Football Manager, but every match is a dungeon and your players can die in it.
You run an adventuring guild in a realm that lost its king. Sign delvers, swear them to a term of years and send them into the dark. Win enough and you take the Crucible, and hold the realm until somebody takes it off you.
Heroes die. Dynasties rise. The realm remembers both.
Every fixture is a dungeon
There is no match engine. Each delve is built for the day, and in the Trials a rival guild goes into the same one. If they make it to the final room, you fight them there.
You never click an attack. You pick the party, set their orders and kit them out, then you watch. Flooded ground slows your fighters and pitch dark ruins your archers, so who you send matters as much as how strong they are. Nine classes, ten races, and a party that grows from four to six as you climb six divisions.
People, not numbers
Every delver arrives believing something, struggling with something, and swearing to do one thing before they are done. Most never manage it. Sending the right one on the right work, year after year, is how you find out who they are.
They make friends and grudges underground. They sign for a term of years and come back asking for what they are worth. They pick up scars, retire, get sold, or do not come home, and the dead get a memorial card with their own sigil and epitaph. The Dungeonborn are the ones that you bring back.
A realm that goes on without you
Seventy-two guilds hold seats in 36 towns across seven lands, so you share a street with somebody who wanted to better you before a fixture was ever played. Rival halls sign, sell, rise and fall. Wars are called and the realm remembers who marched. Beasts roam the roads, and below everything the Deep goes down further than anyone has been.
Your own hall stands in a real town that you can build up, defend, and one day watch your retired delvers settle in.
The Chronicle
Your guild has been writing it down the whole time. Open the Chronicle and the dynasty is there as a story, season by season, with the fallen and the legends who made the place what it is. Everything in it happened in your save.
Play it your way
Climb from the Backwater or start higher up. Take a patron's backing or go it alone. Stack any of the founding terms you like, from Ironman to a guild made entirely of beasts, or play Cozy Mode with no league at all and simply run the guild.
72 rival guilds, six divisions, a cup and the Crucible
A full transfer market, with free transfers, loans, poaching and fire sales
Training, a youth academy and mentors
Your hometown to build up and defend
Vows, families, scars and permanent death
Over a dozen founding terms that all stack, and Cozy Mode
Twelve languages besides English
The dungeon is waiting, Guildmaster.
