Dungeon Quota
Dungeon Quota (title subject to change (as are many things)) is a game I’ve been working on for a while now, in various forms and titles and themes. Now that it’s solidified into a project I’m passionate about, I’m making a post here to soft-announce it! I’m also doing this in an effort to wrangle ideas and make a sort of design bible for me to follow.
The Hook and the Heart
I’m using Irving Benitez (@jellyfishlines2000)'s wonderful and succinct pitch structure here. For the uninitiated, the Hook of a game is the surface level and brief description you use to catch someone’s attention, while the Heart is the deeper and more subtextual themes of the game.
The Hook: Dungeon Meshi meets Lethal Company and resource management to make dungeoneering mean something!
The Heart: This game, at its core, is about the exploitative nature of industrialization and driving for short term profit over long term sustainability. Dungeoneering companies are stripping dungeons of treasure and resources and then moving on, leaving the surface communities they previously were a boon to worse off than they found them. It’s akin to USAmerican gold rushes and coal booms in history, and the environment destroying datacenters and ai bubbles of today. This is not sustainable, and it is the end of something important.
Inspirations
Thematic inspirations: LOTR’s Isengard plot, the Lorax of all things, the dying age of westerns, my vague recollections of The Last Unicorn that I’m too scared to reaffirm.
Mechanical inspirations: Heart: The City Beneath, Lethal Company but less Lethal, PBTA family games (sorta kinda), Breath of the Wild.
Setting inspirations: Dungeon Meshi, The Hobbit, Lancer (specifically the Seccomm era Anthrochauvinism and the little wars of Cradle, with a bit of Diasporan reclamation thrown in), my grandpa’s stories of growing up in Matewan WV.
Mechanics
On a macro scale, the main mechanical weight of Dungeon Quota is based around resource management and attrition. Every action you take has a cost, whether it be in time, stamina, equipment, or opportunity. Everything you have is temporary and in need of maintenance or replacement, which is made more tense by your need to meet a weekly quota. The game is a balancing act between caring for yourself and staying alive and your responsibilities to your dungeoneering company.
On a more moment to moment scale, the main structure of the game is a PBTA-esque system of actions, all of which have defined effects that can be bought with successes rolled, as well as defined effects that can be triggered when complications are rolled. The resolution mechanic is a bit much to get into here, but the system of buying success effects allow more successes with larger dice pools to have a greater impact than a simple pass or fail system. Complications are also a separate beast from success and failure, which means a success can become complicated or a failure even more devastating.
As for characters, your equipment and supplies are just as important as your own skill, with tools and weapons and armor all having different ratings that impact their use. It’s a sort of foil to the OSR adage “the answer isn’t on your character sheet” - your character sheet is a toolbox, and failing to bring the right tools into a dungeon will end poorly. This isn’t to say you need to bring every single tool imaginable, as a matter of fact you can’t, but instead that preparing accordingly makes the toll dungeoneering takes on your character much lower.
That’s the main philosophy and concepts of the game, I have more nitty gritty stuff written out but it isn’t the most relevant to the bird’s eye view I’ve given here.
