Introduction

Premise

Dungeons of Dekkom is a tabletop roleplaying game focused around dungeon crawling, fighting monsters, and collecting treasure in a classical fantasy world. It’s inspired by the classics of RPG history, but updated with more modern mechanics and sensibilities. It’s a light game – deep, serious emotions aren’t the goal, compared to a good romp ripping through undead with nail-biting combat. The focus is on beer and pretzel style gaming.

Dungeons of Dekkom is played with a number of players, or PCs – at least 3 is recommended, and more than 6 is likely cumbersome – and most of the time, one Dungeon Master, or DM. The DM runs the game, designing dungeons, controlling monsters, and the like. The two roles are not competitive, and instead the DM acts as a sort of game designer, narrator, and referee, with the goal of setting up interesting challenges for the heroes and acting the part of the minor characters and villains, while the heroes take center stage. There’s also the option to play without an DM - to do so, you’ll need an adventure written to be run without a DM, in which case you read the instructions from the adventure, which will tell you what challenges you face.

Unlike many other roleplaying games, in Dungeons of Dekkom, players are expected to switch characters often - as a group, they control a guild, which has a roster larger than the number of actual players. Between adventures, characters need time to rest, and so get switched out – no character “belongs” to one player, and any player can play as any character. Managing the guild is part of the play experience, including recruiting new characters to play as, building an armory of magical items, and upgrading your guild’s facilities.

The expected structure of a game involves players choosing what characters they’ll play as, and then going on an adventure. During the adventure, play will be split between exploration and combat. During exploration, players will take turns to use skills to navigate past obstacles, manage resources including healing and time, and try to find whatever their goal is.

During combat, players and their enemies will take turns for short, vicious fights. If the dungeon is small, they’ll be expected to visit it once, and then be done. If the dungeon is especially big, the goal might be to clear a small part of it, find the path to deeper parts, or unlock and clear a path for a later adventuring team to move through. At the end of the adventure, treasure is split, and players get to take guild actions, building up their guild and managing meta-resources to help in future adventures.

Task Resolution

In Dungeons of Dekkom, whenever a character attempts a task that is difficult, dangerous, or opposed by someone else, a dice roll is used to resolve the task. A single twenty-sided die is rolled and a character adds a bonus appropriate to the task at hand. If this total equals or exceeds the Target Number (TN), the task is a success—if it is under that number, the task is a failure.

In addition to twenty-sided dice, dice with four, six, eight, ten, and twelve sides are needed to play. These dice are used to determine the severity or outcomes of effects like damage done in combat, and never for the success or failure of a task.

Outline of Play

The general gameplay of Dungeons of Dekkom involves selecting a character for each player from a randomized, shared guild roster, and undertaking an adventure, usually in a dungeon or isolated place. There, the characters will have to explore, using their skills to get around obstacles, fight dangerous monsters, rescue prisoners, and try to haul back as much treasure as they can carry. After an adventure, characters can be swapped around – and some might even need to rest – with a new party heading off on the next adventure.

Generating Characters

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