You are the Dungeon
A downloadable game
You Are the Dungeon is a single-player journaling experience that puts you in the role of a living, sentient dungeon--eternal and indomitable. You create your initial space, allow a foray of adventurers into your depths, reward their greed appropriately, and linger in their minds and hearts for the rest of their lives... well, of those who live. In the fallow which follows, you invite in new evil, grow, and prepare for more fools to grace your unhallowed halls with their presence.
The adventurers are determined by draws from a deck of tarot cards. A standard deck will work just fine. (However, if this campaign does well enough, there may be a tarot-themed stretch goal lurking in the shadows.)
The seasons of Foray and Fallow define your existence. The game continues as long as you wish it to, with the Dungeon ever growing, and the adventurers spreading word of its–your–legacy.
As of June 8, 2021, this game has been updated with a new layout, new content (including guidance for playing with a group), and a new set of 100 events for the hapless adventurers who have dared to brave the depths of the Dungeon.
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Development log
- Updated to r4Dec 05, 2020
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I found this fabulous game through the Character Creation Cast and love it! The rules are easy to follow, clear and support the gameplay with creative suggestions. (Copy of the review from my rating.)
Thank you so much!
I was a kickstarter backer for 'You are the Dungeon' and just received my physical copy last night. I immediately sat down and ran through a season for my dungeon - the initial setup, a foray, and a fallow period- and I loved it!
The rules are very simple- a few writing prompts to get you started, graph paper and instructions to draw out your dungeon based on the prompts, then fast rules to generate adventurers and to generate events for them. After the adventurers muck up the dungeon, you have a few more writing prompts to go through how your dungeon rises again- bigger and better than before.
The concept and rules are easy enough to follow and flexible enough that I never felt limited by them- only inspired. Also, it would be easy to pull in other homebrewed subsystems- say, if you wanted to use the tarot deck to build more in depth adventurers, or if you wanted to add more events to the event generator- you could do so without any worries.
The co-op rules in the back are also flexible and easy to follow, and would make this a great little game to pull out while at the local bar or coffee shop with friends. And its also a great way to build an in depth dungeon that you can then turn around and run your favorite dungeon crawling game group through too.
You Are The Dungeon is single player journaling game in which you play as a dungeon.
The PDF is 16 pages, with a very clean and easy to read black and white layout. A number of solid thematic illustrations are scattered throughout, and everything feels visually consistent.
You Are The Dungeon is played with tarot cards, a d10, and a journal. It's not especially crunchy, and the goal of play is more to tell a good story than to win. That said, it isn't without mechanics, and the writing and tone are so clear and consistent that it's hard not to get swept up in its story.
You have a dungeon map on which to draw yourself, and you have tools and tables for generating parties of adventurers that try to explore you. You don't actively oppose them---there's more tables to determine their fates---but when the survivors have left you draw more of yourself. Or you refine the parts that are already there.
There's variant rules for playing as a group, or expanding your dungeon, but I think the most powerful use of the game might simply be to generate extremely lived-in feeling dungeons for other adventures. It's still a strong narrative experience, and it lets you play as long as you want, but at the end you have a complex, grounded map---and that's a great artifact of play to be left with.
Overall, even if you're not totally sold on journaling games, this is a wonderful GM utility. And if you *are* interested in journaling games, this is a break from tradition in that it tells the story of a place, not a person. You can do a *lot* with fiction focused on a place, and Dungeon lets you tell a wide variety of tales. I definitely recommend this, if dungeons are of any interest to you. It's extremely well made.
Minor issues:
-Page 14. I know it's intended, and it looks neat, it's just difficult to use. The writing in the individual entries is great, but the way they're scattered and overlapped makes it a bit difficult to do anything other than treat the whole page as a single cool piece of art.
Thank you for all of this!
For page 14, if I did it correctly, the alt text should have the entire list in numeric order. Please let me know if that isn't the case. I wanted to make it weird but also have it be accessible.
I'm honestly not sure how to view the alt text on a pdf.
This is probably a me-problem. Don't worry about it too much. Odds are good that it's not an issue for other readers.
Updated to r2 - typo fix
Updated to r3 - Minor content fix