Rooms and Doors
Every room is a square. Every door sits in the middle of a wall. A room has one door or two, and the second one is how you got in.
Five kinds of chamber have been catalogued below the seal. Three came back with the first survey: @Missing file, @Missing file, and @Missing file.
Two were added by somebody who got further. @Missing file is buried to the knuckle in iron dust, with empty brackets still bolted along the walls at even intervals. @Missing file has had tallow poured over it until the fittings are gone, and every wick in it has been trimmed square.
What a room looks like tells you nothing about what is in it. The ash rooms are not safer than the bone rooms, and the chapel is not safer than either.
What can be in a room
A room holds at most one monster and at most one event, and very often neither.
A monster attacks immediately. You do not get to look at the room first, and you do not get to reach anything else in it until the fight is over.
An event is everything else that can happen in a chamber. There are five so far. Some fire the moment you step in, whether you like it or not; the rest wait until the room is safe and then let you decide.
| Event | When | Can you walk away? |
|---|---|---|
| @Missing file | On entry | No |
| @Missing file | On entry | No |
| @Missing file | Once safe | Yes |
| @Missing file | Once safe | Yes |
| @Missing file | Once safe | Yes |
A trap fires the instant you enter, before you act. 1d20 + WITS against 12: make it and you catch the mechanism before your weight is on it, miss it and take 1d6. It fires once and is then spent, even if you come back.
A warp has no save, no check and no damage. You are put back at the entrance of the floor with everything you were carrying and everything you had already explored. You lose only ground. It never exhausts itself, so that room stays a mistake forever.
Treasure is one item and a handful of coin, once the room is safe.
The water is below.
The goblin is the odd one, and he is worth his own section.
The water
A fountain restores you to full. Once, then it is spent.
Before you drink, roll 1d20 + RESOLVE against 10.
- Make it and you are healed clean, at no cost.
- Miss it and you are still healed to full, but something in the water takes hold: one point off one of the six, permanently, for the rest of that run.
You may always decline. You will be told what the water looks like before you choose, and walking away costs nothing.
This is the one real gamble that is offered to you rather than sprung on you, and it is placed where it hurts: usually you find the water at half health, with something large still ahead. A delver with high RESOLVE drinks freely. A delver with RESOLVE 1 is being offered a bad bet dressed as mercy.
The goblin
Sometimes a room has a goblin sitting on a folded blanket with stock laid out on it in rows, none of it his.
He carries three to five things and never the same three twice. He sells at half again what a thing is worth, he buys anything loose in your pack for half, and he does not haggle, discount or extend credit. If you cannot afford something he will tell you the number and that is the end of it.
He cannot be robbed. Swing at him and he is gone before the blade arrives, and so is the blanket.
He does not tell you what anything does. If there is a cursed relic on that blanket it is priced and laid out like everything else, and the only warning you get is the item's own description — which will not lie to you and will not volunteer either. Read carefully before you spend.
This is what gold is for. It is the only thing it is for.
Doors and direction
You are told the exits every time, in the same format:
Exits: north, east.
Nothing else about the layout is offered. You are not given coordinates and there is no map in your hand while you crawl. What you have is what you remember.
Ask for a direction with no room behind it and you will be told it is solid rock. Nothing will be conjured to accommodate the request.
Cleared rooms
Once a room's monster is dead and its event resolved, it is done. Come back through and you get a clause, not a description — the room as you left it. Nothing regrows, nothing returns, no wandering thing moves in behind you.
The one exception is the warp, which is never cleared and fires every single time.
This makes retreating genuinely safe, and it makes the floor shrink as you work through it. The Vaults are finite. That is the closest thing to mercy in them.