Dungeons & Dynasties

From the Devs

Football Manager, but every match is a dungeon and your players can die in it.

You run an adventuring guild in a realm that lost its king. Sign delvers, swear them to a term of years, send them into the dark, and try to build something that outlasts the people who built it.

Win enough and you take the Crucible and hold the realm until somebody takes it off you.

Heroes die. Dynasties rise. The realm remembers both.

A REALM WITH NO KING

The crown fell in a war and the lineage ended. The guilds were the only institutions still standing, so the succession they improvised became a competition, fought in the Ninefold Vale on the ground where the throne used to be.

Open the Realm and you get the map for your campaign: seven lands, 36 towns, mountains, drowned coasts and rivers, with all 72 guilds having somewhere they call home. That means roughly two halls to a town. You share a street with somebody who wanted to better you before a fixture was ever played. That is where a derby comes from.

Your delvers are born in these places, and it matters when a war comes. A muster falls on a region and marks every hero with kin there. March and they are steadied by it. Keep them home while their people burn and they will not forget that either.

You spend the season competing with these guilds. A few times a year you need to work alongside them.

EVERY FIXTURE IS A DUNGEON

There is no match engine. There is a procedurally built dungeon with monsters, hazards and rooms that make you choose, and your delvers are going into it. You never click an attack. You pick the party, set their gambits, kit them for what is down there, and then you watch.

In the Trials, you face the other guilds in the Realm. If they make it to the final room, that is.

• Conditions can matter more than stats. Flooded ground slows your melee. Pitch dark ruins your archers. Cursed ground drains you where you stand.
• Party composition has named synergies worth hunting for. Stand a Guardian next to a Cleric and you have a Sanctuary Engine.
• Bosses have mechanics, and you can scout them before you commit to anything.
• The quiet rooms are where people get found out. A caged captive, a whispering idol. Who you brought decides how it goes, because their temperament answers, not your orders.

Before the gate you get one word with them. Read the mood, commit blind, and find out afterwards whether you judged it right, because the wrong word costs you.

Gear turned up in the dark goes on whoever wants it badly enough, which is not always who you had in mind.

THE TRANSFER MARKET

The realm's delvers are not a shop, they are people with their own opinion of you.

The buying board shows who is available. The selling board is where you list your own and wait for somebody to come. Between them sits the window: the Archive's roll (Transfer Window) opens for the first days of each season.

Wanderers (Free Transfers) are the ones worth chasing. Offer a place to one and they take a few days to weigh it, the rest of the realm bids against you, and nothing is paid until they walk through your gate. Sometimes they pick somebody else.

You can poach a rival's hero and pay for the privilege, protect your own from the same, loan a delver out to a hall that asks you for them, take a free transfer when an oath runs out, and give a returning favourite a discount for old times. When the coffers run dry the fire sale comes for whoever you can least afford to lose.

WHAT THEY CAME HERE TO DO

Every delver arrives holding something they believe, something they are bad at, and one thing they mean to do before they are finished. A vow to outlive the hall that threw them out. To fell the thing that killed their brother. To die with a blade in hand rather than in a bed.

You cannot see the vow being worked on, and the game will not tell you how to serve it. You just notice, eventually, that sending a particular hero on particular work is doing something for them. Keep faith with one and they are harder to tempt away for the rest of their life. Put the hero who swore against a named beast in the party that finally fells it, and the hall takes a trophy off the carcass: named for the thing it came from, and worked into something that delver can actually carry. A fang for a striker, a hide for a guardian, a heart for a mender.

Most of them never manage it. That is rather the point.

PEOPLE, NOT NUMBERS

Heroes are changed by what happens to them. A brush with death can leave a scar that changes how they fight. A heroic clear can forge a virtue. Over a career those things accumulate into an archetype drawn from what actually happened to them rather than assigned at birth: Prodigy, Late Bloomer, Iron Veteran, Cursed.

The Dungeonborn are the ones that you bring back.

Friendships and grudges form underground. A rival hall that keeps getting the better of you hardens into a named Nemesis, and the realm keeps count.

Everybody serves on a sworn Oath, a term of years at an agreed wage. When it runs out they come and ask for what they are now worth, and you meet it, haggle it, or watch them walk into a rival's colours. Losing a favourite is a decision you made, not a number that came up.

When they go they do not disappear. The dead get a memorial card with their own sigil, their epitaph, and the name of the place that took them. The friendships outlive the leaving, so the rival who signed your veteran away still shows you who back home counts them a friend, and a favourite can come home in a crisis for that friend's sake. A youth may walk into the hall carrying a dead hero's blood. Lose a legend and one day they may come back running the guild that took them.

THE CHRONICLE

Your guild has been writing this down the whole time.

Open the Chronicle and the dynasty is there as prose: every season with its result and its casualties, the drama that defined it, the Fallen with the epitaphs they earned, and the heroes who made the place what it is. It opens on forty-five years of the realm's history before you ever turned up.

None of it is authored. There is no flavour text and no scripted beat anywhere in it. If it says a hero fell in the Reaving of Vael in Year 4, that happened in your save, and the sentence exists because it happened.

Copy it out, download it, or share it as a card drawn from the Ledger. It reads like something a person sat down and wrote about your guild, and nobody did.

OR DON'T COMPETE AT ALL

Found your hall in Cozy Mode and it is an adventurers' guild rather than a league one. No Trials, no table, no cup, no Crucible. Every fixture slot becomes a commission instead, so the year is work you took because somebody needed it done rather than a ladder you are being measured against.

Everything else is still there. People still swear oaths, still go into the dark, still die in it, and the Chronicle still writes it all down. You just do not have anyone to beat.

WHAT'S IN IT

• 72 guilds across six tiers, with promotion, relegation, cups and festivals
• Cozy Mode: no league, no table, no Crucible, commissions instead of Trials
• Found your guild by drafting its first delvers, each on their own character sheet
• A realm of seven lands and 36 towns, every guild with a home and every hero a birthplace
• The Crucible: win it and you hold the realm until somebody takes it from you
• Convictions, Flaws and Vows: what a hero believes, where they are weak, and the one thing they mean to do before the end
• Trophies torn off named beasts, named for the kill and shaped to the slayer's calling
• Heroes age, decline, retire and die, permanently, in every mode
• Scars, virtues, earned archetypes, bloodlines and mentorships
• The Oath: every hero serves a sworn term, then meet their wage, haggle it, or lose them
• A transfer window, buying and selling boards, wanderers who weigh your offer against the realm's, poaching, protected slots, fire sales, and loans a rival has to ask you for
• Old Friends who do not stay gone: crisis returns, reunion discounts, and true siblings who share a name
• Send the bench on Quests across the realm for loot, hard seasoning and renown
• The Herald: a running account of rising talent, collapsing houses and wars that redraw the realm
• Patron politics, finances, scouting, staff and facilities
• Lay down the ledger: seal the dynasty into a finished saga, on your terms, at a peak you chose
• An in-game Compendium and Bestiary generated from the code that runs the game, so it cannot lie to you
• Ironman: one save, no reloads. Lose your patron and the run is over
• 50 traits, every one wired to real behaviour in the dark rather than sitting on a sheet as decoration
• Every visual is drawn in code. No stock assets, no AI-generated images, no AI-generated audio

The dungeon is waiting, Guildmaster. Go and build something worth remembering.