How do you keep your character alive while exploring the dangers of underground dungeons? As a GM, how do you keep the darkness of the underground feeling intimidating and treacherous?
AAW Games teamed up with best-selling author Douglas Niles earlier this year to Kickstart the Survivalist’s Guide to Spelunking.
The campaign was a success, and the guide is now available on DriveThruRPG as a digital download.
Douglas Niles is the author of the original Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide for D&D. That supplement helped DMs with the dreaded Underdark, expanding the AD&D ruleset, offering a Battlesystem for mass combat.
The new book, fit for 5e, offers;
- A comprehensive taxonomy of cave types
- Expanded climbing tools and rules Advice for designing, mapping, and running 3-D environments
- Modular rules for momentum and chases
- Rules for mining minerals and exotic ores
- Streamlined rules for tracking supplies
- Foraging and hunting rules
- Detailed segmented spellcasting and combat manoeuvres
- Rules for tactical combat puzzles
- Highly modular hazard generators
- Comprehensive notes on light and darkness
- A breath-engine for exploration of flooded caverns or spore-choked jungles
- Rules for hypothermia, hyperthermia, and more exotic afflictions like Shroomitis
- The lethal hazards of elemental border regions
- A glimpse at the lightless abyss and the upper areas of Hel
There are tables and even toolsets to help run a game of underground exploration, enough to make a whole campaign.
The guide is centred around the advice of dwarven delver Dugmore Dumple. This experienced dungeoneer has wisdom on crystalline caverns, fungal jungles and the labyrinthine weave of passages that are his home.
Written by Douglas Niles, Thilo Graf and Stephen Yeardley, the 208-page Survivalist’s Guide to Spelunking costs $29.99.
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