Dungeons and danger

A dungeon is a stack of floors. Each floor is made the first time you set foot on it, then kept as you left it. This page explains who lives on a floor and how many; the dungeons with rules of their own, from the endless Grundlēas to the lairs of the wanted, are on The dungeons one by one.

Every place has a danger level, a number the game never shows you. On a dungeon floor it is the dungeon’s base danger plus a step for every floor down. A hand-made place has one of its own. The overworld and the land you explore from it have none. Only the Pits grow more dangerous as you do.

Who lives there, and how many

Each dungeon names the creatures that live in it. A creature’s level is its danger. On a floor of danger 6, the creatures you meet are mostly of level 5 and 6, some a little weaker, a few weaker still, and now and then one from deeper down. Each time a creature is chosen, every kind that lives there gets a weight by how far its level is below the floor’s danger, and the choice goes by weight. Kinds of the same weight are equally likely:

Some kinds are rarer than others. The more dangerous and rewarding a kind is (casters, chieftains, the strongest of a place), the rarer. A kind’s weight above is multiplied by its rarity’s share, so a rare kind at the floor’s danger is chosen a quarter as often as a common one of the same level. Creatures placed by hand (people, shopkeepers, a place’s own guardians) are never chosen this way.

A dungeon is for fighting. Kinds that are not hostile to you, the deer, bats, beetles, and other wild animals that leave you be, are chosen far less often when a floor is filled or a creature comes later: their weight is multiplied once more, by the share below, unless the table of dungeons says otherwise (the fey of Ælfhām are its folk and keep theirs). The draws they lose go to the hostile kinds, so a floor holds as many creatures as before. A teeming den of wild beasts is still full of them, and on the land you explore from the overworld the wild animals are as common as ever.

Strays

A dungeon holds mostly its own folk, but now and then something wanders in from elsewhere. One draw in twenty, unless a place says otherwise, is a stray. It is chosen the same way, but from the generic list:

• every kind of the land that is hostile to you, whether any dungeon is its home or not;
• every kind that lives in some dungeon of the land.

A creature marked “once a run” is never on the generic list, and neither are people, shopkeepers, or the guardians placed by hand. Animated objects come only where a place’s folk include them. A stray may also be one of the place’s own kinds. Some places, the outlaws’ four lairs, take their strays only from the kinds that live in the land’s dungeons (the “Strays” column of the table below). Together with the deeper draws below, this means anything the land knows can come to any floor, however rarely. A kind no dungeon is home to is met only as a stray.

Out of depth

Another draw in twenty, again unless a place says otherwise, is made out of depth: as if the floor were one danger deeper. Then one draw in twenty of those goes one deeper still, and so on, with no limit. So a careless step on a quiet floor can still meet something it should not, very rarely something far worse, and at astronomical odds even the deadliest creature of all.

If nothing that lives in the place is strong enough to be chosen that deep (every kind more than 8 below it), the deeper creature comes from the generic list instead. If nothing anywhere is, the draw is made at the floor’s own danger. Whether a draw is a stray and whether it is out of depth are each decided by their own chance. As a share of all draws:

Dread

Some kinds are dread: the monsters to fear. Each has something of its own that a plain fight does not prepare you for: the basilisk, the shadows, the vampires, the banshee, the nymph. The creature tables mark them “dread”.

Before anything else, one draw in a hundred, unless a place says otherwise, is a dread draw. It is made among the dread kinds alone, the place’s own and the strays alike, each weighted by its level and its rarity as above. A common dread kind therefore comes far more often than a very rare one. Every other draw is made among the kinds that are not dread. If a dread draw finds no dread kind strong enough to be chosen there, it is made the ordinary way instead.

There is no limit. A floor of forty creatures has about one chance in three of holding a dread creature, before counting those that come later. Creatures placed by hand, a vault’s own folk, and the first kind a teeming den is drawn around are never dread draws.

The deeper and more dangerous a place, the more often a draw is dread. In Grundlēas, past the floor where the draws stop rising, the dread keep coming more often floor by floor:

A creature marked “once a run” comes at most once in your life, however many floors it could come to.

A floor starts full

A dungeon floor with a danger is full when you first come down to it. Its population is the number in the tables below; by default it is 35 creatures for every 1000 cells you could walk on, at least 25 and at most 80. They are chosen as above and spread over its plain floor. None is placed within 8 steps of a staircase, in a shop, in a sanctuary, or in a teeming den. Most walk a short beat, back and forth; where there is no room for one, they wait where they stand. They come armed as their kind is (see the creatures’ gear), on top of the few the floor’s own rooms and vaults hold. A creature marked “once a run” that you have met already is not among them.

Some vaults hold a crowd of their own, on top of the population. It is chosen as above when the floor is made (a guard post keeps two of the floor’s creatures beside its guard), so who is inside differs from one visit to the next. A hand-made place with a danger starts as it was made; only the arrivals below fill it up. A teeming den holds its sleepers on top of the population, and they count toward it below.

They keep coming

While you are on a floor with a danger, the creatures that live there keep coming. Every so often, two minutes of game time unless a place says otherwise, one may come, with a 60 percent chance, as long as the floor holds fewer creatures hostile to you than its population. A vault’s own crowd is not counted, so leaving a vault shut does not stop the arrivals.

A newcomer appears somewhere you cannot see, never within 8 steps of you. It never appears on stairs, in a doorway, on a shop floor, or in a sanctuary. A cleared floor fills up again while you stay, and a long rest below lets it refill. A floor you are not on is frozen: nothing comes while you are away, and the clock starts again when you come back.

The Delver tree’s Quiet delver talent puts off each next arrival twice as long.

The dungeons

Lytelscræf, the little cave, is the easiest place to start. Its mouth opens in the foot of the western wall two cells from Beorggeat, where you come into the Ascmearc, and you see it from your first step. It has three short floors of cave at danger 1, 2, and 3, thinly peopled by the weakest things in the land and nothing else: giant rats, cave bats, cave beetles, grave worms, and kobolds. No stray from elsewhere comes in, and none from deeper down. Its traps are a few pits and arrows. It has no shop and no special rooms.

On its third floor there is always the kobolds’ cache: two kobolds keeping a chest that is neither locked nor trapped, filled as any chest of that floor would be. On the first floor the cave smells of wet stone and rats.

Cealdhlāw, the cold barrow, is the first of the Ascmearc’s deeper dungeons. Its way in is on the downs of Hlāwdūn, east of Cēaptūn. Its first two floors are the barrow’s passages and chambers; the four below are the hollows of the hill, wide caves. It is cold (8 °C). Its traps are arrows, spears, pits, and alarms.

Its dead walk: crawling hands and the bones of rats and wolves, skeletons (some with bows, some armed and shielded warriors), zombies (kobolds among them), ghouls, and the barrow wight. Among them live goblins, kobolds, and vermin, and in the hollows an orc war band with its wargs.

On its second floor there is always the barrow chamber. A skeleton paces a burial hall before a locked bronze door. Behind it, the silver chalice Sister Hild wants back lies on a plinth. The skeleton carries the bronze key. On the first floor you feel cold air breathing up from the mound.

Floor by floor

See also: The dungeons one by one, Teeming dens, and Quests.