Dungeon Dynasty Draft
1 Summary of gameplay
A roll-and-write somewhere in the space of Blue Prince and Castles of Mad King Ludwig. The players are adventurers who have discovered a curious, abandoned network of underground chambers, where some hidden magic or machinery rearranges the rooms and corridors on each new visit. Residual enchantments give the explorers some control over how the dungeon forms itself, allowing them to build safe routes to the rooms they wish to visit, but they may find themselves stuck if their plans push the architecture into impossible geometries.
Players draw at random from a pool of variously-shaped dungeon rooms, placing them one by one onto a map, which they record personally in whatever style they wish (old-school hand-drawn grid paper, some digital art package, the website I used to draw the examples below, ASCII art, building it in a videogame, etc.) which they share to the blog. They then decide some optimal route through the dungeon that they've built, interacting with the effects of the different rooms as they pass through them, and announce the result. The goal is to design a dungeon in the first step that will allow you a high-scoring path in the second.
The game would be played over a number of rounds where players try to outscore each other in some way, all players using the same pool of rooms in each round, but adding and changing that pool (and perhaps being able to tune a personal pool) as the dynasty progresses.
Some rooms would grant the player resources when entered. Others might require resources to be held or spent to pass through. Hazards or creatures might harm the player, ending their run early.
My Imperial Style would be Gardener, Preservationist, Powerhouse, Scam-Gradual, Guarded and Methodical. I'd also be interested in trying out a Hybrid game clock where we initially don't care when actions are taken, until a switch gets flipped at some point to say that we do now care, and the structure becomes more measured.
2 Rule: Rooms
The table below lists Rooms that exist in the game, their shapes and their Doors, and their Effect if any.
| Entrance | 
|
Gain a Torch if you have no Torch |
|---|---|---|
| Gloomy Corridor | 
|
- |
| Pit Room | 
|
Lose 1HP to gain 3 Bones |
3 Rule: Dungeon Runs
When an Adventurer performs a Run, they perform the following steps as an atomic action:-
- Start a fresh Map, and draw an Entrance Room on it
- Repeat the following loop of steps as many times as they wish:
- Explore: Select a Room at random from those which have not already been selected during this Run
- Either draw that Room on their Map in a valid position, rotated by zero, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, or (if no valid positions exist for it) skip this step
- Make a blog post that includes a representation of their Map; this post is known as an Expedition
- Set their Location to the Entrance Room
- Repeat the following loop of steps as many times as they wish:
- Move to a Room connected to their current Location
- Optionally perform any action that can be performed there, any number of times
- Post a comment on their Expedition listing their Moves and Actions, and stating their final Inventory
Whenever an Adventurer Explores for the second and subsequent times in a Run, they should state in that dice roller comment where they placed the previous Room and in what rotation, in an unambiguous manner: eg. "placed Belfry north of Crossroads, rotated left".
A valid position of a Room is when one of its Doors overlaps with a Door already on that Map, and none of its floor squares overlap with floor squares already on that Map.
4 Rule: Heirlooms
Each Adventurer may have a publicly-tracked Heirloom, being an Item from the list in the rule "Items". If an Adventurer has no Heirloom, they may set their Heirloom to any Item.
