A Dungeon, A Girl, A Demon, An Idea
I suppose ever since I started making games and getting into this indie ttrpg scene I’d wanted to do my own dungeon crawler, dungeons are just such a perfect little unit of gameplay, but it wasn’t until I I played in a Play-by-Post playtest of Tibbius’ Swords Against Demons that an idea really started to coalesce in my mind about what my take would be.
The game is good and I will talk about what I like about it but to be perfectly honest, my dungeon crawler has very little mechanical connection at all to Swords (there is a little). The main inspiration for this game to come from that one was the character I played: Cecily, who is… probably my favourite player character I’ve ever played (it’s a small selection to choose from but I think she takes the gold medal).
When Tibbius first showed me the rules for Swords Against Demons I was immediately drawn to the wizard. The idea of binding demons to do magic was so flavourful. I took that concept and ran with it when I played Cecily. I think in Tibbius’ mind the binding and releasing of the demons was a little less visceral. I immediately made it a character thing, the demons were bound TO HER, not just bound in some sort of liminal magic space. The demons messed with her emotions, her reactions.
She was a different person with those things in her head. She started out unsettling and odd, very twitchy and quick to violence but then, after releasing a pair of demons to do horrible things to some cultists she broke, came to her senses and was terrified before snapping to action and trying to keep her companions going despite the horrors below.
The party dynamics were great, Roka and Cecily were wonderful, they didn’t trust each other at all but were forced to agree they needed each other; Pierrot was the over stressed go-between. Cecily loved them both, but I think they were both mostly terrified of her.
Then it happened, the moment that really hooked me on this idea of scary, desperate dungeon crawling with demon-slinging wizards… the moment Cecily died.
Given how the magic system worked, Cecily ended up undoubtedly the most injured character in the group. Covered in dried blood and wrapped up in dirty makeshift bandages torn from her tattered dress only for every wound to open up again any time she used her magic. Her death was expected and horribly mundane.
She tried to go down some stairs in the dark and tripped… then things got REALLY interesting.
Tibbius agreed the idea I had was fun: to have Cecily get right back up again, possessed by a demon who just wants to see what it’s like. In the end Demon Cecily went down swinging, bursting out of her corpse suit and fighting another demon to the death while the others escaped
This moment and the way the magic works in Swords led to two ideas in my mind: Demons have personalities that conflict with the wizard and Spells are fueled by wounds.
Taking these ideas and running with them I went from, spells cause wounds that you have to carry in your inventory; a game mechanic that a lot of great games have used that does a good job of easily mechanising fatigue; and, as I often do when designing games asking….
What if that was the entire game?
I liked the idea of building up stress and wounds but, at a certain point they start to de-incentivise the kind of player actions I generally like to do myself and love to see players do, i.e. throwing your characters absolutely headlong into danger and possibly but maybe not having it blow up in your face. With Cecily I just kept throwing her into the brunt of the action despite her being a fragile little stick insect once she’d burnt through her demons. It was fun and exciting and terrifying, the whole game felt tense and dangerous, we were up against impossible odds just trying to escape as a horrible demon chased us through the halls while scared and as it turns out, fairly harmless cultists ran away from us. But for Cecily, and the demon inhabiting her corpse it was all just a long march to death. I knew Cecily had no chance of killing the demon at the end, it was mechanically impossible, but it was so much fun. For my game I want to be able to do things like that while also having a chance to get out of even the most desperate situations.
So that’s where the core mechanic of my dungeon crawly thing comes in.
The main idea is this": You build stress up as you explore the dungeon, then, you can use that stress to power abilities. After a bit of tinkering, reading game books and looking at forum posts while typing out ideas I landed on what I think is a pretty neat little system. I haven’t play-tested yet but that will be happening soon, you’ll hear all about it here when I do.
okay, so this is how it works:
There are three stats, I call them Aspects: Mind/Body/Heart, I originally wanted to go Head/Hands/Heart because it sounded good but it didn’t work as neatly once I started talking about like… types of magic etc.
You roll a d20 against one of these aspects when rolling a save.
I went for a roll under system (i.e. you want to roll at or under your aspect score) since it made the math neater when stress came into the picture.
When you gain stress from something it is taken away from your aspect score so for example:
If a character with a Mind score of 18 takes 3 mind stress their mind aspect is brought down to 15.
Because of how this system works the players should be incentivized to want to use their abilities (aside from them just being the big flashy things your character can do) because abilities shift stress around which in turn lets you modify your chances to succeed on rolls.
The other big thing I want to shout out in this post that I’ll get into later with each specific character class is the Breaking Point. I didn’t want a character hitting max stress to only mean death. I really like the Zenith abilities in Heart: The City Beneath by Rowan, Rook & Decard. The idea that your character always goes out with a bang just felt so right for what I want to do with this game, so that’s where Breaking Points came in. A lot of them do result in your character dying but… it is never clean and always chaotic.
I could keep rambling about this here but it wouldn’t be a blogpost series now would it. Let’s pull up here for now, next time… let’s get weird… real weird, and start on the character classes!
Until next time,
Andy.
