Dungeon Crawls for the Solo TTRPG Gamer

Dungeon crawls and Table-top roleplaying games, Name a more iconic duo. You probably can’t.

Dungeon crawls, or dungeon dives, are as old as the hobby itself. Some of the first campaigns ever created involved dungeon crawls and a large portion of the early years of TTRPGs revolved around getting into a dungeon, killing everything that moves, and getting out with all the gold.

But if your group can’t meet this week, or you're struggling to get into a group due to life stuff (check out this post for why I play solo RPGs), try out a solo Dungeon Crawl. Pit yourself against the most devious creatures and enemies your own mind can come up with. Will your party survive and come back with bags of gold wearing down their straggly pony? Or will they perish beneath the earth with their bones adding to the dusty piles already on display?

Good luck down there! Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

Four Against Darkness

Do you want an old-school dungeon crawl experience where every dice roll may mean life or death for your party? Then try our Four Against Darkness. The game is simple, create a party of four adventurers and throw them into a dungeon. What dungeon? Well, that is what is great about Four Against Darkness, you actually create and draw the dungeon as you go. So every run-through will be different and you as a solo player, won’t know what the next steps will be.

The game has a low bar to set up and run. You only need a pencil and paper, graph paper and 2 six-sided dice. And that is it! You can run through a dungeon in about an hour, so it is great for a short dungeon crawl. But if you’d like a longer campaign, there is a chance your characters can level up, if they survive.

Favourite Part: Four Against Darkness (or 4AD as the cool kids call it) is the closest on this list to the look and feel of Original Dungeons and Dragons. So if you are feeling nostalgic for that old-school dungeon diving, check this game out.

Marching Order

Marching Order has a similar look at feel to traditional old-school dungeon divers but that is where similarities end. This game is all about the order of your party, sort of like the computer game Darkest Dungeon. Again, your party will be diving into the deepest and darkest dungeons, fighting the most wicked creations in order to run off with the most gold. Your characters are travellers, mercenaries, cutthroats and pickpockets. They aren’t heroes, but they need to eat.

Crumbling Keep has done a great job with the artistic direction of the game. It is dark, it is dirty, and you can just feel the type of game they were going for when you see the front cover. They have physical and PDF versions of the game and ever offer a free first mission if you join their mailing list.

Favourite Part: What I like most about this game is the tactical decisions that must be made. Who goes on the front line? The big hulking guy that can take a hit of course. But who takes his place when he goes down? How do you deal with monsters who knock your party’s Marching order around? You need to play to find out.

A Torch in the Dark

Now we start breaking away a bit from the traditional Dungeon crawls to some new and interesting takes on the genre. A Torch in the Dark is a Forged in the Dark hack that has you creating a character who is just trying to survive in a world where a violent revolution has taken power from the evil rich. The rich were executed but refused to die. They haunt their tombs and protect their wealth. You have to get in there and pry the gold from their cold and somewhat dead hands. Are you up to it?

The mechanics of the game are simple and easy to pick up. You pull cards to show what the next room your character will encounter is. Each card on a standard 52-card deck will have a different encounter, with one card being the ‘boss’ of that dungeon. You can retreat from the dungeon if need be and spend some time and coin recovering from your adventures. Then your character can jump back in to find the treasure and kill the evil rich.

The game recently had a successful Kickstarter for an advanced edition, so keep an eye out for that also.

Favourite Part: The different phases of the game are an interesting way to dungeon crawl. While the previous two dungeon crawls are very focused on mechanics for combat and exploration, A Torch in the Dark also has rules for recovery and resting. That means you can see what the life of an adventurer is outside of the dungeon is like.

Delve: Ironsworn Supplement

Alright, so this isn’t a dungeon crawling game, but a supplement to Ironsworn, one of the best solo RPGs out there. Ironsworn is a great game in its own right with lots of tools for exploration and character building, but if you desire to delve deep into a dungeon, fight through an ice cavern, or hack your way through a haunted forest, you’ll need the Delve Supplement.

Delve is a great tool for creating dungeons or dungeon-type adventures in your Ironsworn game. It can be added into an Ironsworn game at any point, so if you are already half way through your epic quest, don’t worry about how this game will work with your campaign, it will slot in well.

Delve has rules for creating those dungeons and taking your character through them. It also contains some additional rules and improvements to the standard Ironsworn game which people may appreciate.

Favourite Part: Delve effectively extends the life of any Ironsworn campaign by giving you a whole lot of new tools for new adventures. What evils are lurking in that cave? Roll on some Delve tables to find out.

And pick up Ironsworn here.  It's free!

Mork Borg with Solitary Defilement

This is the first and only game not specifically made for solo play. Mork Borg is a metal album converted to an RPG. It’s epic, brutal, deadly, and nasty. The rules are old-school, so easy to understand stats and checks. Characters die all the time, often awfully. It is really fun.

Now Mork Borg can be played solo! Solitary Defilement is a free supplement that allows you to play the game with custom solo rules. The rules are somewhat inspired by Ironsworn, so you’ll feel at home if you’ve played that before.

Favourite Part: The art direction of Mork Borg is just something else and it will inspire you to fight through the most corrupted dungeon. Also, there is a free version of Mork Borg (with no art) so you can play Mork Borg solo for free! You can find it on the Mork Borg website here. 

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There you go! Five awesome and deadly dungeon crawlers. Next time you get a few minutes, go into one of these games and go exploring for treasure, fame, or glory. But be careful, your character’s bones may haunt the very halls of the dungeon forever…

If you want to listen to a dungeon crawl actual play, try out this podcast episode from our friends at Black Dragon Dungeon Company. The most recent episode of their Lonley TTRPG podcast is an actual play of One Shot in the Dark! A quick dungeon crawl from the creator of the Tale of the Manticore. 

Check out the episode here!

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