D&D: Take a Look at ‘Dungeon Delver’s Guide’ – Coming Soon for Advanced 5th Edition
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition’s newest book tackles dungeons, crawls, and delves with the A5E mindset. Get more depth to your dungeons.
Level Up is back with a new book for Advanced 5th Edition. Coming soon to Kickstarter (and releasing in pdf form shortly thereafter), is Advanced 5th Edition’s Dungeon Delver’s Guide.
This is the book all about dungeon crawls. The Dungeon Delver’s Guide looks to return to RPG’s roots: the dungeon crawl. Crawls were where the earliest RPGs took life. In the olden days you used to hit a dungeon looking for the way down to the next level (hoping you’d go up a level along the way).
Now Level Up hopes to bring its knack for offering new depth to 5th Edition to the game’s earliest roots. Check out this preview of the Dungeon Delver’s Guide coming soon to Kickstarter.
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition – The Dungeon Delver’s Guide Preview
With hundreds of new tricks, traps, treasures, and monsters, this book provides a comprehensive toolkit for designing dungeon adventures. But a collection of cool goodies and baddies doesn’t really amount to anything unless it’s animated by an equally engaging story. Dungeon Delver’s Guide provides a new framework (the NODES system) for weaving together adventure ingredients into a coherent, tightly-themed story.
If you’re a player, Dungeon Delver’s Guide offers new origins, class archetypes, spells, and cultural equipment that let you be a part of the story. Whether you’re a ratling decomposer druid or a grimlock sound sculptor, a dungeon adventure can be not an exploration of the unknown, but a return home. While they’re dungeon-themed, our new character options are useful anywhere. Your shadow elf arachnid guardian might have been born in Underland but will feel perfectly comfortable webslinging around a surface-world metropolis.
So right away we have some exciting new options. Decomposer druids. Sound sculptors, playable ratlings and grimlocks. Yes please, sign me up. But it’s exciting to know that the book all about dungeon delves isn’t just a DM’s guide. It’s there for everyone. Though DMs will find a ton of use out of this.
The new book offers a ton of guidance on building and running dungeons with depth. One of the things that A5E does extremely well is add depth to the 5th Edition ruleset. A5E offers up answers to the most common problems of 5th Edition—martial characters don’t get to do cool things, monsters feel one-note and two-dimensional, exploration is a crumbling, wobbly third pillar.
And it’s this last point in particular I’m most excited to see in the new book.
Exploring Dungeons with Story & Depth
The Dungeon Delver’s Guide has a lot to say about telling a story with your dungeon. Take a look at this:
Every element of a dungeon can be enlisted to help tell that story. Architecture, room contents, journals and other writings, and even intelligent inhabitants can all have their say, allowing the environment’s history to unfold as adventurers explore it. Lore earned by adventuring can be more satisfying than information gained all at once through a handout or a knowledge check.
To encourage this kind of environmental storytelling Dungeon Delver’s Guide offers 8 unique random dungeon generators for any level of play each of which provides tightly-themed enigmas, discoveries, obstacles, and revelations. For even more curated stories, we also provide 8 complete, fully-mapped minidungeons, each with its own mysteries to explore over a game session or two.
But even if you’re the kind of DM who improvises most of what comes next, there’s something for you here. The Delver’s Guide emphasizes choice and consequence, and promises to explore “fractal description.”
And through all that, A5E’s focus on exploration comes to the fore. In an A5E dungeon “each of the pillars of play […] coexist in the same neighborhood and sometimes in the same encounter.”
What does that mean, exactly? More exploration challenges, traps, environmental hazards, and of course, opportunities for intricate, challenging combats.
The Dungeon Delver’s Guide promises new random encounter tables and “several dozen new monsters” that can serve as centerpieces for dungeon encounters. You’ll even find new lairs for climactic villains.
All in all, this book looks incredible. In the weeks to come, we’ll get to see the new character options and the dungeon design framework, so be sure and check back.
The ‘Dungeon Delver’s Guide’ comes to Kickstarter later this year
