of quickly shifting squares flittering across your vision like lights dancing on the ceiling of the world. 

Out of the Dungeon uses a deck of cards to help generate the rooms that your adventurers move through. More than any of the other games on this list, I think Out of the Dungeon has the capacity to give you the feeling of changing the dungeon as you venture through it, because your characters need the dungeon to change if they’re going to escape it. It’s still in a pretty rough ash-can place, but I think the ideas behind it are pretty resonant with what you’re looking to achieve.

A Golden Flame, by Mundos Infinitos.

A Pamphlet TTRPG adventure where you explore dungeons and survive the Dungeon Master. Based on a Whim-based system, this game is classic-style, not OSR, and is easy to learn, play and hack.

A short pamphlet game, A Golden Flame doesn’t come with a pre-generated dungeon, but it does come with dungeon generation tools that the GM can take advantage of during their prep. A unique game system for this game is called Whims - a resource that is given to everyone at the beginning of the game, and can be used by players to level up, expand the world, conjure magic, or engineer a lucky circumstance.The GM uses Whims to eliminate people or things precious to the players, change how effective an action is, create custom challenges, etc.

I’m not so sure I’m a fan of the rules that penalize players for poor table manners by giving the GM more in-game powers - I’m a believer that out-of-game faux pas are best met with out-of-game responses, rather than in-game punishments, but I do like the idea of giving the GM visible currency to give them a reason to generate challenges for the characters.

Overpowered, by Technical Grimoire Games.

Overpowered is a solo framework for speedrunning your favorite tabletop rpg adventures. Manage your power, choose your path, and perfect your strategy. Achieve a high score and dominate the online leaderboards. Try the demo adventure for free right now! 

Overpowered converts adventures from various ttrpgs into something that can be played through solo, using specific pieces of information as challenges that your character will have to overcome. The game seems to work best with pre-written dungeons, and rewards play that is cautious but ambitious. If you have a lot of adventure modules that have creatures, treasure, and puzzles, you can probably speedrun them using Overpowered.

Overpowered is also probably the most professional-looking game on this list, and that's simply because Technical Grimoire really knows what they're doing when it comes to making a nice-looking product.

Bite-Sized Dungeon by @sprintingowl.

Bite-Sized Dungeon is a 9 page tabletop adventure game that you can play with absolutely no equipment.

You can use it to dive a forbidden ruin, fight monsters, steal treasure, and hightail it back to safety---all in the time it takes for your pizza to arrive, or for the bus to show up, or for the doors to open at the convention hall.

Use your hands to resolve checks, play modules from other systems with very little trouble, and hack to add in additional content.

Bite-Sized Dungeon uses some very simple rules to determine whether or not your adventure succeeds or fails in any given action, and has a simple way to keep track of your health - you can get Squashed five times before you’re eliminated, and you need a new adventurer. The game is designed to be able to be played anywhere, which is useful for the players, but I’m not sure how well you’d be able to play the dungeons on the go, unless the dungeon master has either a printed reference or a very very good memory. I do appreciate that the game has links to 5 different dungeon modules that you can use with this game, or any other dungeon game!

You can also check out the Remastered version of Bite-Sized Dungeon if you want to see what the author’s been doing with the game recently.

Also…

If you want more Dungeon games, I recommend checking out some of my following recommendation posts:

Fantasy - With Tools

Modern Magic

Crunchy Dark Fantasy

Echoes of D&D

I also think Planet Dungeon does some great dungeon-crawling stuff.

If you like what I do, you can leave a tip at my Ko-fi page <3.

[vixensdungeon]

Are there any good or at least decent science fiction/fantasy RPGs that support dungeon crawling, planetary and space exploration, and base building? Anyway here's my campaign pitch.

The party has come into possession of a massive ancient Precursor™ ship. The hallways and compartments are dark and filled with peril, with many systems barely functional. At some point (maybe around level 3ish) the character manage to get the ship operational enough to fly it around, but there's still much of the ship itself left to explore.

Basically it's a megadungeon you take with you as you explore the wilderness.

[bubbydarkstar]

more assorted fantasy junk

what do you think of the colors here? tried using a limited palette and not sure how i feel about it

[greatwyrmgold]

Dungeon Logistics

Between the currently-airing Dungeon Meshi anime and my recent binge of the manga (I finally got past the 40% mark), I've been thinking about the logistics of long-term dungeoneering.

The Problem

Military theorists and historians have some rules of thumb about what soldiers can be expected to do and need. [citation] For instance, they usually need around three pounds of food per day and can carry around 90-120 pounds of stuff. (The total varies less by strength and more by how much of that strength you can convince soldiers to use carrying stuff the general cares about.)

Theoretically, this means soldiers can carry a month or two of food; however, hardtack makes a pretty terrible weapon. Most of their carrying capacity is taken up by inedible (and also important) gear; the standard rule of thumb seems to be that soldiers can carry about ten days' worth of food.

The same is presumably more or less true for dungeoneers. A wizard's robe, staff, and spellbook probably weigh less than a sword and a suit of armor, but that space is going to get taken up by the miscellaneous tools you need to survive in a dungeon that aren't necessary for armies walking through inhabited lands.

In short, in the absence of Senshi, dungeoneers can only spend about a week and a half in the dungeon. Obviously, you need to set aside time to return to the surface, so you can't go deeper than five days. Well, you can—starvation doesn't kill you instantly—but you really shouldn't.

Extra Cargo

What if we added some people who only carried food? That would help some. Including two porters per three dungeoneers would roughly double the group's operational endurance, from ten days to twenty.

But the number of porters grows rapidly as the desired trip into the dungeon grows longer; operational endurance to 30 days requires four porters per dungeoneer. Even if the dungeon is spacious for a party of dozens to be possible, having that party be 80% or more noncombatants is a recipe for disaster.

What about pack animals? Mules require about five times as much food as humans (assuming they can't graze in the dungeon), but they can carry close to 300 pounds of supplies. One mule per three dungeoneers extends operational endurance from 10 to 15 days, a second to 17.

That's not bad, but pack animals work better when they can graze. If the dungeon has grass or equivalent foliage, one mule per three dungeoneers increases operational endurance to about 26 days, a second to 35, and one mule per dungeoneer increases it to 39. But most dungeons don't have much to graze on.

For the spendthrift dungeoneer, pack animals have one advantage over porters: You can eat them.

Butchery

I can't find any actual data about how much meat you get from butchering a mule, but combining other data lets me estimate 300 pounds (with large error bars).

So you could theoretically buy a (relatively) cheap mule at the surface, bring it with you through the dungeon, butcher it when you'd eaten through the supplies on its back, and live off its meat for a while. In this case, you probably don't even need to feed it on the way down! I have been informed that you do, in fact, need to feed it.

Five dungeoneers could live off the supplies carried by an increasingly malnourished mule for about 19 9.5 days. The mule would probably lose weight during that time, but the butcher could probably get at least a hundred pounds of decent meat off the poor critter. That would give them at least a week of extra rations, plus whatever they carried on their own backs, for a total operational endurance of at least five three and a half weeks.

This strategy probably works best if the adventurers are planning to go establish a camp after a few days and linger there for a few weeks. That would let them slaughter the mule as soon as they reach their base camp and free them from somehow carrying a whole mule carcass worth of food around afterwards.

This kind of strategy could enable supply depots relatively close to the surface. If we increase the party from five dungeoneers and a mule to five merchants and twenty mules, they could supply adventurers going a bit deeper. They'd need to charge a pretty hefty surcharge—at the very least, they'd need to cover the cost of killing so many mules!

It's also possible to create supply depots without slaughtering pack animals, but they would need to be smaller, closer to the surface, or both.

It would, strictly speaking, be possible to make a deeper supply depot, supplied by a larger depot. It would probably be impractical, though.

Conclusion

Dungeoneers weighed down by their own equipment can only spend brief periods of time exploring a dungeon. If they include some porters or pack animals in the party, they can increase that to maybe a month (two weeks down, two weeks up).

A sufficiently profitable dungeon economy might enable a set of outposts where adventurers can rest and resupply between treks deeper into the dungeon. If enough pack animals were slaughtered, they might be able to bring supplies a week or two deeper than the surface market.

In the right circumstances, dungeoneers might be able to delve a full month below the sunlit world without eating anything except wheat bread and mule meat. But this requires a small army of merchants and herdsmen and porters and butchers and so on, feeding not just the dungeoneers themselves but all the people supporting them, and all the people supporting those people, reaching through countless miles of cavern and across acres of farmland.

And of course, all of that assumes that no step in this process gets disrupted by the dangers of a dungeon; no wargs killing your mule, no warg packs overrunning the outpost, no getting lost in the twisty little maze of passages all alike. The higher you build that house of cards, the farther you'll far if it fails.

Senshi had the right idea.

[sprintingowl]

Dungeon Crawl Bundle

From now (3/3/25) to later (4/3/25), the Dungeon Crawling TTRPG Bundle will be live.

Thirty five games, twenty five creators, every possible interpretation of dungeon crawl.

My game's about liminal marine bus stations. Others are about the stone age, dreams, BLAME!!, pokemon, tiny mice, and more.

Every purchase supports indie designers and helps us make more ttrpg stuff.

[muzetrigger]

The Diary of Nana June 2025

Above ground, you could easily find a handful, but they were scattered across the ruins. Now that we’ve gotten farther into the level, there are just heaps of magic focuses everywhere!

[latealzalost]

The Bois Today marks my 29th lap around the sun. It's been a long ride and I have witnessed many changes. Changes such as my growing roster of comfort characters and new hyper fixations to put next to my old ones. I recommend to everyone that they play Dashbored, DreamWild, and Psychopomp GOLD. Their shared multiverse and lore is amazing and intrigues me to no end. I've never been so hyped over an indie developer's games like I have these past 6 months. I swear on my life as a major Orre fan and video game connoisseur, it will be worth your time.

[salamanding]

a little while back i revisited my Dungeon Bun poster design (still one of my proudest pieces tbh) and gave it some color! i like it even more now

[jettermelon]

Guess who's finally posting on Itch.io again?

That's right, it's this bitch.

A system agnostic OSR dungeon, about exploring a first world war bunker with a supernatural twist. Created for @imsobadatnicknames2's the Delve of the Dark Moon Game Jam.

I think it's pretty cool, and that you should read it. It's free!

[resident-dog]

Watching the first episode of Dungeon Meshi (pretty much the only Isekai/RPG-ish anime I've seen in ages) and it has me thinking about the stuff that the manga kinda glossed over (I have read the whole thing lol).

Just being in town and seeing those people who just escaped with their lives, squinting and pale from how long they've been down in the dungeon, jumping at shadows and holding onto their weapons or casting focuses like their life depends on it. They've had no time to adapt, and the volume and bustle of the towns has them overstimulated and nervous.

The people who have a faraway look in their eyes, their skin baby-soft. You know they were just revived. They experienced death. They were gone. And now they're back. If it's their first time, there's no way it hasn't left a mark on them. If it's their hundredth, they probably still aren't doing much better.

Dungeon crawling's gotta be hard as fuck, man.

[hotcomicstv]

Vermis Art By Plastiboo

[bugbearsandbookends]

Beneath the Sunken Catacombs: Rules Lite Dungeon Crawling Done Right

Paul Bantok’s Beneath the Sunken Catacombs (2nd edition shown here) may be as close to the platonic ideal of an old school dungeon crawling roleplaying game as I’ve found yet.

This is 150 tightly written and handsomely illustrated pages crammed full of content, covering everything from characters creation to dungeon design, all designed with an eye toward squeezing as much variety and option from as few rules as possible. Sorcerers, rangers, arcane archers—you can have it all with the tiniest of tweaks to basic player character archetypes. The same goes for the monsters. All of them come with six different random variants, which in effect gives the DM dozens upon dozens of unpredictable foes for play groups.

Play is brutal, of course—this is old school, like I said—but Beneath the Sunken Catacombs knows what it’s all about, and gaming groups who can get with the vibe will find no end of adventure in this single volume.

This is a desert island game for me, essentially. Hand me a set of dice and this little book and I could run campaigns for years and years with those alone.

[jkcorellia]

While I've never disliked Tolkienian or DnD-style dwarves, I've also never thought a ton about them. However, I'm now planning a Pathfinder one-shot involving delving into the tomb/prison of a feared ancient dwarven tyrant, and my players are absolutely going to think the whole thing is an ode to dwarves - which it kinda will be, as the more lore I come up with the cooler I think dwarves are.