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gimblestank-the-goblin · 13 hours ago

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hi so ive been interested in designing my own ttrpg lately, and a big part of that is simply becoming familiar with extant ttrpgs and their genres. so i come to you to ask for good introductions (not necessarily to play, but to read) to the dungeon crawling genre. like, ones which sort of make clear what exactly dungeon crawling is, and what the appeal of it is.

Ok well! This is an interesting ask!

Before I make any recommendation, I'll just say that in my personal opinion, a good dungeon-crawler includes all or most of the following elements:

Emphasis on resource management, the PCs' resources should be always dwindling in a way that makes the choice to retreat vs. push forward a meaningful one

Emphasis on attention to detail and environment interaction, as well as resourceful and creative usage of the tools at the PCs' disposal to overcome challenges with no predefined solution.

Mechanics that disincentive combat as the default outcome of every encounter (such as high lethality, no guarantee of "balanced" encounters, significant time and/or resource investment required to recover from damage taken during a fight, etc.) The decision to engage in combat should not be the default assumption whenever a creature is encountered, it should be one that always carries significant risks and potential consequences, ideally incentivizing players to find creative or resourceful ways to bypass combat situations through stealth, deception, parlay, fleeing, etc., and only engage in it when they think exposing themselves to those consequences is justified or the only option (or when they've found an ingenious way to tip the scales in their favor).

A reward structure that encourages players to explore and interact with the environment, such as the classic Gold For XP rule that encourages players to search every nook and cranny for any bit of hidden treasure.

Systems that encourage an open-ended structure with no pre-defined GM-authored narrative.

That's just my opinion though. I think that a bit essential reading for your purposes would be any of the D&D editions from when the main focus of the game was still dungeon-crawling rather than grand epic high fantasy adventures. I recommend reading the Basic booklet from the 1981 Basic/Expert set, which is probably the D&D edition that has had the most explicit influence over the modern dungeon-crawling revival (B/X retroclones are basically their own entire subgenre of the OSR). Old-school D&D is just a good starting point to understand a lot of the basic elements and base assumptions that later dungeon-crawlers are, in some way or another, in conversation with. But like. D&D's legacy looms so large here that this recommendation was probably already a given.

While it isn't a game, but rather a primer formatted as a collection of Player and GM principles, I would also say that the Principia Apocrypha is also pretty much required reading, as it's IMO the clearest distillation of the play culture that modern OSR and OSR-adjacent dungeon-crawlers are try to incentivize.

I think it's also an example of something I find interesting about the OSR and its associated play culture: as @thydungeongal (I think it was her, at least) put it once, as much as the OSR community claims to be getting back to the roots of the hobby, much of its play culture is actually an exercise in historical revisionism. The play culture espoused by the OSR community isn't really a faithful recreation of the play culture that actually existed around dungeon games back in the day, but more like. an attempt to reverse-engineer a play culture that's actually compatible with the mechanics and assumptions of old-school dungeon games. And I think the Principia Apocrypha is a wonderful and clear distillation of this reverse-engineered play culture.

As for my actual recommendations now:

Mausritter by Isaac Williams, I know I'm always recommending Mausritter every time I get the chance but like. I don't only recommend it because it's my favorite game, but because it's extremely approachable regardless of your previous level of familiarity with tabletop rpgs (probably one of the best possible introductory games to the hobby) AND it does a lot of stuff that is relevant here.

First of all, despite the fact that it doesn't explicitly refer to its adventure locations as "dungeons" or use the term "dungeon-crawling" or related, it *is* very much a dungeon game, and explicitly spells out the gameplay loop and setting assumptions of dungeon games: the world is dangerous, settlements are small, rare, and usually their stability is threatened in some way, and you play as one of the few people who are willing to brave the dangerous outside world to find riches to bring back to the safety of a settlement (it's trivially easy to point out the ways in which this setup has the potential for a lot of #unsavory ideological implications, but it *is* the standar dungeon game setup and it *does* make for a compelling gameplay loop). It also explicitly spells out a lot of the principles that support my ideas for what makes a good dungeon crawler. For example, I like how it explicitly encourages players to be resourceful by straight-up telling them that relying on dice-rolls is dangerous, that dice rolls can be avoided with preparation and resourcefulness, as actions that you attempt with a good plan or the right tools automatically succeed without a roll, and thus the most optimal way to play is one where you minimize or completely eliminate the necessity to roll dice through clever planning and use of the tools at your disposal.

I also really like how it leans into the resource management aspect by tying so many of its mechanics to inventory management. Like. Its cars-based physical inventory is cute and distinctive and intuitive:

But it also clearly has to exist because shuffling items around in your inventory is such a load-bearing mechanic for many of its systems. Like, inventory is extremely limited (you have two paw slots, two body slots, and six slots in your backpack, that's all the items you can carry, and being co.pletely encumbered gives you disadvantage on every roll), which of course limits the tools and resources you can bring into a dungeon, but also:

The only source of XP in the game is treasure: the XP you get is equal to the value in pips (the mouse kingdoms' standard currency) of any treasure that you bring back from a dungeon to a settlement. This means you need to balance making sure you bring any gear you'll need with making sure you leave yourself enough free inventory space to be able to carry any treasure you find.

Negative conditions take up an inventory slot each, which makes them especially dangerous and hard to ignore, as getting hit with a negative condition might mean having to leave some of your items or treasure behind.

Spells are physical items in your inventory, and you need to be holding them in your paw in order to cast them. This means that not only the space you dedicate to spells in your inventory is an important choice, but also WHERE you put them in your inventory (items in your body slots are assumed to be strapped to your upper body and may be freely swapped to your hands at any point, but items in your pack slots require an action to retrieve).

A common argument against the kind of resource management centered in this type of dungeon-crawling gameplay is that inventory management is boring and tedious, but Mausritter shows how much well-exevuted inventory management adds to this gameplay style. It not only makes keeping track of inventory fun and effortless, but also explicitly turns it into an extremely engaging source of tension and challenge by tying it to as many of its systems as possible.

There's a lot else I could say about Mausritter (like how much I like its damage system, which is very effective at having longer-term consequences for getting hurt in co.bat beyond HP loss without being too very punishing, how much I like the faction system, how good its GM toolkit is, etc.) but let's move on.

Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games is a game I kinda slept on for a long while, because as far as I knew it was mostly an AD&D clone with an admittedly cool artste that evokes the more pulpy illustrations of 80's D&D with a bit of a grimier feel to it. But after checking it out, it's a very unique game that leans very hard on the strange, chaotic, pulpy gonzo side of dungeon-crawling. The most distinctive feature of DCC is its heavy use of an absurd amount of random tables. While this can be a bit cumbersome to be quite honest, the randomness inherent to the system and the sheer number of strange and absurd table results do a phenomenal job of Putting The PCs in A Situation™ in a way that requires them to be constantly on their toes. It's just a lot of (extremely chaotic, extremely lethal) fun, as the players can never know what to expect and they can easily be thrown into disarray at a moment's notice and have to think on their feet. Definitely not for everyone but it's very interesting nonetheless.

DCC is also responsible for creating the concept of the level 0 funnel adventure (or at the very least popularizing, not sure if any other game did it before but DCC definitely was the game that brought attention to it): the game starts with a big group of level 0 characters, with the understanding that their first adventure will serve as a meatgrinder in which most of them will inevitably die (which is why each player starts off controlling up to 4 characters). Only the ones that survive their first adventure get to advance to level 1 and pick a character class to become full-fledged adventurers. Starting off controlling several characters with the assumption that most of them will not survive long into their first adventure is an extremely heavy-handed but very effective way of establishing the tone of high lethality I mentioned before, which is an essential tool for forcing players to find ways to deal with encounters other than immediately charging into combat.

Knave 2e by Ben Milton is a pretty solid D&D-adjacent dungeon crawler with enough cool features to mechanically stand apart as its own thing (such as the fact that the system is designed to effortlessly convert any GM-facing roll into a player-facing roll if desired, and some relatively unique character generation procedures) while still preserving compatibility with most D&D adventures, which is really cool. It has very clear and streamlined procedures for dungeon and wilderness exploration, it makes extensive use of tons of random tables for nearly everything you might need to generate on the fly (although not to the same degree as DCC, nor anywhere near as chaotic), it's a very cool imolementation of a classless system where PCs are mostly defined by their inventory, and a lot of other good stuff. However, none of these are the reason I bring it up. The reasons I recommend it for your purposes here are:

1) Its magic system is really emblematic of what I said about emphasizing resourcefulness and creative use of your resources. Knave has a pretty sizable spell list (as well as tables for randomly generating even more spells), but if you start with a spell, you have no control over what spell it is, and. more importantly: Knave 2e doesn't have any spells explicitly meant for combat. There aren't any spells in the game that have the effect of directly causing damage to a creature. This, along with the fact that the spell(s) you start with are random, means that players are incentivized to apply their spells creatively, both in and out of combat. Because the thing is: magic *does* have the potential to be used for combat, but doing so requires a great deal of creative lateral thinking on how to apply it.

And, most importantly, 2) Knave is a game that's very upfront and explicit about what its best practices and design goals are. Not only does it have clearly spelled out GM and Player principles that are very clear about its intended playstyle and what is expected of GMs and players in order to have the intended experience, but the last section of the book also features designer's commentary about pretty much every mechanic and feature of the game, explaining what its purpose is, why it works the way it does, and what its influences and inspirations are, which I think is particularly useful for your case.

Shadowdark by Kelsey Dionne is one that I don't have as much to say about. It's a game built on the skeleton of 5e but massively stripped down and trying to replicate the spirit and gameplay style of old-school dungeon-crawlers. For the most part it's a solid but pretty standard "old-school style game but with modern quality-of-life improvements", but what I find remarkable about it is how it emphasizes an aspect of dungeon-crawling that's often overlook or handwaved: light and dark. Not only can characters not see in the dark, but also being in the dark gives disadvantage on every roll, which makes it appropriately dangerous and oppressive. But the most unique thing about it is the fact that light sources run on a real-time one-hour timer, and the book encourages the GM to constantly threaten the party's light source with environmental effects and whatnot, which makes darkness a much more pressing danger, It also incorporates an optional DCC-style funnel adventure mode, as well as a ton of optional game modes which modify certain rules (such as shorter light source timers and a ton of other stuff), which is pretty neat.

This one's probably the most different out of the bunch I'm going to mention, but... Dungeon Bitches by @cavegirlpoems is a very interesting example of taking the core conceits of the premise of a dungeon-crawler and using them to produce a queer narrative about trauma, centering queer women (especially trans women). In terms of mechanics it's very different from all the other ones i've mentioned because it's a Powered By the Apocalypse game, but it still goes out of its way to incorporate a lot of the principles of OSR play, just on a different mechanical chassis. In terms of its queer themes, Dungeon Bitches is a game that asks the question "what kind of person would actually end up having to do this for a living?" and concludes that the kind of people who would end up gravitating to dungeon-crawling as a career would be the most marginalized, the people who have no place for them in polite society. As explained on the original post from 2020 on cavegirl's blogspot:

Here's the pitch. A faux-medieval gritty fantasy setting with all your standard crap hetero-patriarchal assumptions. Political marriages, dowries, etc etc. Not the best society to be a queer girl in. Luckily, if the thought of getting married off and having to pretend like you're happy with that is too much for you, there are two options.

-You can run away and join a nunnery. This is slightly more socially acceptable, much less likely to get you killed, but will also result in living a life defined by limitations and restrictions.

-You can run away, join a band of similar (heavily armed) bitches, and make a living as mercenaries, tomb-robbers and adventurers. This is far less socially acceptable, and far more dangerous, but you might get rich, fall in love, and be able to wreak terrible vengeance on the society that wronged you.

So... yeah. It's an excellent game imo and one that leverages and recontextualizes the core assumptions of the genre for a very different purpose in a really cool way.

Lastly, for a game that boils dungeon crawling almost completely down to its bare essentials, check out bastards. by Micah Anderson. It has a lot of the elements of a lot of the games I mentioned above, but distilled down to their bare essence both in terms of mechanics and in terms of how they're described, at the cost of presuming a high level of prior familiarity with the ttrpgs and the assumptions of the dungeon-crawler genre. I just like how stylish it is and how flavorful it manages to be with so little.

Some other games that I think you should check out but I can't really write about here, either because the cool stuff they do is similar to games I already mentioned but executed in a different way, because I don't have that much interesting commentary about them, or because I haven't read them myself and my awareness of their cool features is all secondhand so I can't rlly vouch for it:

DURF by Emiel Boven

.dungeon by Snow

Songbirds 3e by Snow

The Black Hack by David Black

Torchbearer by Thor Olavsurd and Luke Crane

Troika by the Melsonian Arts Council

Tunnel Goons by Higland Paranormal Society

Cairn by Yochai Gal

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