the rules, kept under the rose

ATK is the blade. DEF the held breath. CAR the spoken word. INT the eye that reads what others miss. Every check in the dungeon, every strike, every door, every truth, bends through one of these four.

Each pillar starts at five, and the rest are placed by hand before you step in: eight points at first standing, and more the higher you have risen. One may rise as high as thirteen at the door; none may fall below one. The balance is the build, and the build is the run.

Stats rise during the descent as well: one point per level, to a cap of ten during the run.

Combat resolves in rounds. You pick a path; the enemy answers. A twenty-sided die is cast, your stat added, and the result is measured against a difficulty drawn from the enemy's tier and your level. These paths are offered:

• strike. d20 + ATK against the enemy's guard. A clean hit deals damage; a clean miss takes one in return.
• brace. The held breath. The same round's blow is halved, and a small recovery comes if the eye is steady.
• speak. d20 + CAR against the enemy's wit. On a full success the enemy waits, not one round but two, before answering again.
• study. d20 + INT against the enemy's mind. Their weakness is named; the next two strikes carry half again the weight.
• cast. an INT-keyed spell, in place of strike or brace. costs a point of mp. spoken at the edge of what the candle will hold. see iii. casting.
• skill. a special strike in place of an ordinary one. it always lands, for your ATK and more, but held to one or two uses a descent, and rest does not return them. see iv. skills.

Each roll lands in one of four ways. A natural twenty or a margin of five over the difficulty is full success. Meeting the difficulty is partial: enough, not generous. Below is failure. A natural one is the candle guttering: the enemy hits half again as hard.

The worst of what an enemy carries is telegraphed: a wind-up you can read and answer before it lands. Ordinary blows come unannounced.

A build with six or more INT at the entry remembers spells: the gate is the mind alone, no matter your standing. The mind, kindled in the dim, holds a small pool of will, mp, equal to the INT above five. INT six grants one; INT ten, five; INT fourteen, nine. A point of mp is spent for each casting. The pool fills again at rest.

Two columns are offered, each substituting an ordinary blow:

• attack spells stand in the place of strike. the roll is d20 + INT against the enemy's guard; the damage scales with the mind, not the blade. a full success adds a die's worth of fire.
• defense spells stand in the place of brace. each carries its own mitigation. mend returns wounds to the body. ward draws a circle that absorbs the next blow.

Every caster begins with two starter words: cinder to strike, mend to recover. The deeper your standing, the more the mind carries in: further words are granted at the descent's start, drawn by chance and growing in number as you rise. The stronger ones lean harder on the INT behind them.

Others still are not granted, but found. A scroll taken from the dungeon, read once outside of combat, joins itself to memory. The scroll burns away. The word stays for the rest of the descent.

With less than six INT, the words do not come. Scrolls found by such hands are paper.

From the third level of standing, the body learns blows the blade alone cannot make. These are skills: special strikes that always land, dealing your ATK and a flat measure more. They ask no mp and cast no die, only that you choose the moment.

But they are finite. Each holds one or two uses for the whole descent, and rest does not return them. Spend them on the thing that must fall, not the thing merely in your way.

Like the deeper spells, skills are drawn at the descent's start: granted by chance, more of them and stronger as your standing rises through the third, sixth, and ninth levels.

Before the third level there are no skills. The blade is enough.

Before the first step, you may take a calling: a discipline the account has earned the right to. A wanderer takes none and goes as they are. The others each bend a single virtue in your favour.

The duelist's blade runs a point hotter. The scholar reads a point sharper and carries a draught of clarity. The silver tongue speaks with more weight. The warden holds the line and stands a little longer. The delver simply endures: five measures of vigour past the ordinary.

The bend is small and fixed: one point, or a cushion of health. Callings open as your standing rises: the duelist early, the delver only to those who have gone deep and come back. The point a calling grants may carry a virtue past the door's own ceiling.

A calling is a name, not a power spike: who you were before the door, carried through it.

Falling to zero is not the end. One breath is spent; you rise at the last rest you crossed, vigour full, one consumable lost to the air. The dungeon does not forget what you walked, but it remembers what it cost.

A small dungeon grants one breath. A medium, two. A large, three. An epic, four. When the last breath is spent, the descent ends; the relic that might have come home stays where it lay.

Ironman, a subscriber's vow, is the same descent with one breath only, regardless of size, and a fifty percent larger reward for those who make it back.

Three slots travel with you: a weapon, an armor, an accessory. They are rolled before the dungeon begins and named in keeping with the setting: a chipped iron blade, a felt-lined coat, a small bronze charm. Each may grant a single point to one stat, or grant nothing at all; the dungeon decides.

Better things may be found: in treasure rooms, in narrative gifts, in what defeated enemies leave behind. Rarer gear holds sockets, and sockets are where relics wake. A common piece holds none; uncommon, one; rare, two; epic, three. A legendary carries an effect that nothing else does.

Nothing taken from a dungeon comes home except a single relic at the end.

Coin is gathered as you descend and banked when you leave: the whole purse on a clean exit or a negotiated peace, half of it if you are dragged out beaten. It is the reason to press one room deeper, and the reason to fear the room after.

Home again, that gold spends in the armory: a standing shelf of weapons, armor, and charms you may buy outright and carry into the next descent as your opening kit. What the dungeon leaves to chance, the armory lets you choose.

Bought gear sits deliberately below what a dungeon yields at the same rarity. The armory's gift is certainty, not power: a better-chosen entrance, never a way past.

At the end of a victorious run, a few of the items you gathered may be transformed. Their stat bonuses halve; their special effects remain intact. These are relics. A small or medium dungeon yields one; a large, two; an epic, three.

You may carry one to three relics into the next dungeon; they are dormant in the kit, doing nothing, until they are placed in a socket. A relic without a socket waits patiently; rest rooms and pickup screens are where the placing happens.

A failed run grants no new relic. The ones you brought in, however, stay with you. They are kept regardless. The collection grows slowly, deliberately, and the choice of what to bring into the next descent is half the run.

Every descent leaves a trace in the study: a private archive that grows whether you win or fall. Creatures faced become a bestiary; the truths you uncover, a codex; the endings you reach, a shelf of trophies.

A defeat is not nothing. The thing that killed you is entered, its weakness noted if you took the time to study it. What you learned survives the run that taught it.

The study is yours, kept sub rosa, for no eyes but your own.

Harsh is not the ceiling. Once a dungeon is cleared at its hardest, trials open: stacking bindings that make the descent meaner and the reward richer. The first raises every difficulty; the next hardens what you face; the third takes a breath; the fourth turns rest itself half-hearted.

Each trial layers on the last, and each pays more: a quarter again at the first rung, doubled at the fourth. They are proof, not new content: the same dungeons, asked to be survived on worse terms.

Ironman, the subscriber's vow of a single breath, may be sworn on top of any trial; its reward multiplies with the trial's own.

Each dungeon hides one truth: a name, a betrayal, an old crime. It does not live in any single room. Roughly a third of the rooms, the revelatory ones, hold a fragment of it. Fragments surface only on full successes: a stat check passed cleanly, a puzzle resolved with grace.

Gather two and you may speak to the boss before the blade is drawn. Gather three and the strike itself grows more clever: a single decisive blow becomes possible. Gather four, and the encounter may end without combat at all: a quieter ending, a different relic, half the points.

The peace ending is intentionally less rewarding. The dungeon remembers mercy as something other than victory.