It was all in one place once. Eight hundred years of it — crowns, bands, bracers, the whole hoard of a house that had spent centuries taking beautiful things off people who could no longer object. It was catalogued. There was a room with a ledger in it.
The ledger survives. The room does not. What the ledger records is that on a night in late autumn the hoard left the house in the hands of roughly ninety people, none of whom were working together, all of whom went a different way. Forty of them were dead inside a month. The things they carried kept going.
Nobody has seen two pieces of the same set in one room since.
Everything here is enough to play a whole game. The rest of the book is for when someone asks a question.
The locals call it the Undercroft, which is what you call a place when you would rather not name it. It is not the only way down. It is the only way down that people keep coming back to, because three separate ledgers agree that a great deal of the hoard went in this direction and a great deal less has come out.
On any given morning there are eleven or twelve delvers at the mouth of it. They do not speak. They are not a party and they will not become one. Each of them has worked out that the others are useful right up until the moment they are carrying something worth having, and each of them assumes the others have worked out the same thing.
They all go in anyway. That is the part outsiders never understand.
This section is not rules. It is what to do with them.
Dungeon Crawl is a race to build. Everything else in the box — the spells, the monsters, the attacks — exists to slow down whoever is winning. If you play your first game concentrating on hurting people, you will lose to someone quietly equipping armor while you do it.
Collect armor in matching sets and complete them. A complete set is attuned and counts toward winning. Nothing else counts toward winning.
Sets come in three sizes. Two-piece sets are quick and cheap. Four-piece sets take real commitment and hit like a falling building. Most of the deck is somewhere in between.
You have five cards. Draw two, so seven. Now take three actions, and the honest answer is usually the boring one:
That is a good turn. It is not exciting. You will have exciting turns later, and most of them will be turns where someone else lost something.
An empty HP pool. Your HP pool is the wall in front of your armor. An attack destroys all of it before it can touch a single piece of armor. With nothing there, the first attack that lands strips armor straight off your board — and armor is the game.
Hoarding a hand of good cards. You cannot end a turn holding more than seven, and what you discard is gone. Cards are worth more played than admired.
Completing a set and relaxing. A finished set is the most attractive thing on the table. It is also the only thing an Overpower can take whole, and it is where a Set Bonus can be attached — which makes it more attractive still. Finishing a set does not make it safe. It makes it a target.
He paid for the room in advance, which the innkeeper noted, because men going down rarely bother.
He did not drink. He did not sleep much. Some time after two he came down and sat by the banked fire with his kit laid out on the table in front of him — rope, candles, the oilcloth, the food, the knife — and looked at it, and packed it away, and then laid it all out again in the same order. He did this four times. The innkeeper watched from the stairs and did not interrupt, because there is nothing you can say to a man doing that.
At first light he packed it a fifth time and left without eating. He had not asked the innkeeper a single question about the way down, which meant he already knew, which meant this was not his first time.
That is the part worth understanding. He had done it before. He still counted everything four times.
From a journal recovered eleven days after it stopped.
First day. Down to the second gallery. Cold. Ate half the bread.
Second day. Found a bracer, olive-green, heavier than it looks. Ate the rest of the bread.
Third day. Passed a man coming up. Neither of us said anything. He was carrying something under his coat and I was carrying something under mine.
Fourth day. The stairs stopped going in one direction.
Fourth day. I have written fourth day twice. I am going to keep going.
A turn has three parts and only the middle one takes any thought.
One action plays one card, one way:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Equip | Play an armor card to your board, in its set. |
| Defend | Play a non-armor card from your hand face up to your HP pool, worth the HP printed on it. Armor never goes to your HP pool. |
| Attack | Play an attack card, using armor you own. |
| Cast | Play a spell. Most cost one action; three cost two; one costs none. The card says. |
| Attach | Play a Set Bonus or an Enchant onto a set you have completed. |
| Summon | Play a monster card onto another player. |
Recovered inventory. The body was four days old and had not been robbed, which tells you something about where it was found.
Rope, forty feet, unused. Two candles. A knife with a broken point. Three days of food eaten down to one. A folded square of oilcloth. A stoppered jar of something that had gone bad. A child's copper bracelet, not from any set, not worth anything. One gauntlet, frost-blue, worth more than the house he grew up in. A second gauntlet would have made it worth more than the street.
He was found with the first gauntlet on his hand and the second nowhere at all.
Everything you own sits in one of three places, and the difference matters constantly.
| Where | What it is | Can it be taken? |
|---|---|---|
| Your hand | Private. Maximum seven cards. | Only by specific spells. |
| Your HP pool | Cards played face up for the HP printed on them. This is the HP you lose damage from. | Yes — this is what damage destroys first. |
| Your armor | Equipped pieces, arranged in sets, plus any Set Bonus or Enchant attached to them. | Yes — but only by an attack or a theft. |
Four rings. Worn together they are the most dangerous thing anyone has carried out of the dark in living memory, and worn in any smaller number they are four unremarkable rings that a pawnbroker would price by weight.
This is why the Band moves the way it does. A delver who finds one keeps it and says nothing. A delver who finds two starts making decisions they would not otherwise make. A delver who finds three has, by every account we have, stopped being interested in coming back up at all — and the accounts we have are secondhand, because none of them came back up.
The fourth ring has been described twice, sixty years apart, by people who each believed they were the first to see it.
There are ten armor sets. Each is a color, and each takes a fixed number of pieces.
| Pieces | Sets |
|---|---|
| Two | Amulet of the Archmage, Earthbinder's Girdle, Ironbound Bracers |
| Three | Archbishop's Mantle, Frostbite Gauntlets, Glimmerstep Slippers, Stormweaver Cloak, Verdant Chestplate |
| Four | Infernal Crown, Nightfall Band |
A set with all its pieces is attuned. Attuned sets are what you count to win, and an attuned set hits far harder than an unfinished one.
| Players | Attuned sets needed |
|---|---|
| 2 or 3 | Five |
| 4 or 5 | Four |
You win the moment you reach the target. There is one exception: a Dragon on you stops you winning while it lives, no matter how many sets you have. You keep the sets. You do not get the win until the Dragon is dead.
They met at a doorway too narrow for two. Neither had said a word to another living person in six days. One of them had a chestplate, green, complete; the other had nothing but a knife and a very clear understanding of what a complete chestplate is worth on the surface.
What the survivor said afterward, and he said it without much feeling, was that there had been no decision to make. He had not gone down there to make friends. Neither had the other one. The only question was which of them worked that out first.
He was wearing green when he said it.
You attack with an attack card from your hand, and an attack card does nothing unless you own armor from one of the sets it names. Your armor is your weapon.
The damage is whatever that set is currently worth — which depends on how many pieces of it you have equipped. One piece of the Nightfall Band deals 1. All four deal 16.
If a monster is sitting on you, your attacks can only be aimed at it — you cannot reach other players at all. Damage on a monster accumulates across turns; track it with your dice. Excess damage is wasted, not carried.
Killing a monster draws you cards: nothing for a Goblin, one for a Brute, two for an Ogre or a Warlord, three for a Dragon.
Taken from the body of Aleth Warring, whose name we know only because she had it stitched into her coat.
One pauldron, orange, chased with silver. One pauldron, orange, matching. One clasp, orange, which completes them. A cloak-pin she had clearly worn since before any of this. Eleven coins. Her boots.
The pauldrons and the clasp were seen four days later on a delver called Renn, who was not the man who took them, and who paid for them without asking a single question about where they had been.
The cloak-pin was left where it fell. It was not worth anything.
This is the most important page in the book.
When an attack lands on you, you lose cards to cover it. What you lose is decided in a fixed order.
Within any one set, things leave in a fixed order and you cannot reach past them:
| Order | What goes |
|---|---|
| First | That set's Enchant |
| Then | That set's Set Bonus |
| Then | Its armor pieces |
The order is per set, not across the table. A bare set's pieces are free to take while another set of yours still has an Enchant on it. You simply cannot skip over a fitting to get at the pieces underneath it in that same set.
If losing a piece takes a set below complete, any Set Bonus and Enchant on it fall into your own HP pool. You keep them, as HP — but they are no longer attached to anything, and they are now the next thing an attack can take.
If you have nothing left — no HP pool, no armor — the rest of the damage does nothing. There is no debt and nothing carries over.
A surgeon's notes. The patient walked in.
Left arm broken in two places, both old, both badly set by someone in a hurry. Three ribs. Burn across the back of the neck consistent with something that was not fire. He tells me he has been down eleven times and that the first ten were worse.
What is remarkable is not the injuries. It is that he is wearing a breastplate he says he took off a man who was wearing it when he died, and that under the breastplate there is almost nothing wrong with him at all. The armor took what should have killed him. Twice, he says, it took nearly everything and left him almost none of it.
He asked me to be quick. He is going back down on Thursday.
When several things modify one attack, they resolve in this order, always:
A two-piece Amulet of the Archmage attack is worth 12.
The attacker has Amplify Magic up, so it doubles to 24. Their set carries Cataclysm, adding 4 — 28.
The defender holds Aldric the Paladin, halving it to 14, and has Block in play, halving it again to 7.
An attack that started at 12, was doubled and boosted to 28, lands for 7.
The story goes that a woman called Sethe stood in the fourth gallery with something enormous coming down the passage at her, and said no.
Not shouted. Not cast, in the way people mean when they say cast. She is supposed to have simply refused it — the way you refuse a debt you never agreed to — and the thing in the passage stopped, and considered her, and went a different way.
Nobody has ever been able to name the person who saw this. The story arrives always at one remove: a man who knew her, a woman whose brother was there. What everyone agrees on is that it worked exactly once, and that Sethe never spoke about it, and that she never went back down.
Two cards let you answer a spell the moment it is cast, on anyone's turn.
| Card | What it does |
|---|---|
| Counterspell | Cancels the spell entirely, for everyone — including anyone else it was going to hit. |
| Divine Shield | Negates the spell's effect on you only. Everyone else it targets is still hit. |
Block is not a reaction. It is cast on your own turn, and until your next turn all damage to you is halved, rounding down. Then it is discarded. You may cast it even while a monster is on you, because it only affects you.
If anyone casts a spell against Vex's holder, that holder steals a random card from the caster's hand. This happens whether the spell worked or not.
Five accounts of the same thing. They were collected separately.
“Big as a cart. Never made a sound.”
“It made a sound the whole time. That was the worst of it.”
“There were two. I am certain there were two.”
“It let me go. I have thought about why for four years and I have nothing.”
“It was not interested in me until I picked the bracer up. Then it was very interested in me.”
That last one is the only detail all five agree on, though only one of them says it outright.
You do not fight monsters. You play them onto other people, and then those people have to deal with them.
Playing a monster costs one action. Two things must be true:
| Monster | Health | Needs | What it does to them | Kill reward |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Goblin | 2 | — | Nothing but the cage itself. | — |
| Brute | 4 | 1 set | 1 damage at the end of their turn. | 1 card |
| Ogre | 6 | 2 sets | They discard a card of their choice at the end of their turn. | 2 cards |
| Warlord | 8 | 3 sets | They may only take two actions per turn. | 2 cards |
| Dragon | 12 | 3 sets | They cannot win while it lives. | 3 cards |
While a monster is on you, you cannot target other players at all — no attacks at them, no spells at them, no monsters onto them.
You may still equip, defend, attach, and cast exactly these: Improvise (which bolts your monster instead of a player), Amplify Magic, Life Tap, Hunter's Mark, Resurrection, Time Warp, Block, and your two reactions — Counterspell and Divine Shield. Every other spell is shut off until the monster is dead.
To get out, attack the monster. Damage accumulates until it dies.
Corvin the Warlock is two hundred years dead, or he is not. The accounts cannot agree, and they disagree in a specific and unhelpful way: everyone who claims to have met him recently describes a man matching a portrait painted before their grandparents were born.
What nobody disputes is the armor. He left a full suit behind — not scattered pieces, a matched set, made for him and fitted to nobody else. It has been assembled twice since he went missing. Both delvers who wore it were asked what it was like, and both answered the same way, and the answer was not about how it looked or what it was worth.
They said it fit.
A Set Bonus attaches to one complete set of yours, and each has a minimum set size it will accept. One Set Bonus per set.
Each of the eight left a suit behind. A set carrying their Bonus is understood to be theirs.
| Bonus | Needs | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Pell the Tinker | 2+ | Once per turn, free: discard a card, then draw a card. |
| Torm the Beastwarden | 2+ | Monsters on you lose their effects. You deal double damage to monsters. |
| Corvin the Warlock | 3+ | Once per turn, play a card directly from your HP pool. Costs one action. |
| Kael the Duelist | 3+ | You may take four actions per turn. |
| Rowan the Ranger | 3+ | Opponents may only hold six cards in hand. |
| Selene the Archmage | 3+ | Draw an extra card at the start of your turn. |
| Aldric the Paladin | 4+ | Damage against you is halved, rounding down. |
| Vex the Rogue | 4+ | When a spell is used against you, steal a random card from the caster's hand. |
An Enchant goes on a complete set that already carries a Set Bonus. One per set.
| Enchant | Effect |
|---|---|
| Twinstrike | Attacks with this set deal double damage. |
| Unstoppable | Attacks with this set can't be countered or negated. |
| Cataclysm | Attacks with this set hit every player for an extra 4. |
| Soulbound | This set can't be stolen. |
There is a man in the coast towns who has never been below the second gallery and has never once drawn a weapon, and who owns, by the most careful reckoning anyone has managed, pieces of six different sets.
His method is not complicated. He waits at the places delvers come up, and he is pleasant, and he is patient, and he is there on the day somebody comes out with three of something and needs a bed, a meal and a person who will not ask questions. He has never taken anything by force. He has never had to.
The people he has taken from mostly do not describe it as being robbed. That is the part that should worry you.
Three cards move armor without dealing any damage at all. Theft is not an attack, so it never touches anybody's HP pool — it moves armor directly.
| Card | What it does | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Pickpocket | Steal one armor piece. | Not from an attuned set. |
| Mind Control | Swap one of your armor pieces for one of theirs. | Neither piece may come from an attuned set. |
| Overpower | Steal an entire attuned set, with its Set Bonus and Enchant. | Attuned sets only — and not a Soulbound one. |
The questions that actually come up at a table, answered in one line each.
Some pieces carry a small mark near the inside edge. Three strokes, or four, cut rather than cast — added later, by hand, by somebody who was not the maker.
The same mark is on a bracer in a private collection in the coast towns, on a gauntlet that has not left the Undercroft in sixty years, and on the inside of a door in the eleventh gallery that nobody has opened.
They mean nothing in this edition. Ignore them. They have no effect on play whatsoever and you may treat them as decoration.
Somebody put them there on purpose.