You and three AI rivals pass packs of cards. Take one card per pack, then it passes on. Draft characters to grow your party, plus equipment, spells, and personalities to shape it. Packs always hold characters — no dead drafts.
Only four adventurers march. Draft a fifth and they wait in reserve, stepping up the moment someone falls — so extra bodies are insurance, not an army. Draft order decides who takes the four field slots, which makes the fifth character a real cost: that pick could have been the blade, the working, or the temper that wins the room.
When the packs run dry the party stands mustered: kit dealt out by best fit, every working prepared by the sharpest mind that holds it. Pick a difficulty and march. If you want to overrule the dealing — put the Tower Shield on whoever holds the door, hand Fireball to the wizard rather than whoever picked it up, rename anybody and write who they are — open Change kit & names first. The name and the history both go into the saga.
One draft, one dungeon. The party crawls it room by room, deciding for itself — weighted by the personalities you drafted and the classes present. Every situation is graded: outcomes are a spectrum, from a scramble to a clean success, not just win or lose. When the throne falls, or the party does, the delve is scored — then draft again and try a better party against a new dungeon.
Capabilities are the language of the dungeon. Twelve of them — warcraft, roguery, observation, tinkering, alchemy, medicine, scholarship, astrology, divination, conjuring, correspondence, rhetoric — and every character is three of them. A room asks for one, and how well the party answers depends on who holds it and how deep they go: a capability nobody has can still be improvised from a neighbouring skill at a penalty, one character brings the assisted option, and real depth unlocks the mastered one. Drafting for a spread of capabilities is drafting for the situations you will meet.
Monsters have natures — armored 🛡️, ethereal 👻, venomous 🐍, swarming 🐝, slow 🐌 — shown over their heads and hinted in the prose, and the party plans around them: nobody rushes the venomous without a cleric, and spells shine against the armored. Spells carry elements (🔥❄️⚡🌟); a caster picks the working the foe hates. Traps come in kinds — fire burns, poison lingers, alarms tell the dungeon you're coming. Hoards hide finds: scrolls, trinkets, draughts. Your kit is read by every encounter.
The grimoire holds two kinds of working. Spells you drafted are prepared: they come back every room, but each can only be cast once before the party moves on. Scrolls found in the dungeon burn on use — one shot, then gone. Power is the spell’s own plus half the party’s sharpest mind, so a high-minded character makes every working better; a wizard adds two more and opens an ordinary fight with two workings instead of one. A working that lands keeps working — half its force again every round while the fight lasts, whether it is burning the foe or mending the party — and in the boss chamber the party looses everything it has. A healing working goes off the moment a companion is failing, mid-fight, not after the dust settles. So a grimoire is a reserve you spend down toward the throne: one spell is a tool, three are a plan.
The delve wears you down, on two clocks. The lamp burns oil on every march — run dry and the whole party takes damage every room it gropes through the dark, so an Everburning Lantern (which sips), Dancing Light or Eyes of the Mouse are worth real picks. And a blow worth a quarter of a body leaves a wound: healing can no longer reach past the hatched part of the health bar, and nothing in the dungeon mends it — the scar is carried all the way to the throne. The throne is not the only thing that can kill you.
The dungeon itself is built room by room: halls, chambers, caverns, rotundas and cells, each sized for what happens in it — a boss gets a great cavern, a vault is a closet. Passages join them through real doorways, and secret doors hide side branches. One floor, every room of it earning its place, and the throne room at the end of the spine.
The room is a weapon. A chamber holds up to five pieces of furniture — pillars to fight behind, crates to crack, and hazards to put a monster into: an open pit, a bed of rusted floor spikes, a crack across the floor, a brazier still burning. Driving something onto a hazard is a big opening blow — but it takes the right body or the right kit: a fighter's muscle or a rogue's leverage can manage the bare shove, while a grapple and line, a tower shield or an athanor charm does it harder and safer. Rooms are sized so four adventurers, a monster and the furniture all genuinely stand somewhere — except corridors, which stay narrow on purpose, because a passage is where a column is the only formation that fits.
Off the spine hang wings: two to four rooms with a theme and a payoff — the burial, archive, barracks and flooded wings. An open one is a party vote; a hidden one has to be noticed, and always ends in a vault. What the party can do with what it finds there is, again, a question of capabilities and kit.
Every room is performed: the party walks the passage, forms up in the shape the fight calls for — one blade forward in a column, three in a wedge — and a fight plays out round by round: the front rank swings, the monster's health falls, the counter-blow lands and the numbers rise off the wounded. The Chronicle writes each line as its beat plays, so what you read is what you just saw. Pause to read, Step one room at a time, or set the speed.