A downloadable game

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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.

There are few encounters in the tabletop role-playing game space so maligned by modern game design as the dungeon crawl. 

Conflated with glacial pacing, tedious sense checks with arbitrary results, and senseless bookkeeping that does nothing to progress gameplay, dungeon crawls become a dreaded encounter for Game Masters and players alike.

This zine seeks to remedy that. 

Players & Their Roles

In DUNGEONEERING, players choose one of four roles (the Warrior, the Magician, the Thief, or the Prophet) and roll up their statistics (Might, Intellect, Agility, and Favor), along with their hit points. Once the preliminary character building is complete, the players will have to rely on their own cunning to get through the dungeon alive.

Each role has their own special feature that only they can use:

  • The mighty Warrior can attack and carry more than any other character, at the risk of overextending themselves.
  • The intelligent Magician can cast spells from their grimoire or from scrolls found in the dungeon, at the risk of misfires and anomalies. 
  • The agile Thief can pick locks and disable or enable traps, at the risk of either backfiring.
  • The favored Prophet can call upon their deity for assistance through prayer, at the risk of becoming forsaken.

Game Masters & Their Domains

Game Masters, meanwhile, will be busy dressing the dungeon with all manner of monsters, treasures, and traps to beguile the players and disarm the characters. 

The GM may create their own sprawling underworlds or utilize the dungeon generation tools in the zine, drawing from six unique locales (Forest, Desert, Water, Fire, Ice, and Sky). An additional sample dungeon is included in the zine for those who want to run a game as soon as possible.

The generation tools go further and offer sample intersections, hallways, dead-ends, pits, stairs, and lairs (among many others) to place in your locale. Each have their own unique tables for even more specificity. GMs then add life to these rooms with interesting encounters built from the robust encounter tables.


What Do I Need To Play?

All you need to get started in DUNGEONEERING are the rules, paper, pencil, and a six-sided die (probably a few six-sided dice, to be safe). The dungeon generation tools and sample dungeon certainly allow a group to hit the ground running, but are not required for play if a GM wants to come up with a dungeon on their own.

Purchase

Buy Now$15.00 USD or more

In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $15 USD. You will get access to the following files:

Dungeoneering Core Rules & Starter Dungeon 12 MB
Dust Jacket / GM Screen 2 MB

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

Dungeoneering is great fun! I'm still a pretty inexperienced GM and the simplicity of this game made it very approachable for me. I ran a couple friends through the starter dungeon, Mazar's Tower. There was no magician in the group but somehow they managed. Maybe I went too easy on them. But the Amalgamation kept them on their toes. In the end, despite my very imperfect GMing, they said they had fun!

Sometimes you just want a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl, and this game does a great job at that.

Wonderful to hear! Glad you and your group had fun.

(2 edits)

Hi, I might finally get the chance to run this game pretty soon, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around how combat works.

The errata says "A character wants to roll under their mod for the attack but equal to or over the monsters evasion." But what happens if the mod is lower than the evasion? Say a character's Might mod is 2 and the monster's evasion score is 5, does that mean the monster is just impossible to hit because you can't roll lower than the Might mod and higher than the evasion score?

And similarly when a monster attacks, what happens if the monster's attack is higher than your mod? If I understand correctly, you use a single roll to resolve attacks, so I'm confused about how the two different numbers are used together and how you determine success.

Thanks! This looks like a fun game!

Oh, I was just looking at the updated PDF and I saw that all the sample monsters' evasions scores were updated with the errata. It makes more sense now!

Apologies for the delay in responding - been a crazy week!

It sounds like you figured it out, but feel free to ask if there’s anything else that’s confusing. Happy to provide my thoughts.

Thanks! I guess there's one more thing I want to make sure of: when a monster attacks a character, does the character's Might or Agility mod come into play for the roll? Or is it just the monster's attack score that you look at?

(1 edit)

Ability mods don’t come into play when defending, but if a creature has any amount of DR (from items or effects, etc.) they gain a +X to the check to defend, where X is the DR.

So for example, if a monster’s attack is 3, normally a character has a 3-in-6 chance at evading the attack. But if they’re wearing DR 1 armor, that becomes a 4-in-6 chance at evading the attack.

As an aside, I’ve been working on a few house rules regarding morale, sundering armor, and some other stuff I was planning on doing an errata for in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that!

(+1)

That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation! I'm excited to try Mazar's Tower tonight.

This dungeon is awesome, such a cool game!

Thanks Colin! Appreciate the support.

is there a print version of this available anywhere?

Hey there Diogo,

There will be! Currently working on getting backer copies out before selling physical copies. I'll have a bunch of information on that in the coming weeks.

Thanks for the interest! And might I say, I thoroughly enjoyed Halls of the Blood King!

(+1)

Thank you very much. I am glad you did!

I asked because I mostly read physical books. I always forget where I put the PDFs lol.

Hi Nate, are there any plans to include a character sheet? Or is there already one that I just seem unable to find?

Thanks! Loving the product so far, will definitely take it for a test drive in the future.

(1 edit)

Hey there!

I had originally gone without a character sheet as the stats are super slimmed down, but I think a character sheet could be pretty fun (maybe one for each role?)... I'll give it some thought!

If I do, I'll make it free for folks to download here on the itch.io page.

Thanks for the kind words!

EDIT: In case anyone is looking for character sheets, they're located here: Dungeoneering Character Sheets

Quick question, how do player characters determine their Attack Ratings(AR) and Defense Ratings(DR)? I can't find anything about it in the rules.

Hey there!

AR and DR are modifiers added by items and effects. As you can see on the Warrior, their armor and shield has a DR rating. There are no starting weapons that offer an AR bonus, so you’ll need to grab magic items to increase them.

In the testing I did, adding AR for starting characters made encounters a bit too easy whereas adding DR made it so they could at least survive a bit better if bad rolls came up. With more folks having more hands on the rules we’ll see if that logic holds up!

Let me know if there are further questions!