reikhelm/deepfall/RULEBOOK.md

DEEPFALL — Rulebook

Reikhelm, the deep hold, is sinking into the Maw. Delve fast, hold ground, and know when to die. The deepest grave is the brightest glory.

Players: 2–6 · Time: 45–75 min · Ages: 12+

This is the playtest rulebook. Every number here is grounded in the DEEPFALL balance simulator (deepfall-sim); see FINDINGS.md for what the data said and DESIGN.md for the deeper why. Where the sim used continuous coefficients, this rulebook rounds them to clean tabletop integers.

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1. The idea & how you win

You lead a delve-company plundering a collapsing megadungeon. Beneath the deepest floor waits the Maw, a rising hunger that devours the hold one floor at a time, from the bottom up — so the richest, deepest rooms are doomed first.

You don't win by surviving. You win by Glory, and the surest fortunes come from spending a company deliberately: send a crew quietly to ground with its loot, or hurl it into a Worthy End at the bottom and let the Maw take it gloriously. Nobody is ever eliminated — a dead crew becomes Glory and silent territory, and you muster a fresh one.

The game ends when the Maw eats Floor 1. Most Glory wins.

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2. Components

Component	Count	Notes
Room tiles	~48 deck	10 themes (Threshold → Throne); each shows value, ⚔ threat, 🜏 lock, produce icon
Floor strips (or trays)	6	The dungeon, top (Floor 1) to bottom (Floor 6)
The Maw marker + Dread track	1	The doom clock
Delve dice	7 types	Recruit / Warrior / Scholar / Priest / Rogue / Champion / Relic (see §5)
Dice bags	1 per player	Your bag is your engine
Lineage cards	6	Your "race" half
Calling cards	6	Your "class/faction" half
Player mats	1 per player	Party, held rooms, Mettle, hand
Control markers + Fallen (skull) markers	per player	Claim rooms / mark your dead
Mettle & Loot tokens, Glory track, Denizen rep tracks	shared	The economy

The six dice faces: ⚔ Steel · 🜏 Cunning · ✚ Faith · 💰 Greed · ✦ Mettle · ☠ Dread.

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3. Setup

1. Build the dungeon. Stock the six floor strips, rooms-per-floor = number of players (so a 4-player game has 4 rooms per floor, a 6-player game has 6). Draw room tiles weighted richer with depth: Floor 1 is mostly Threshold/Stone; Floor 6 holds the Throne and the Vaults. (Easiest: use the reikhelm Generator Companion — give it a seed and it prints the exact layout. Every game, a new dungeon.)

2. Depth track. Each floor has a Depth Value printed beside it:

   Floor	1	2	3	4	5	6
   Depth Value	×1	×2	×2	×3	×3	×4

   A room's Glory at collapse = its tile value × its floor's Depth Value. (A Vault, value 6, on Floor 6 is worth 6 × 4 = 24.)

3. The Maw starts just below Floor 6. Set the shared Dread track to 0; its length is 3 + number of players (see §9).

4. Draft your company. Each player takes one Lineage + one Calling (deal 2 of each, keep 1 of each, or draft) and builds their starting dice bag as printed on the Lineage card.

5. Give each player their markers, a player mat, and 0 Glory. Seed the shared Recruit Pool with dice of each recruitable type. Pick a first player; pass the marker clockwise each round.

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4. The company: Lineage × Calling

Two halves smash into one identity. Each grants an advantage and a cost — no free builds.

Lineages (the "race" — sets your starting bag + a passive)

Lineage	Advantage	Cost
Dvergar	Ignore 1 point of a room's ⚔ threat when claiming	−1 ✚ Faith (courts Dread)
Wisp	Draw +1 die every hand	Bigger hand rolls more ☠ Dread
Revenant	Convert leftover ☠ Dread into ✦ Mettle (peril as fuel)	Cannot cancel Dread with Faith
Gnoll	+Loot when you claim a combat room (Den/Forge/Crypt/Throne)	−1 ✚ Faith
Sylphid	+1 Move and +1 🜏 Cunning	Fragile: a Setback sheds an extra die
Golem-born	Never lose dice to a Setback	−1 hand size (rigid)

Callings (the "class/faction" — special + recruit pool)

Calling	Special	Recruits
Reaver	Pillage: gain Loot every time you claim a room	Warrior (cheap)
Lorekeeper	Open Vaults solo — no trinity needed	Scholar
Wardancer	Free Last Stand; Worthy End ×2.2; +1 marker strength; +1 Move	Champion
Hierophant	Cancel +1 Dread; heal Setbacks; +25% held-room production	Priest
Warden	Your control markers count double for majority	Champion
Prospector	Cheaper recruits; +1 hand; can find Relic dice	Relic

6 × 6 = 36 companies. They are deliberately spicy, not flat — Dvergar and Reaver run a touch strong, Wardancer a touch swingy — but the sim confirms every combo is viable (no dead picks).

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5. The dice

Your bag holds delve dice. Each is a d6; the types differ only in their face mix:

Die (color)	⚔	🜏	✚	💰	✦	☠
Recruit (grey)	1	1	1	1	1	1
Warrior (red)	3	–	–	1	1	1
Scholar (blue)	–	2	1	1	1	1
Priest (white)	–	1	2	1	1	1
Rogue (green)	1	1	–	2	1	1
Champion (gold)	2	1	1	1	1	–
Relic (purple)	–	–	1	3	2	–

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6. A round

A round has two phases.

Phase A — The Delve (players take turns, clockwise)

Speed tip: roll your opening hand during the previous player's turn, so your turn is decisions, not dice-fishing. With 5–6 players this keeps downtime low.

On your turn:

1. Draw & roll a hand from your bag (default 4 dice, ± Lineage/Calling).
2. Press On? (push-your-luck) You may draw & roll another hand for more symbols — as many times as you dare, stopping whenever you like. But every Press On feeds the Maw (add a Dread to the shared track), and rolling too much ☠ risks a Setback.
3. Resolve Dread. Cancel ☠ with ✚ Faith one-for-one (Hierophant cancels one extra; Revenant converts instead — see its card). If 3 or more ☠ remain, suffer a Setback: return your lowest die to the box (Golem-born ignores this; Sylphid loses an extra; Hierophant heals one).
4. Spend your symbols in any order:
   • Move between floors. You get 1 Move free (± Lineage/Calling); buy extra Moves with 🜏 Cunning or ✦ Mettle (1 each).
   • Claim a room on your current floor (see §7).
   • Loot: each 💰 Greed banks Loot, worth more the deeper you are.
   • Recruit: spend ✦ Mettle to add a die of your Calling's type to your bag (§8).
5. Choose your exit (see §7.3): Stay, Cash Out, or declare a Last Stand.

Phase B — The Maw (everyone, together — the big moment)

1. Advance the Maw. The Maw rises 1 floor automatically each round, +1 more if the shared Dread track is full (then reset it). (It never eats more than one floor per round — see §9 — so "one floor away" is always an honest warning.)
2. Collapse the floor it reaches:
   • Score it. For each room, whoever has the most marker strength takes its Glory (tile value × Depth Value). Ties split, rounding down. Warden markers count double; Fallen markers count as 1.
   • Value rises. Half the value of every unclaimed room rises to the floor above as refugee plunder (add a plunder token). This is why the top floors swell into the richest finale — never abandon the shallows.
   • The Maw takes the floor, and anyone still on it (see §7.3).
3. Pass the first-player marker. New round.

The game ends the instant Floor 1 collapses.

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7. The heart of the game

7.1 Claiming rooms (area control + the trinity)

To claim a room you must, across this turn, produce:

• ⚔ Steel ≥ the room's threat (fight through the monsters), and
• 🜏 Cunning ≥ the room's lock (crack the mechanism).

Vaults also demand the trinity: you must have rolled at least one ⚔, one 🜏, and one ✚ this turn (the EverQuest holy trinity, made literal) — unless you're a Lorekeeper.

Place a control marker; its strength = 1 + extra symbols you poured in (Warden ×2). Didn't quite make it? Your Steel/Cunning carry over as assault progress — keep chipping at the same room next turn. A near-miss is never a total loss.

Holding a room makes it produce each turn (a Forge throws Steel, a Library Cunning, a Vault Greed) — your engine grows on the ground you keep, right up until the Maw takes it.

7.2 Room tiles at a glance

Theme	Value	⚔ Threat	🜏 Lock	Produces	Note
Threshold	1	0	0	–	safe mouth
Stone	2	1	0	–	plain
Cistern	3	1	1	✦	flooded
Den	3	3	0	⚔	combat lair
Crypt	3	2	1	✚	undead (combat)
Hall	4	1	1	✦	pillared
Library	4	1	2	🜏	loot-rich, locked
Forge	5	4	1	⚔	lava (combat)
Vault	6	2	2	💰	needs trinity
Throne	7	5	2	💰	boss (combat), deepest

7.3 The three exits (this is the game)

Every turn, every crew faces the same choice. This triangle is DEEPFALL:

• STAY / Press On — keep the crew active: keep recruiting, holding, producing. More upside, but the Maw is climbing, and a crew caught flat-footed loses everything unbanked and all its active territory.
• CASH OUT ("Go to Ground") — retire the crew. Bank its Loot + a depth dividend (deepest floor reached × 2). Its markers become permanent Fallen markers (strength 1) that still score at every future collapse. Then muster a fresh company at the frontier. Safe, repeatable, keeps your dead earning. (Decline, from Small World.)
• WORTHY END ("Last Stand") — declare it (free if you hold a Throne/Vault, or as a Wardancer). When the Maw Takes your active crew, score a huge Worthy End: deepest floor × 2.5 (Wardancer ×2.2 on top), and the Maw consumes your held rooms clean so no rival inherits them. The single biggest payout — and all-or-nothing. (Valhalla, from Blood Rage.)

Being Taken without a Last Stand is the game's one real disaster (lose loot + territory for nothing). The exits above are always offered, so a careful player never falls into it — and the simulator confirms it almost never happens.

Design note: under perfectly greedy play the bots treat Cash Out and Worthy End as substitutes, so aggression slightly over-wins. At a human table the denial (salting a rival's inheritance) and the sheer drama of a deep martyr make Worthy End pull its weight. This is the one spot still under playtest — see FINDINGS.md.

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8. Recruiting (building your bag)

Spend ✦ Mettle (default cost 2) to take a die from the Recruit Pool into your bag — the type set by your Calling (Reaver→Warrior, Lorekeeper→Scholar, etc.; Prospector gets the rare Relic). A bigger, sharper bag means stronger hands and more Press-On fuel. This is your in-game engine (Quarriors' dice-building).

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9. The Maw & player count

Component rule (playtest-critical): the Maw marker must loudly flag the next floor to collapse. New players reliably forget the dungeon collapses bottom-up and think they have more time than they do — give the Maw a big, unmissable "EATS THIS FLOOR NEXT" pointer. (See PLAYTEST.md, finding #3.)

The Maw rises 1 floor per round, +1 whenever the shared Dread track fills (then it resets). Players add Dread to the track every time they Press On and whenever uncanceled ☠ is rolled — so the table's collective greed literally pulls the doom down faster. The Maw never collapses more than one floor in a single round.

Scaling (validated to 11-round games at every count):

Players	Rooms / floor	Dread track length
2	4	5
3	4	6
4	4	7
5	5	8
6	6	9

Rooms-per-floor scaling keeps contention (and the fight for majorities) constant; the longer Dread track on a bigger table absorbs the extra collective Dread so the game still ends in ~11 rounds with tight margins and a near-zero feel-bad rate.

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10. Turn quick-reference

YOUR TURN (Delve Phase)
  1. Roll hand (4 dice ± mods)
  2. Press On? → +1 Dread to track, risk a Setback   (repeat / stop)
  3. Dread: cancel with Faith; 3+ left = Setback (lose a die)
  4. Spend: Move · Claim a room · bank Loot (Greed) · Recruit (Mettle)
  5. Exit: STAY  /  CASH OUT (bank + Fallen markers)  /  LAST STAND

MAW PHASE (all together)
  • Maw rises 1 floor (+1 if Dread track full → reset)
  • Collapse: score majorities (value × depth) → unclaimed value RISES up
              → Take anyone still on the floor (Worthy Ends fire here)
  • Floor 1 collapses → GAME OVER, most Glory wins

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11. The generator companion (procgen)

DEEPFALL's dungeon is a real reikhelm dungeon. The companion turns a seed into either:

• a Setup Sheet ("Floor 6: Vault, Throne, Forge, Crypt…") you copy with the tile deck — 30-second setup, infinite dungeons from one box; or
• a fully AI-rendered board for that seed (the deluxe one-off / campaign mode).

Same generator that powers the reikhelm playground — so the board, the variety, and the art all come from the engine you already have.