THE RULES OF THE DEEP

EDIT: I've updated the file with a more legible version of Jay's list (v 1.1) as well as a text-only file for accessibility.

Written in collaboration with Jay Dragon.

I don't throw around the word "genius" a lot, except ironically in which case I do it all the time, but I mean it when I say that Jay Dragon is goddamn genius. Jay is the future of roleplaying games. I am whatever the present of roleplaying games is, and I am a lumbering, slow-paced, stuck-in-my-ways dinosaur in comparison. Jay is scoring out new and fascinating ways to play, and reforming and reframing old ways of play to bring them to new audiences.

So obviously we wrote a dungeoncrawler. For a creator who's specialty is diceless, GMless games that reposition what it means to be a player and to play a game, I figured it might be fun to sully that reputation by putting out a grotty little dice-based game where you have hit points and initiative and all sorts of old-fashioned things, but in a new and interesting way.

Working together was fun (we hit it off! We got high and talked about caves for two hours!) but, I'll admit, faintly nerve-wracking. As I said, Jay is a genius, channeling the zeitgeist, a font of inspiration and hustle, and I am merely quite good at my job. But I like to think that I kept up, and that I pushed myself harder than normal, given the company. 

THE RULES OF THE DEEP is not a fantasy heartbreaker, but more an examination of the form. We do some interesting things with initiative (it starts high and degrades as you play) and magic (it eats initiative) to show the adventurers coming untethered from themselves as they push ever-downwards. We do a sort of roguelike thing where the players go down once but the GM maintains the world they built together and brings it to new groups. We make a megadungeon out of a single sheet of paper and an increasingly incoherent list of prompts. I hope you like it.

I'd also like to thank you, dear Patron, for supporting this collaboration experiment. Working with so many different artists and writers has been fascinating, and sometimes exhausting, and I'll admit actually quite a lot more work than just doing the games myself, but it's transformed my experience with this project. I'm so lucky to be able to do this and earn money for it. Cheers. You're a real peach. 

- Grant

P.S. Please let me know if Jay's handwriting is legible to you, and if it isn't, whether that adds to the mystery of the experience or whether you just want to see what it says. We're open to feedback.